Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lewis Cocking Excerpts

Wednesday 15th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Aphra Brandreth]

I will now turn to why we need consistency for headteachers, schools, parents and children, particularly in relation to a mobile phone ban.

Lords amendment 106 mandates schools to prohibit the use and possession of a smartphone during the school day. It is an amendment that could have been written in headteachers’ offices across my consistency. As we have heard, many schools already have some form of mobile phone ban, but guidance alone can lead to inconsistencies, making it harder to enforce rules and leaving parents and young people navigating mixed messages, especially when children compare themselves to friends from other schools, and when parents look to each other for advice on what their children are allowed to do.

Since my election, I have met with headteachers from across Chester South and Eddisbury, and the amendment sets out exactly the kind of framework that they are asking for—one that gives them the clarity and backing to enforce what many are already trying to do. I recognise that earlier this year the Secretary of State issued further guidance on smartphone use in schools, but advisory guidance is not enough. It needs to be statutory: clear, robust action that meets the scale of the challenge, because without it, we are asking teachers to deliver change without giving them the backing to do so.

Ultimately, we have a duty to protect our children, and that means acting now, not later. Parents, teachers and young people are asking for change. This House should listen and I urge colleagues to support these amendments.

[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

My constituents George and Areti are in the Gallery. Their story is one that no parent should ever have to go through. Their 15-year-old son, Chrisopher, was an active and outgoing young man with a bright future ahead of him.

One night in January 2022, Christopher was in his room playing video games. He clicked on a pop-up link and was tricked into sharing personal information about himself and his family. Just moments later, he began to receive messages from an anonymous stranger, threatening to kill his family if he did not complete a series of challenges. Over the 50 harrowing days that followed, these sick challenges got worse and worse. Christopher felt that he was being watched constantly, and felt that he could not tell his mum or his dad what was going on, fearing for their safety. Tragically, the challenges reached such an unbearable level that sadly, in March 2022, Christopher took his own life.

Since meeting George and Areti for the first time this year, I have been taken aback by their resilience and determination to ensure that this can never happen again. Together, they have set up a charity that works to educate others about the dangers that exist for children online. The Christoforos Charity Foundation sets up and has been doing events and activities for kids where they are encouraged to leave their phones behind and enjoy real-life connections.

As George and Areti say, their son was murdered by social media. That is why we should act swiftly to protect children online. Will the Government stop all the reviews and get on and act now by banning phones in schools and bringing in an age restriction of 16 on social media to save lives today?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I rise to call on the Government to support Lords amendments 38 and 106, which would raise the age of access to harmful social media platforms to 16 and ban mobile phones from schools. A broad range of extremely well-informed speeches has already been made in the House, so I will focus on the recent and not-so-recent scientific research that shows the harms of mobile phones and social media in particular.

Social media and access to mobile phones for children reduce attention spans and weaken executive function. Screen time, especially from smartphones, fast-paced videos and multitasking apps, is linked to poorer executive functions, including sustained attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and working memory. Neurocognitive explanations suggest that highly stimulating screens promote rapid attentional shifting, weakening a child’s ability to concentrate in less stimulating real-world environments such as classrooms.

Screen time also creates language issues and verbal delays in early childhood, infancy and toddlerhood. Studies reportedly show that higher screen exposure before the age of three is associated with smaller expressive vocabularies, delayed language milestones and reduced conversational turn-taking. That effect is largely explained by displacement. Screen time displaces direct adult-child verbal interaction, which is essential for language development. Importantly, passive consumption and videos and scrolling are significantly more harmful than interactive co-used media. That increases the demand on our education system to support the children who are behind in their development, so banning phones will not only protect children, but allow them to learn at the rate that human beings are able to learn.

Access to mobile phones and social media also alters brain development. MRI studies provide biological evidence supporting behavioural findings. Higher screen exposure in young children is associated with thinner cortical regions involved in language, attention and higher-order cognition, as well as altered maturation of visual and executive control networks, and reduced structural integrity in the frontal and temporal regions linked to self-regulation.

In our society, we have an increase in the number of children with neurodiverse conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The use of mobile phones and social media and fast, short-clip videos increases ADHD-like symptoms and attention dysregulation. Multiple longitudinal studies, including analyses of more than 10,000 children, link higher screen exposure to increased inattention, impulsivity and ADHD symptom severity.

Let me turn to the cognitive effects of screen multitasking in adolescence. Frequent mobile phone use, particularly media multitasking, is associated with lower working memory capacity, poorer sustained attention and reduced cognitive control efficiency. The scientific consensus shows that well-supported adverse cognitive effects from the use of mobile phones and social media include weaker attention and executive function, language delays in early childhood, reduced learning efficiency, ADHD-related symptoms and atypical brain development patterns.

Earlier in the week, I was in the Chamber for the Government’s statement on their intention to halve the use of knives in our society and among young people over the next 10 years. I welcome those kinds of approaches, which protect our children and wider society. We have heard about the recent court cases in the US, and we know from leaked internal tech company documents that the social media companies were fully aware of the harm they were causing. They were designing in the addictive nature of their platforms, and they know that children want to leave their platforms but feel unable to do so because of their addictive nature. I would class those companies as virtual drug dealers. When people—particularly children—are exposed to the platforms they are providing, they become addicted to those platforms and unable to wean themselves off them.