Smartphones and Social Media: Children

Debate between Andrea Jenkyns and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates)—one of Parliament’s finest at this moment in time. I hope we will see her in her place for a long time.

I will focus specifically on phones in schools. Having spent my entire professional career before entering this place as a secondary school teacher—in fact, as a head of year, which meant that I had to deal with young people’s behaviour and attendance—and having been a Minister for School Standards, albeit briefly, I will say loud and clear that it is appalling that, despite the Government having issued continued guidance since 2010 that smartphones are not to be used in schools, only 11% of schools have taken the brave and bold step of enforcing the rule that phones must be put away and not visible or reachable until the end of the school day. That is bizarre when we consider that most of those schools go on to achieve an outstanding rating. Michaela, one of the finest schools in the country, has very strict rules. I implore anyone to visit, as I have done on a number of occasions, to see that when phones are put away, the results are far better than most grammar and private schools in this country, because young people’s attention is on the knowledge-rich curriculum in front of them.

I am quite embarrassed, to be frank, of my former profession. Not enough headteachers have enough backbone to take the fight to parents who may want to push back or to pupils who may want to moan and groan, or simply to fight the aggressive educationalists who seem to think that the phone is somehow a tool for learning in the classroom. They think children should spend their time googling how to mind-map themselves on A3 or A2 bits of paper, without any proper guidance on understanding the processes involved in things, from those as simple as making chocolate to ideas about how democracy was formed. That should come from the expert in the classroom—the teacher—who stands at the front, delivers the knowledge and ensures that young people have the ability to critically respond to different ideas and do not just find information, copy and paste it off their phones and write it on a piece of paper without cognitively taking it in or critically analysing it in the way they should.

[Dame Andrea Jenkyns]

Look at Parliament: it has pushed for this paperless society, with the Select Committees wanting everything on our tablets. For decades, industry has pushed for it as well. Does my hon. Friend think that has had an impact, and that maybe we should return to using paper again? I myself am addicted—how can we tell our children off when we are addicted ourselves?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I will keep my comments brief, Sir George, to make sure that I do not impact on others’ time, but I will say that I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I am a dinosaur—I like paper and I like to scribble over things. When I was a teacher, I liked having physical paper to write comments on. I certainly did not want to try to use interesting gadgets to get ideas across. Although there is great technology, like Google Classroom, that can be used effectively, ultimately we should not move away from paper-based exercises, because they are still useful, particularly for handwriting skills, which are so important for young people. Fewer and fewer young people have the chance to practise handwriting, because we have all fallen into the trap of being able to type quickly on our phones.

To sum up, let me say loud and clear that I know the Minister gets this. He has been working tremendously hard on the Online Safety Act and on what can be done to make sure that we enforce the rules that have come through that legislation while also looking at the wider debate around this policy area, but he now needs to go back to the Department for Education and we need to end the era of guidance and make it enforceable and directional from the Government.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge pointed out, schools should have the funding for lockers or storage boxes, to make sure that phones are put away and children can enjoy a childhood in the school day without their phone. Believe me, when I was a head of year I was sick and tired of having to deal with parents coming into school to tell me that their child was receiving harmful online bullying content in the evening via social media communications. It was totally outside my jurisdiction as head of year and outside the jurisdiction of the school itself. That imposed a huge workload on teachers and led to major behavioural issues, which are the No. 1 and No. 3 issues in every single survey on why people are leaving the teaching profession. I therefore implore the Government to act on this. I hope that every school will now take action, look to those like the Michaela school and deliver a smartphone-free education.