Baroness Kidron
Main Page: Baroness Kidron (Crossbench - Life peer)(1 day, 22 hours ago)
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Baroness Kidron
That this House takes note of the increasing interest in mandating that schools be mobile phone free.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
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.
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.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister, in particular for agreeing to arrange a meeting with the Minister in the other place. I thank all noble Lords, but I am going to use the little bit of time I have to respond on a couple of issues. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for that.
I am rather disappointed, because the Minister set out quite a lot of stats that showed the problem and then said, “but we’ve got it covered”. I think that that is not the feeling of the House and it is not what the evidence shows. It cannot be the case that, on the one hand, a large number of children say the guidance is not working and, on the other, the noble Baroness says that we have the guidance and the guidance is enough.
I felt that there were a number of things of that ilk, and I shall write to the Minister to point them out precisely and not take everybody’s time right now. However, I wanted to make it very clear that the vast majority of noble Lords in the debate were talking about restrictions and not bans, in school and not in general. I know that there are those who go a little wider, but in general that was the mood of the House. I do not think that any noble Lord who spoke—and certainly I say it on my own behalf—is a tech detractor. There is a better world than this: a better world where technology is designed to take care of our children.
The one point of information that I was delighted to hear is that the Minister thinks that the OSA deals with addiction. I have had quite a lot of toing and froing with Ofcom; it does not seem to think so. I would love to interrogate that with her and with Ofcom.
I shall leave my final word for a young child who said, “I don’t get why everyone is so upset. We’re not allowed to take pets or frisbees into class. Why are we allowed to take phones?”