Mobile Phones in Schools

Laura Trott Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I am delighted to come to the House today to welcome a proper phone ban in place for schools. The Government have finally done the right thing, but they have been on what I would euphemistically describe as a journey. We should remember that the former Prime Minister told us that a legislative phone ban was “completely unnecessary”. The previous Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), stood opposite me here and, in her warm and friendly manner, dismissed it as “a headline-grabbing gimmick”. When I raised this topic at Education questions, a then Education Minister told me to think of something better to go on—not condescending at all. When I asked the Government in this House to rule out a “not seen, not heard” policy, they refused. The stats that the Minister is citing today are correct, but they are essentially the same as the stats we quoted a year ago in this House, and the Government refused to act on them.

Let me remind Labour Members how many times they voted against a legislative phone ban in schools: not once, not twice, but seven times. Even the Minister, who I am sure has agreed with me all along, was forced through the voting Lobbies time and again, and the new Education Secretary, who also voted against it, has clearly had a change of heart.

The Conservatives and, to be fair, the Liberal Democrats, who also supported the ban, were told by Ministers that the majority of schools had a phone ban in place and that the existing guidance was working. It was therefore quite something this morning to have facts that I was repeatedly told in this House were incorrect being used by the Education Secretary, in the media, to justify the new guidance. We must also remember that the guidance was put on a statutory footing only a month ago. One month, and already the Government have to come back and toughen it up. We could have saved a lot of time and confusion for schools if the Government had just listened to us in the first place.

The Minister has confirmed that the guidance will only come in next September. That is a self-inflicted whole extra year of lost learning time while schools have a previous set of guidance, issued only a month ago, that the Education Secretary admitted this morning is not working—all because the Government refused to listen to the evidence. That is at best frustrating and at worst chaotic.

We have got there in the end, however, and this is a significant moment. I pay tribute to the many campaigners who have fought for this, the many parents who have spoken out and the many pupils who have bravely spoken about their own experiences. Smartphones in schools are a disaster for learning, a disaster for safeguarding and a disaster for happiness. This is an important step forward in giving children their childhood back.

I welcome the news that the Government are consulting on an independent safety certification for edtech. Will the Minister clarify whether the review will look at all edtech products currently being used in schools or just new edtech products entering the market? Will he also confirm that the review will look at education outcomes as well as safeguarding? Does he have a timeframe for the consultation? How is the review consistent with rolling out unevidenced AI tutors for the most disadvantaged? Those are the very pupils who need evidence-led, teacher-led support. Will the Government commit to not rolling out the programme until they can guarantee the safety and efficacy of AI tutors?

I welcome the Government finally getting to the right place. A full phone ban in schools is the right thing for behaviour and attainment in our classrooms. It will keep schools as places of learning and will turn the tide on the pervasive screen creep that is destroying childhood. We must never accept that just because something is new, it is progress; just because it involves technology, it is automatically better; and we must never again allow anything into our classrooms that has not been proven to be safe for children.

[Josh MacAlister]

In the spirit of problem solving, I welcome much of what has been shared by the right hon. Lady in response to the statement, and I too thank all the campaigners outside this House and all the Members, both Government and Opposition, who have been pushing for progress on this issue for so long.

This is an issue that we, as politicians, will have to keep coming back to in future. If we look back at what happened with legislation to respond to the rise of the use of motor vehicles, we had to pass Bill after Bill in this House to make sure that seat belts and car safety were brought up to the mark. It was genuine iteration. Government and Parliament took action and the industry responded. In truth, we will have to stick at this for years to come. Hopefully, it is a point of reassurance that this Government are committed to getting ahead of these issues and to iterating time and again to get ahead of the problem.

A lot has changed in the last year on the strengthened guidance that we introduced. The proportion of schools with full bans has doubled since September, which is extremely welcome. I also draw the House’s attention to the fact that this was an issue that the Conservatives did a lot of speaking about when they were in government. I have here a list of all the occasions on which the 10 Conservative Education Secretaries had a chance to do something about this. They were raising the point as far back as 2018. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady says that I said they were right. I felt a lot of sympathy with those views when they were shared originally; the difference—and it is a big difference—is that we have done something about it. In a way, the best reflection of a party’s priorities is how that party chooses to use the precious time that is available to legislate, whether we choose botching Brexit, making a mess of a Budget, pushing a phoney war with trade unions—as the Conservatives were doing in their final few months in government—or prioritising children and legislating for children. We have done the latter, and I am delighted that we have done it. We were only able to do it because we had a Bill, and we prioritised it in this House.

[Laura Trott]

No, you didn’t!

[Josh MacAlister]

Well, we put it on a statutory footing because we had a piece of legislation.

The question that is worth a moment of response was about the educational outcomes being within the scope of the certification process. AI tutors are a real concern, but there is an opportunity there. The Government are funding some of the leading companies around the world to develop products. They will then go into a separate programme for which we have funding, led by the Education Endowment Foundation, to establish the impact on educational outcomes and attainment. It is entirely right to suggest that there should be no widespread deployment of this technology before we know its full effects on cognitive development. Of course, there are also safety issues.