Schools: Mobile Phones

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes an important point, but sometimes parents are right. Perhaps, for example, there are circumstances where there is a long journey to and from school and parents want to be able to be in touch with their children. I take the point that one of the things that we could do is support parents to understand how their children’s use of screen time might impact on them, both positively and negatively, and to encourage them—particularly those with younger children—to engage with that screen time, to understand what their children are watching and doing. That is certainly something we are looking at in some of the early years and family support work that the department is doing.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, we are not in a good place in relation to children and phones and social media. We heard from my noble friend Lord Young the evidence of disruption in classes. Parentkind has just published evidence which confirms that and shows that only one in seven pupils have an effective ban in place. Yesterday, we saw the watering down of the honourable Member for Whitehaven’s Private Member’s Bill on the protection of under-16s from social media and smartphones. Surely, with our children, we should be pursuing the precautionary principle. There is so much evidence of a correlation between the rise in mental health problems among young people and the advent of smartphones and social media. Until we know that that is not causation, surely the Government should be acting and not delaying.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We are of course in a place that reflects the guidance issued by the last Government—probably by the noble Baroness, actually—less than a year ago. On other occasions, quite rightly in this House, the Government are challenged on the approach that they take to the autonomy and decision-making of head teachers. With respect to schools, it is clearly important that we continue to monitor this issue. I know it is of concern to parents, but we also need to be in a position where we trust head teachers to make appropriate decisions within the guidance about what happens in their schools. Some of the points that the noble Baroness rightly identifies come back to the point I made earlier about the impact of phones and social media way beyond what happens in our schools. There, our cross-government approach, which focuses on the implementation of the Online Safety Act, for example, and other issues, is really important in helping us to address this issue of great concern, which I accept is complex and does not exist only in schools.