Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, my remarks will focus primarily on technology in school, but I want to take this opportunity to say that, over the time I have spent in your Lordships’ House, I find myself increasingly in situations where children’s needs are being now balanced with the proportionality principle of others’ adult freedoms, with no recognition of the broad swathe of rights that we are obligated to give them. I start by saying that the well-being Bill should represent that broad swathe of children’s rights and meet their needs in that sense.

It strikes me that one of the easiest and cheapest things we could do is to give them a break from the well-documented intrusions of digital tech while at school, which, as a 15 year-old earlier this week said to me,

“gives us brain rot, prevents us sleeping and stops us talking to each other”.

Ministers cite excessive device use at home as the greater culprit, rather than the smartphone disruption at school, for the decline in children’s well-being and attainment, but that logic normalises smartphones’ constant presence in a child’s life and actually does nothing at all to tackle phone use at home.

Evidence that I will bring to Committee shows that restrictions are helpful to school communities, not only for learning but for peace in the school community and for friendship and human flourishing. The current guidance—which is excellent—puts pressure on teachers that statutory rules could relieve.

While Ministers are slow on smartphones, they are increasingly evangelical about bringing edtech into the classroom. I recognise that there is very good evidence that those with disabilities or special needs benefit from such tech, but for most children there is no such evidence at all. There is no oversight, no pedagogical criteria, no understanding of its efficacy and no proof of learning outcomes. In a similar vein, I have now sat down with four Ministers of Education and explained the risks of uncertified safety tech, yet we still do not have minimum standards. It is another—not the first—accident waiting to happen.

Some tech is wonderful, some is benign and some is in our schools stealing children’s data and their opportunity to learn. Yet we are rapidly wrapping pupils in a world of digital products which isolate them and normalise the screen over the human, with no proof of the benefits. I would say the same thing about early years. Who has not seen a child in a pram with a device strapped to it? At nursery, children are arriving with inhibited social skills and language, yet all my attempts to get mandatory training for early years professionals in technology have been rebuffed by both sides of the House. Government and Parliament must recalibrate that the Covid time-bomb, in which children are developmentally stunted and isolated, is increasingly the new norm of childhood—children are socialised by those brightly lit screens which are focused on the attention economy and ad revenue, not on human flourishing.

In Committee, I will join others in putting forward amendments on these issues. I will also seek to understand the scope of the promised edtech code being produced by the ICO and the Government’s plans to give a data-mining exception to AI companies for all our children’s work and behaviour at school. There are many wonderful uses of technology, but we have to make sure that school is a place of privacy, safety and learning for our children.