This latest article for the Herald and Post follows the decision to ban mobile phones in schools...
In December 2022 I wrote in this column about children and young people, tech, social media, and what was then the Online Safety Bill (now the Online Safety Act, having since passed into law).
I had just completed a series of ‘Life Online’ discussions with pupils at East Hampshire secondary schools. I had been struck by the students’ mature thinking and grasp of some of the complex issues at hand. I was also struck by the ubiquity of technology in young people’s lives.
I’ve also had many conversations with teachers, here and elsewhere, about that ubiquity, and the effect that can be felt on concentration, and on sleep. Our local schools are very conscious both of the benefits of technology - including for education itself - but also about some of the pressures on children, and put restrictions on tech use.
Last week we at the Department for Education issued guidance to schools across England on banning mobile phones.
Obviously, no pupil has been allowed to be on their phone in the middle of a lesson. Most schools across the country already go considerably further than that and many do already have whole-school-day bans.
Many but not all.
What we want is to have a new norm countrywide where school – including at break and lunchtime – is free of phones and children are free to concentrate on what they’re at school to do, and to be with their friends.
There are different ways of doing this, including a ‘not seen and not heard rule’ for phones through to requiring them to leave them in lockers.
This is absolutely not about saying that children should not be able to have a phone for their journey to and from school: it is about inside school and the school day.
And there are exceptions for children who may use their phone to manage a medical condition, for example.
Wrapped up with this is a wider discussion about social media and smartphones in general among children under a certain age — a discussion which has developed over recent months.
I know that ‘Smartphone Free Childhood’ parent groups are popping up around the country to encourage whole year groups to agree not (yet) to buy their child a smartphone. I know, too, of groups of parents locally trying something similar.
Obviously, phones do have many plus points for young people. It helps them stay connected with each other, prepares them for a tech-heavy world, gives them autonomy, and fingertip access to the world’s encyclopaedia. But there is an obvious downside and, for some, sadly a dark side.
Reality can become contorted by the heavily filtered world of social media. For some there are self-esteem issues and struggles to work out fact from fiction.
A balance is needed. Social media platforms must start effectively enforcing their age thresholds that already exist (13+ for sites such as Snapchat). The Online Safety Act means they will have to do much more on this, and to protect children from harmful and inappropriate content — or face potentially hefty fines.
The recent Youth Endowment Foundation survey of 13–17-year-olds revealed that when presented with the rather radical option “If you could push a button that turned off all social media permanently for you and everyone you know, would you push it?”, 35% of teens responded that they would.
While far from a majority, that is still a remarkable result. But the phrase “and everyone you know” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A key thing with social media is the ‘network effect’ – you want to be on it because everyone else is and you certainly don’t want to be the only person not on it.
I really hope that the new guidance will help solidify a norm across England. And show that while smartphone technology brings many benefits, there are also benefits to having extended times without it.
