My Lords, it is a privilege to open today’s debate, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak. I look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Cass, who has done so much for children in a long career in paediatric medicine, including as President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Her voice is very welcome in this debate and her presence will undoubtedly enrich the work of the House. I declare my interests on the register, particularly as chair of 5Rights Foundation and of the Digital Futures for Children research centre at the LSE, and contributor to the DFC’s report on smartphones in schools.
The issue of smartphones in schools should be straightforward. School is for learning, for building relationships, for personal development and acquiring skills such as sports, debating and drama. The academic literature shows that smartphones interrupt that learning and, as the Library note records, a report has stated:
“Because the same finite pool of attentional resources supports both attentional control and other cognitive processes, resources recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone are made unavailable for other tasks, and performance on these tasks will suffer”.
In more straightforward language, a phone unused on a desk diverts attention that is then unavailable for learning.
Government guidance published earlier this year is also unequivocal. The introduction by the then Secretary of State, Gillian Keegan, says:
“Mobile phones risk unnecessary distraction, disruption and diversion. One in three secondary school pupils report that mobile phones are used in most lessons without permission. This not only distracts the single pupil using the phone, but disrupts the lesson for a whole class, and diverts teachers’ efforts away from learning”.
There are calls for further research, but the evidence that we already have indicates that restricting personal devices benefits learning, with a particular benefit accruing to those identified as disadvantaged or struggling academically. This is important, because advocating for phone restrictions in schools is sometimes characterised as a “middle-class moral panic”. The evidence suggests otherwise. Inasmuch as phones are a distraction or a barrier to the opportunities and activities that schools offer, they have no place in school, but for those who still doubt, let me add four further points.
First is the case of Singapore. In 2020 the Ministry of Education announced that it would embrace smartphones in school and invest in devices for students who could not afford them, simultaneously promoting wide-ranging digital literacy education and teacher training. But in October this year, Singapore’s Straits Times reported widespread misuse of those devices, with one parent discovering their 13 year-old son had spent more than three hours on apps such as YouTube and TikTok and just 13 seconds on Google Classroom. That prompted public calls to restrict personal devices in school, and some schools have already done so.
My Lords, it is always a pleasure, as it was last week, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass.
Smartphones are addictive by design, with the messaging, the notifications and the social media likes. We get trapped into behaviours that produce dopamine, which gives us short-term pleasure hits, and thereby the behaviour patterns become addictive. This shift in behaviour is especially distracting and potentially damaging for children. But we as adults are as addicted as our children. I can look around this Chamber every day and see up to half of your Lordships looking at their phone. I cannot therefore look a young person in the eye and tell them we are banning their phones when we are just as addicted as they are.
My 13 year-old has learned to be an independent traveller, commuting 45 minutes each way to school on the P4 bus or taking a train on her own to see Auntie Sandi in Cardiff. None of that would be possible without the messaging and travel information on her phone. Her homework is set on her phone, as is her music and as is the information on the web to support learning and the app to help her calm down when she becomes overwrought. So how should we protect children as parents and policymakers, while teaching and modelling positive smartphone behaviour?
I do not think it is appropriate for primary school-age children to have phones, and parents should be encouraged to limit their phone use around young children as much as possible. This is an important time for children to learn positive social and emotional behaviour and not be constantly babysat by screens. Ofcom should robustly use its powers under the Online Safety Act to ensure that social media companies abide by their own terms and conditions, keep under-13s off their platforms and protect children from porn and the range of harms we legislated against. Ideally it should be easier for parents to restrict content on their children’s devices using their wifi router settings and local device management. I do that at home, but I recognise that not everyone is as tech curious or capable of doing the same. There is a need for the connectivity providers and for Apple and Google to make that easier for parents.
My Lords, I was genuinely in two minds about contributing to this important debate due to the expertise that exists in our Chamber, not least from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, whose work on online harms is renowned and her reputation well deserved. I am particularly looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, whose recent authoritative report I publicly applaud.
As a grandma of three grandchildren, I am already concerned about their screen time. Before diving into the murky pool of politics, I was the pastoral head of a large comprehensive school, where I was responsible for child protection and safeguarding. To me, this is a safeguarding issue. Even then, I had begun to notice increases in mental health issues; things that were rare were becoming common. My son recommended that I read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. His main tenet was that two factors within Generation Z have created this anxious generation: the overprotection of young people in the real world and the underprotection of them in the virtual world. That was the lightbulb moment when everything fell into place.
There is now a significant body of authoritative data showing that depression, anxiety and other mental health issues are on the increase in young people. There also seems to be a growing consensus that the use of smartphones has been and continues to be a major contributing factor to this. The kids are definitely not all right.
Health Professionals for Safer Screens is very clear that the risks are overwhelming and increasing and outweigh any benefits. That is a sit-up-and-take-notice statement—and, to be fair, some parents are doing just that. Parentkind, in its informative briefing, told us that eight in 10 parents say that smartphones are harmful to young people, while seven in 10 say that limiting children’s access to smartphones would make life easier for them as parents.
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Kidron for securing this important debate and I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass. In case anybody has not met me and does not know, I am a state secondary school teacher in Hackney.
I thank all the organisations that sent briefings, but most of them were about online safety and I will confine my remarks to smartphones in schools. As we have heard, the Parentkind survey found that 83% of parents say that smartphones are harmful to young people. I disagree—I love smartphones.
Due to some rather complex arrangements, I have three 13 year-olds in my household. They use smartphones to keep in touch, play games, organise their sporting activities, do homework, talk to friends and, equally importantly, talk to relatives at home and abroad. To take a smartphone away from a secondary school pupil would be to isolate them almost totally and to stigmatise them.
I think smartphones are great, but not in schools. In 10 years of teaching, I have never taught in a school that allows mobile phones and I hope that I never do. The school where I trained, St George’s in Westminster, was one of the first state schools to ban mobile phones in school because in December 1995 a mobile phone call from the school summoned a gang that ended up killing the head teacher, Philip Lawrence.
The school where I presently teach, Mossbourne Community Academy, does not allow phones for students under 16 for all the obvious reasons. One of the most important is that our students wear distinctive uniforms. They are not allowed to carry cash either. It makes them not worth mugging, always a risk in our part of Hackney. Students who are seen with a phone or in a shop in school uniform are severely punished. It is amazing how a cashless and phoneless walk home can reduce the desire for a little light shoplifting or to take revenge on social media.
My Lords, it is an honour to take part in this debate. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her excellent introduction. I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass.
The diocese of Oxford, where I serve, has 285 church schools. We share in the education of over 60,000 children through these schools and the network of multi-academy trusts. There is a broad consensus on the importance of this issue and in favour of smartphone-free schools. However, there is not yet a final consensus on the next steps to be taken to bring this about. The consensus arises from our commitment to follow the Christian values of wisdom, respect, community and hope in all our schools.
Nine days ago, I visited the Chiltern Hills Academy secondary school in Buckinghamshire to meet some sixth-formers and the principal. The school had just introduced and enforced a rigorous ban on smartphones below sixth-form level, which the sixth-formers seemed quite happy about. Outside the sixth-form study centre, the sixth-formers use lockable pouches, such as those referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. This genuinely seemed to be working well for the students and brought them relief. I asked the principal about the effects of the policy in the first term. His first answer surprised me: there were fewer fights; in fact, there were no fights. I asked why that should be. He said it was because they could not be filmed and put online. The ban has translated into better behaviour overall, less bullying and higher levels of concentration, which are in turn translating into more learning, better relationships, healthier communities and higher attainment. These outcomes are all supported by the extensive research summarised in the briefings we have received, including the report Disconnect from Policy Exchange. The case for smartphone-free schools seems very strong.
My Lords, it is a great honour to be making my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House. It certainly was not a future I could have envisaged when I started my career as a doctor in 1982. In those days, induction was simple; I was handed a bleep and a list of patients and was pointed in the general direction of the ward—although, to allay any panic in the House, I should say that hospital inductions have improved considerably since then. My arrival here was quite different. The induction process organised by the Clerk of the Parliaments and his team has been superb, and Black Rod’s reassurance that time is on my side, and that this is a marathon and not a sprint, did much to calm my nerves. The kind welcome from Members on all sides of the House has been truly heartwarming, and I want particularly to thank my supporters, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hollins and Lady Neuberger, who have been an ongoing source of wise counsel, as has my staff contact, James Galbraith.
One of my early memories from my houseman years was running for a cardiac arrest just days into a new job. I was well ahead of the pack as I rounded a corner, opened what I took to be the ward door and found myself in a broom cupboard. With the rest of the team hard behind me, I laid low until they had passed, before emerging and arriving last at the scene. Since arriving here, I have spent even more time lost, and I fear that the endlessly kind and patient doorkeepers will be rescuing me from broom cupboards for some time to come.
At medical school, adult medicine occupied 95% of my training so, like most young doctors, when I started my first paediatric post I was terrified. My registrar told me not to worry: children were just like adults, only smaller. Of course it was not true, but it got me through my first night. Indeed, many years later when I was moonlighting on an adult ward, I prayed that they were just like children, only bigger.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and to warmly welcome her here. Five years ago, the noble Baroness was anticipating retirement, after an immensely distinguished career as a paediatrician, specialising in autism, and having served as president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She was looking forward to learning the saxophone. Instead, she agreed to chair the Cass review, taking immense care to study all the evidence and taking nearly four years to complete it.
Informed by meetings with more than 1,000 people, seven new evidence reviews and a survey of 15 gender clinics across Europe, she achieved what many thought was impossible, to bring about something close to a consensus on one of the more difficult issues of our time: how best to care for children who are gender questioning or gender distressed. She did so with calm, compassionate and evidence-based writing and reasoning in the publication of the most comprehensive review ever undertaken into youth gender care.
This willingness to follow the evidence and not to follow the herd, is what makes the noble Baroness such a welcome addition to our Chamber. She is just what we need. As we come to grapple with issues such as assisted dying, her experience with disability and palliative care in children’s medicine will be invaluable—no time for that saxophone, I am afraid. We look forward to her contributions to our debate.
It is also a tradition to thank the noble Baroness for moving today’s debate, but I do so with genuine enthusiastic gratitude. Childhood has changed beyond imagination, and not for the better, from the change in children’s food intake, now an average 80% ultra-processed diet, the teaching of contested ideology in schools as fact, lack of traditional play to aid development and, worst of all, the addictive nature of smartphones. We should all be focusing on what we can do to protect the next generation from the repercussions of constant unrestricted access to the internet.
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Secondly, research from Policy Exchange this year found that schools with an effective ban on smartphones were more than twice as likely to be rated outstanding by Ofsted. There may be other contributing factors, but none the less one of the characteristics of an outstanding school is effective smartphone restrictions.
Thirdly, schools that have had well-managed restrictions talk of culture change. Ellie, a 5Rights young advisor, said:
“Because it was banned for everyone, there was no judgment for not having a phone, and it was a lot easier to foster communication with everyone”.
A head teacher quoted in the government guidance said that
“pupils have the headspace and calm environment to learn, and staff have the quiet and focus to teach”.
It is not simply about learning; it is about building a respectful and communicative school community.
Fourthly, and possibly most importantly, children know that they are distracted. A 2019 survey of 3,000 children reported that 45% found their phone distracting at school. In algorithmic terms, 2019 is the dark ages. It marks the earliest days of TikTok’s For You page algorithm, dubbed TikTok’s “secret sauce” by tech journalist Alex Hern, which we now know—because of disclosures prompted by legal action by 14 US states’ attorney-generals—is so powerful that a new user can become addicted in less than 35 minutes.
Noble Lords will note that I have not used the word “ban”, because there are times when smartphones are necessary. There are medical reasons—for example, children with diabetes who use the phone to manage blood sugar. There are services that support children with certain learning difficulties. There are pedagogical and PSHE reasons for having a phone in class. Some vulnerable children or children with caring duties need real-time access to communication. Each of these is acknowledged in the government guidance and each should form part of phone restriction policies in schools.
The Government might argue that the current guidance is so comprehensive and sensible—it is—that no further action is needed. But an estimated 37% of schools do not have a comprehensive restriction in place, and the DfE’s own research found that 20% of secondary school pupils reported mobile phones in most lessons without permission. Up and down the country, safeguarding leads ask for more robust support to manage harmful behaviours and phone-fuelled conflicts.
Optional guidance is not fair to children whose learning experiences are interrupted or to teachers trying to enforce voluntary policies with little support. Putting the guidance on a statutory footing would mean that all schools are subject to restrictions that are flexible enough for educators, who understand the context and circumstances on the ground, to be the final arbiters of when and if having a smartphone is in the best interests of teacher, class or child. It would also place a duty on the Government to ensure that every school was supported and resourced to implement the policy, and to ensure that the impacts were monitored and reported.
Since Pavlov’s conditioning response experiments with dogs in the 1890s, we have understood that the brain can be trained to respond to small increments of dopamine that fuel a craving for more. The tech sector sinks billions of dollars into creating persuasive design strategies that keep children seeking the next opportunity to text, swipe, post or respond. Their distraction is neither an act of wilful disobedience nor an unforeseen consequence but a direct result of the priorities of a sector that openly exploits human psychology and cognitive function to grab attention.
It does not matter whether it is the toxic views of Andrew Tate or the seemingly innocent act of filling a shopping basket and leaving it full at the checkout. The real cost of the attention economy, set out starkly in the briefing from Health Professionals for Safer Screens, is being paid by children who have poorer eyesight, inhibited speech and language development, interrupted sleep and rising rates of anxiety and other mental health issues. Smartphone restrictions do not just protect the sanctity of schools as places of learning and personal development but offer kids a much-needed break.
That brings me to the broader question of tech in our schools. Despite academics, campaigners and even UNESCO raising the alarm, the DfE increasingly allows edtech designed on the same reward-loop principles with unproven pedagogical values and poor privacy practices into the classroom. In one case, a parent refused to consent to her son’s use of Google Classroom and found, to her horror, that he had been consigned to a separate room with a teaching assistant while his classmates, headphones on, were busy researching things on YouTube. In short order, she reversed her decision so that he could be a full member of a class taught by a trained teacher, but her choice was between having an eight year-old on Google Classroom, with its extractive personal data practices and direct links to commercial and age-restricted services, and her child being, in effect, sent to detention.
The DfE has been very unresponsive to concerns about technology for learning, for school management and for safety, including attempts to tell it that many of the monitoring and filtering products in our schools are unable to monitor generative AI. This lack of responsiveness is exacerbated by DSIT’s determination that digital protections do not apply in school settings, ironically giving a child more protections on the bus to school than when they arrive in the building.
The lack of coherence across home and school has created a palpable increase in tensions between teachers and parents. Teachers are exasperated that children come to school tired and wired after nights spent scrolling and gaming, often on products and services that outstrip a child’s capacity to understand or navigate them, while parents are frustrated that homework must be uploaded and that services they do not understand or would rather their children did not use are required to complete teacher-directed tasks. Many feel that children spend far too much time online during the school day.
A recent letter from the Early Years for Digital Standards Action Group to the DfE raised the alarm on how little departmental and regulatory focus is on nursery-age children, citing the routine use of YouTube and passive screen time, the rising cases of inhibited development, access to harmful content and the lack of digital literacy for teachers and parents in early years settings. I am talking about children aged nought to five.
We need clearer standards on how all tech in educational settings is designed and used. It is time for the Department for Education and DSIT to concede that the digital world is seamless and that children of all ages in all settings need equal consideration.
Before I conclude, I will briefly raise the banning of social media altogether for under-16s, as the Australians have proposed and, indeed, passed today. There are practical issues about what falls into that definition. It is unclear whether it means anything with social elements, which would include Google Classroom and many e-commerce and entertainment sites. Should it include services with persuasive design features or gaming? Will it push children into darker, worse parts of the digital world? Of course, what happens when the full force of the tech sector’s offer floods in on a child’s 16th birthday? If I had a school-age child, I might well be among the 58% of UK parents who support a social media ban for under-16s, and I would certainly be among the 69% who say it would make their lives easier, but we are living in a time when you cannot apply for a university, a job or a benefit without being online, when the spectre of living alongside intelligent machines is more likely than not and when, whatever your profession or vocation, you will need digital understanding.
The only reason we would ban children from accessing this new world is that we in Parliament and in government, and our regulators, have spectacularly failed to deliver on the promise that tech would be held to account. It is both inequitable and impractical to ask parents and children to supervise a ban if we continue to allow companies to create deliberately addictive and toxic products in their race for children’s attention. I believe we will look back on this time and regret the generations of children whom we failed to protect on our watch. The least we can do is give some effective respite at school.
I look forward to the Minister’s response, but I must say that the Government failing to send a Minister from DfE is disrespectful to the anguish that so many parents feel and to the lack of support expressed by teachers and safeguarding leads. I hope the Minister will not restrict her comments to existing guidance but will address each of the issues I have raised and undertake to bring Ministers from both DSIT and DfE to the House to discuss a path forward on each. I beg to move.
In our home, we have also agreed a digital code of conduct as a family—back when Coco was just eight. No phones in bedrooms at night, no tech at meals, no sharing pictures online without consent. We all have to comply. As parents we also limit her to one social media app at any given time—her current choice is Pinterest to help her with her art at school—and all apps are downloaded with my approval. Incidentally, WhatsApp counts as social media and she therefore has to navigate her social life without the traumas meted out on that platform by other users.
What about schools? My preference would be for a ban on phones in primary schools, but for secondaries I am attracted to the technology used by the John Wallis Academy in Ashford as an example. Children place their phones in lockable pouches and lock them as they enter school, where they are welcomed and checked by teachers. The pouches block the phone signal and can be unlocked only using a similar device to that used to remove security tags from clothes in shops.
This is an elegant solution. The distraction of phones is eliminated. It is relatively straightforward for the school to do but also allows for phones to be unlocked for learning if that is what a teacher wants to do—because we also need to find room in the timetable for media literacy, perhaps by teaching journalism; teaching how to create good audio, video and text using phones; teaching how to research and critically think, and how algorithms are manipulated and manipulate you in turn; and teaching how the business models of free services work on your phone and what you are giving away in exchange. This is learning that we all need as teachers, parents and children.
This is a shared responsibility between home and school. Our digital consumption, like sugar, is addictive. We need to consider what is healthy. As a family, we choose the rules to ensure that we do not become digitally obese, that we consume the right things and that we treat one another with respect, trust, individuality, collaboration and kindness in a digital world. It is on all of us.
We are now faced with having accepted this wonderful new technology that we all love, to which I confess to being addicted, with its many positives, but without concrete knowledge about the impact on our children—until now. Apparently, older teens spend at least eight hours a day in front of a screen, teenage boys more than girls, and even eight to 10 year-olds spend at least six hours a day. Eight hours in a day is an enormous amount of time that could, and in my view should, be spent on personal and social development in the real world. Instead, they become passive consumers of other people’s curated worlds, giving them a very poor representation of reality.
I believe that allowing children several hours a day without phone distractions is a good thing in itself, and it would break the addictive cycle that is associated with excessive use. It is no surprise to me that there has been a rise in the number of youngsters with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—ADHD—an inability to keep focused. Clear restrictions on phones in schools would send a very clear message to parents that the excessive use of phones causes demonstrable harms—harms that in the real world they are seeking to protect their children from. Schools are best placed to take on that educative role for students and to empower parents to take back control in the home. The evidence shows that many schools are doing that.
I feel that a school’s leadership team should be able to decide how to make such restrictions work and make exceptions. The key question we are asking is whether it should be mandated, and I believe that it should be seriously considered. It is illegal for youngsters to buy alcohol or other drugs and to gamble. Most parents would not be happy if their child had a bottle of vodka or a bag of weed in their school bag, but the phone sits there capable of creating the same cravings, desires and subsequent addiction. That bothers me greatly.
The worry that we hear from parents is about the journey home. Our pupils have to go the most direct route home after school, so parents know when to expect them. Any detentions, sports fixtures or clubs are written in advance in a pupil’s planner, an A5 diary that they will have with them at all times. If their public transport is delayed, pupils are told to seek a responsible-looking adult and politely ask whether they could send a message home, saying what has happened.
The Carers Trust talks of the importance of young carers needing a phone to stay in contact. As we have already said, it is much more important to give young carers time and space for their education, safe in the knowledge that, if there is an emergency, they can be contacted. Any school wanting to ban phones must have an efficient system to get a message through to students when it is needed. Plans change. We all know that.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, the only exception should be for medical conditions. Diabetes UK makes a very sensible point that diabetes management is now mainly through an app. All this should be part of an individual healthcare plan. I agree that it is vital that children should use the latest technology to manage serious medical conditions.
We have survived many thousands of years without smartphones in schools. Why do we need them now?
A few weeks ago, I had another piece of evidence. I visited a primary school in Oxford, where I had a sobering conversation with the excellent head teacher. It concerned the effects of the unchecked use of smartphones and social media on those who are now in their 20s and the parents of the children in her school. The head described the challenges of communicating with this TikTok generation of parents. The school now has to prepare a short, TikTok-style video of one or two minutes on such simple subjects as how to prepare a healthy lunchbox because the concentration levels among the parents have become so low and their ways of receiving information so restricted. The head described as well how much of her staff’s time was taken up with responding to parent group WhatsApp messages for similar reasons.
All the evidence presented by Jonathan Haidt and others suggests that smartphones need to be regulated through a combination of legislation, industry good design, and intermediate institutions such as workplaces, schools, families and individuals. Addictive technology needs communities of resistance to be formed by schools and parents. Very senior colleagues agree on the need for these restrictions but differ somewhat on the means. I would welcome further government leadership and legislation which set an enforced benchmark for schools and brought the best research to bear, but which left the means of implementation in the hands of schools and the educators themselves. The mental health and attention span of our children and the whole of our society are at stake.
Everyone in this House knows that children are not like adults, only smaller. They are in a dynamic state of physical, personal and emotional development, so I am delighted to give my maiden speech as part of this important debate moved by my noble friend Lady Kidron, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for her tireless work in advocating for children’s rights and safety in the online world.
My noble friend has already told us about the impact of smartphones on attention, learning and culture. Some people have questioned the research, suggesting that an association between smartphone use and learning problems does not prove causation. However, if we imagine a deliberate social experiment where we exposed children to several hours of screen time a day, including potentially harmful content, some negative effects would surely be inevitable—and that is what we have done.
With schools already taking positive action to restrict smartphone use, I would like to make three points. First, we need young people’s voices in the national debate. Two recent studies of 13 to 18 year-olds found that 15% to 20% reported addictive-like smartphone use. This was linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression and insomnia. The good news is that a majority recognised the problem and were already taking active steps to reduce their smartphone use.
Young people are worried about this issue. It will doubtless be a hot topic among many active youth groups such as those at the National Children’s Bureau, 5Rights and the UK Youth Parliament, which even now has a Select Committee taking evidence on the links between social media and youth violence. If we do not engage these young advocates to be partners in our deliberations and actions, imposing restrictions in school may just produce behaviours akin to smoking behind the bike shed.
Secondly, we know that some young children are at particular risk in the online world; for example, those who are struggling with mental health or have a history of being bullied. Reducing exposure in school may be one strand of a strategy to address this, but more research and action are needed to protect this vulnerable group.
Finally, we need to take a public health-style approach to this issue. Parents and teachers need support and information to help them work together rather than pulling in different directions. We need a broad education programme aimed at helping everyone to understand both the risks and benefits of smartphones, and how to use them wisely, safely and in ways which do not compromise learning, mental health and social development.
Almost daily, new reports indicate that banning smartphones in schools leads to beneficial impacts on educational attainment, social skills, student behaviour and educational inequality. Stopping their use in schools goes a long way to aiding the development of children. It is increasingly clear that smartphones stifle the cognitive skills vital for academic success. A study involving 150,000 students across 16 countries has demonstrated that the proliferation of smartphone usage in the classroom has significantly damaged the process of learning and academic achievement.
The recent Policy Exchange report mentioned by other noble Lords found that children in schools that have an effective ban on smartphones achieve GCSE results one to two grades higher than those that do not. It also found that only around 11 % of secondary schools have an effective smartphone ban, although those numbers are rapidly increasing as more and more schools recognise the dangers and harms. It found direct correlations to other positive outcomes, including noticeable reductions in bullying and an increase in amounts of healthy physical activity by pupils. A legal ban on smartphones for schools across the UK would provide protection for teachers when parents push back, although most parents I speak to are worried sick about the impact that constant access to phones is having on their children and would welcome such a ban.
The unions are increasingly concerned, too. In response to the NASUWT “Big Question” survey, asking what pupil behaviour problems cause the most concern on a day-to-day basis, the percentage of teachers who think distraction of mobile phones is a major issue has risen from 20% just four years ago to 32% today. They comment that
“social media has encouraged poor behaviours and has been the catalyst for poor behaviour in general. Social media is affecting how students form relationships. Students use phones and social media almost constantly. They are unaware of the world, each other, anything”.
That comes from one of our leading teaching unions.
Now, as a mother of two, thankfully born and raised in a world before smartphones, I of course recognise the value that smartphones can bring to a child’s security—but while they are in school, they are secure. Relentless consumption of internet content provides a threat not only to learning but to mental health. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and an expert social psychologist, cites
“social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction”
as the symptoms of smartphone overusage by young people. Only last week, health professionals were here in Parliament giving powerful evidence about the damage caused to developmental issues, including language and communication, as well as physical changes in the brain and to eyesight, leading to eating disorders, obesity and musculoskeletal changes as well as issues with sleep.
It is worth looking at evidence of children themselves. After the John Wallis Academy imposed a complete ban on smartphones, a set of year 7 pupils were asked as part of a survey how they felt about the ban. Only 11 % wished they had more access to their devices, while 52% of pupils felt that the policy had an extremely positive impact, citing more human interactions, better concentration and increased learning. The evidence is clear: without regulation, our children face a dystopian future. I urge the Minister and her colleagues to act without delay.