Schools: Mobile Phones

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

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.

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.