Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, so I declare my interest as chair of and adviser to the Birmingham Education Partnership.

It is 25 years ago, when the Minister and I were in the Department for Education, that we were discussing the rollout of technology in early years. It just was not part of school life; it was not an implement that was used. The thing we were most worried about then, which underpinned every speech I made, was that it should be an innovation that became available to all and was not limited by social class, the family you are born into or how much money you had in your pocket. I never thought that, a quarter of a century later, the debate would be about the damage that that area of technology development has brought to schools, but we must remember that that does not take away from the vision, the hope and the aspiration we saw in this technology a quarter of a century ago.

However, we are clearly not in a place where we want to be. I cannot say anything to counter the evidence that the noble Lord, Lord Nash—indeed, everybody who has spoken—gave about the impact of social media on young minds. It is just terrible. As an adult, I feel responsibility that it has happened and that we moved too slowly to do anything about it. If some of us come to the conclusion that we do not want to ban smartphones in schools, it should not be a political dividing line; we are actually all on the same side. We have at least got to that point, but there is a genuine debate to be had about how we take it forward to protect our children so that they have the advantages that technology can bring while saving them from the risks and the bad things that it can do.

I think that there is a difference between smartphones and social media that has not been clear in this debate, and I am not sure about the definition of smartphones at the end of the proposed new clause. It says that a smartphone is something

“whose main purpose is not the support of learning or study”;

I do not know what that means. A smartphone enables learning and study and good things in life, and it allows social media to reach people that it should not be reaching. The definition is quite difficult to follow.

My main problem is that the smartphone is a bit like the atom bomb; you cannot uninvent it. It is entrenched in our society. There are things that as adults we cannot now do unless we have a smartphone, and every single week, month and year, government and everybody else push us as adults to use smartphones. That is what AI is about. All the advantages that are going to come through AI are connected to smartphones, so whether we like it or not, we have gone too far down the road. For adults, smartphones are here to stay. I do not see how abolishing them in schools allows teachers and educationists in wider civic society to train and help young people come to terms with the adult world in which they are going to live. If smartphones are banned in schools, if they cannot be used, how can we expect young people to be competent and confident adult users of smartphones and to cope with social media? It would be like saying, “We’re not going to teach you to swim, but by the time you get to an adult, we’re going to let you live by the side of a lake”. It is just nonsense. We have got to help children to come to terms with smartphones, and that is why I thought that the speech made by my noble friend Lord Knight was powerful.

I describe myself as being on a bit of a journey. I am a bit of a floating voter on smartphones in schools, but when I am honest with myself, I know that the reason that I nearly come down on the side of banning them in schools is that I am panicking that we are not doing anything else. I almost reach out for anything—at least we could ban them in schools; at least we could protect children between 9 am and 4 pm; at least we could protect them between five and 18. To be honest, that is not enough. If there is this problem, and we all seem to have signed up to the idea that it is a problem, it needs more from us as policymakers than to, yet again, say it is the responsibility of schools. Reducing teenage pregnancy was the responsibility of schools. Healthy eating was the responsibility of schools. Being better citizens was the responsibility of schools. Every time we have a problem that goes through society and we are not quite sure how to deal with it, we put it on the curriculum—it is the responsibility of schools.

I do not say that schools have not got a responsibility—they hold the major responsibility because they are going to be teaching media literacy—but they are not the only ones who have it. If we are serious, adults, parents, government and civic society need to get together with schools and educators to try to solve this problem. It is not sensible to say that all we can do in this Bill is go for schools. That would make a bad policy. When it does not work, we cannot say, “Yes, that’s all we could do in that Bill”. That would be poor policymaking. I hesitate to say that government has got to look at it in the round and do something more than it has, because that is just time, and we have known about this problem for 10 years at least and we have not moved fast enough. I end up probably coming down on the side of my noble friend Lord Knight and saying that there are things that need to be done in schools that mean we ought to keep smartphones in schools.

I have some specific questions on that. The proposed new clause in Amendment 458 would ban smartphones, except in two or three circumstances. My noble friend Lord Knight then puts down an amendment, which is great, excepting another circumstance. We know what is going to happen: people will be putting forward amendments as to why, in a particular case, smartphones should not be banned in schools, and eventually it will all be a muddle and we will have to start again. In truth, you cannot ban smartphones in schools. There will always be reasons why you will need to use them, so you end up coming down on the side of saying that we have got to use them well and we have got to support young people.

My last point is, how do you enforce it? It is in the law. If the governing body—that is the noble Lord, Lord Nash, to tell the truth—permits smartphones in schools, who enforces it? Do you get the police in? Do you get parents to report it? Do you get kids to report that they have been allowed to have a smartphone in school? At the moment, it is heads who choose, along with their governing body and staff and the wider school community, not to have smartphones in schools. They own that. It is their law. They have gone through the preparation, talked it through and arrived at a decision, and that makes sense. I may just not be seeing the rationale, but I worry that enforcement, when it is in primary legislation, will be not a great thing for schools. I am coming down on the side of not banning them, but my great worry is that it is just another couple of months passed where the real dangers that were outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and others have not been addressed in this House or elsewhere.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I think she spoke for many of us on the challenge of edtech: how our hopes that this would be a transformational technology have now changed emphatically, and how we now find ourselves in a place we really did not intend to be.

I would like to say a word about Amendment 183CA, from my noble friend Lady Penn, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass. My noble friend Lady Shephard put it well: our children do need respite, and a school is a wonderful place to be spared that kind of respite. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, spoke well about the harsh impact on education.

However, it is Amendment 177 that I primarily want to address. For that reason, I see Amendment 183CA as a stepping stone to getting rid of mobile phones from the lives of under-16s altogether at some stage; that is what I will address my comments to. I do this as a former Health Minister and I declare my interest as a trustee of the Royal Society for Public Health.

The neurobiological evidence of the harms of social media on children is not ambiguous any more. It is irrefutable, as it is, for instance, for tobacco. We can see the causes and the correlations. One three-year longitudinal study published two years ago found that adolescents who habitually checked social media showed “distinct neurodevelopmental trajectories” in brain regions governing social reward and punishment, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In other words, social media exploits the dopamine pathways involved in addiction, creating cycles that exploit the neurochemical pathways that determine their actions.

I personally struggle with addiction. I find it extremely tough. Our children’s plastic brains are just not in a shape to be able to survive that struggle. This challenge is not a teenage rebellion or some kind of moral panic. It is a systematic neurological manipulation by megacompanies that know exactly what they are doing.

Social media is a major driver of the mental health crisis that this country faces, and the consequences are contributing to the overwhelming of our NHS. In 2024-25, NHS mental health services supported 800,012 under-18s, an increase of nearly 300,000 since the NHS long-term plan first started. I will not go into the figures in detail, but I assure the Chamber that this is not a question of “snowflakery” or wokery; it is a genuine public health emergency, and the problem is not going away.

I say this with some delicacy. I am one of the few Peers in this House who has children of this age. Mine are 18, 15, 13 and 10. In answer to my noble friend Lady Shephard, they are all at different schools, which is a logistical problem for me. None of the schools is winning this battle. In fact, I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that, each year, I have seen this problem get worse. You can feel the algorithms getting more effective and having more of a grip on your children’s lives.

Each year, children spend more hours on the phone. The communal social pressure each year is more intense. Mental health, and self-harming among friends in schools, gets worse. There is more and more disgusting pornographic filth available to young children. Statistically, there are more predators, activated by the addictive escalator of increasingly violent porn, seeking meet-ups with my children. There are more frustrated parents each year watching their children’s attention and well-being deteriorate. The kids simply are not mature enough to handle these toxic tools and this content—and this is even before AI gets to work on their brains with superpowered social algorithms that screw with their heads. It is going to get worse and worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, has suggested is indeed happening: private schools, grammar schools and schools in wealthy areas are doubling down on their success by pursuing smartphone bans. Schools in areas of deprivation, where family and community ties are the weakest, are being left behind.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I had not planned to speak to this group of amendments, having tabled an amendment that we will debate in the following group. But as I have interests in the founding of Parent Gym and in the early years in particular—about which I hope to speak later—it would be remiss of me not to add a few comments, given some of the very esteemed contributions made in this debate.

I support all the amendments in the group with the exception of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for the reasons that have been outlined. My noble friend Lord Bethell touched on an important point in his intervention: we have a real issue around the different types of parenting and families, from those who are aware of the dangers to their children to those who deploy smartphones as substitute childcare. I fear that all the evidence—as very eloquently put by my noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lord Nash, who cited at length the reports and data around all this—show us that there are families who do not have the resource or means to engage in this daily battle.

I declare another interest: I am on that front line daily with my 14 year-old daughter; I hoped that she might have been here this afternoon, but she has conveniently not made it. It is a daily battle. What children will tell their godparents, when you are not around to hear it, is that they actually agree that you are right and that they wish they did not have their phone. They wish that phones did not exist and that they were not part of their life; they want them because their peers have them.

The report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, published last week, has very notable commentary about the safety of some of the girls who were groomed by gangs. She talks with real concern—it is in an early section, for those who have not read the entire thing, as I have—about the fact that online activity means that we no longer know what is going on for children. We literally do not know who is in their bedroom at night. Who are they engaging with? Who can forget the case of Molly Russell—the terrible case that an Instagram post led to? There is one place where we can surely assume our child should be safe: at school. It is not an unreasonable request that we, as a society, look seriously at this to care for the health and safety of our children.

I am very aware of the comment by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but it is the opposite to asking schools to police the use of phones. I completely empathise with the concern about asking schools to do more, but this is removing from them the need to police phones. It gets them off the premises, or at least locked up within the premises, so that bullying cannot happen online, grooming cannot be going on, boys who are being recruited into county lines cannot be harassed or intimidated while they are meant to be learning at school, and on it goes. Your Lordships have heard plenty from others on the various points.

I end on another note. Let us look at what the people who invented these things are doing. We all agree; no one has disagreed with the fact that they are addictive—we all feel it every day. What do the people who invented them to be addictive and who use behavioural science and neuroscience to do that, do with their children? They have screen-free schools—completely screen-free, incidentally: no tablets or laptops—and screen-free homes. What is China doing? It is hoovering up our children’s data to understand everything about our society and drive their behaviours in the most destructive way possible. If you ask AI, “If I were China, what would I do to destroy the West?”, the answer is exactly what it is doing: to destroy and undermine the mental health of whole generations of people. What does China do with its children? It gives them one hour a day, and it drives them to watch science and maths videos. I support these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I do note that I was coming to the end of my comments at 18 minutes—just so the Whips know I was sticking to the rules. The noble Lord tempts me to say that that was exactly the point I made at the beginning: there has been conflation in this debate of the use of mobile phones in schools, the impact of screen time across children’s lives—I can quite understand people’s concerns about that—and, as I have said, the need for us, at a very early stage in children’s lives, to be clear with them about the appropriate use of screens, which is probably practically none, and clear in the information that we provide to parents. The Government are taking action on all those areas, alongside gathering appropriate evidence. On that basis, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The Minister is quite right to point out that the Online Safety Act did not get much of a mention: maybe it is some kind of PTSD, because some of us did hard yards during that difficult passage. One of the most difficult things was the debate on age verification for porn, which started with all the same arguments we have just heard: it is not technically possible; maybe children can learn by watching pornography; the moral rules around telling children what to do are not crystal clear; the science of whether porn is good for children is not cast in stone, and does not have the longitudinal studies that we need to make decisions on it. All that was heard.

At the end of next month, Ofcom will finally bring in a deadline so that all websites that carry a risk of children seeing porn will have to put in age-verification software. Who in this Chamber now genuinely thinks that was a bad decision? Yet it was fought tooth and nail from that Bench by the previous Government, who had to be dragged to that decision by rebellion in the Commons and a four corners of the Chamber effort here.

The Minister faces a similar storm brewing on social media use by under-16s. Could she, with her multidimensional approach to this problem, help us understand the metrics she will use to judge whether it is right to revisit this issue? How many hours a day do children have to spend on social media? How many predators have to get through? How many grooming gangs have to recruit children in order to abuse them? What metrics will she apply to reviewing this decision?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Well, the noble Lord added considerably to his speech there. I did not use some of the arguments that he suggested were used in this Chamber about porn. I was not in this House so I do not know what arguments and debates went on. Nor did I suggest that there are not considerable issues around young people’s use of social media and the amount of their screen time. The noble Lord is very clear that he believes there should be a complete ban on social media for young people aged under 16. I do not know whether that carries a majority in this House, to be honest. Given that, it is important to demonstrate, as I attempted to do, the action that the Government are already taking to address all those issues, whether it is screen time, the impact of social media on young people, or mobile phones in schools. The Government are taking action on all of them, without necessarily thinking that there is one single silver bullet of a ban that can solve all those problems.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

What Australia did was a political decision. It made a choice and is sticking to it. We could choose to make the OSA what it was supposed to be, and that is what I would like to see. Everybody in this House should suck it up and vote because we have to make it clear that this is not what we were promised and that this is not good enough.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is such a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. She is absolutely right. We have a choice today on whether we will send an amendment to the Commons to put pressure on the Government to act or whether we are going to flunk this opportunity. I support her conclusion that this is a moment when the House of Lords does need to act.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Penn for her Amendment 91, which is thoughtful, patiently put and important. I hope very much indeed that the Government pay attention to her notes on timetable and that, if necessary, she presses this point so that she gets what she needs.

I want to address Amendment 94A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Nash, and pay tribute to the noble Baronesses, Lady Cass, Lady Berger and Lady Benjamin, all of whom have made an enormous impact on this. Guardrails for our children are where we have landed. I say this with some regret, but it is important that we recognise this point.

The noble Baroness, Lady Cass, mentioned a meeting with the royal colleges. As a former Health Minister who has had many dealings with the herd of cats that are the royal colleges, I say that if they unify and say that there is a public health emergency, we should pay attention to that moment. We should not be brushed off by attempts to knock this into the long grass via public consultations. We should listen to our clinicians. Dr Rebecca Foljambe and the clinicians against smart- phones have done conclusive research on the harms done by screen time, by predators, by fraudsters, by the filth on the internet and by the sheer quantity of screen time that our children are subjected to. It is an utterly persuasive argument. Further research is not needed.

In fact, a consultation is the tobacco industry playbook, applied to smartphones for adolescents. Delay, consult, lobby, weaken—we know this playbook very well. We do not need a “get out of jail” clause for the tech companies; we need implementation. This is our opportunity for doing it.

Like many others in this Chamber, I worked really hard on the Online Safety Act to make it a success. It is a landmark piece of legislation. I am extremely proud of bits of it. But it assumed that we could work with the platforms to moderate their algorithms, to remove the filth, to prevent the predators, and to limit the screen time. It assumed that we were working in some kind of collaborative partnership with Facebook, Google, TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, Twitter and all the other social media companies to protect children and work towards some kind of better world.

That was a catastrophic misjudgment about the nature of these companies and of their leadership. The outcomes for our children, which have gone significantly backwards in the last two years, are testimony to that point. That damage done to our children is accelerating, with the tsunami of AI that is heading their way. The platforms have not reformed. They have not taken the bait. Instead, they have taken the mick. They are introducing artificial intelligence and totally inappropriate chatbots to our children.

The risk assessments that are an absolutely essential building block of the Ofcom regime and the Online Safety Act are an absolute insult to the intelligence of the regulators and of parents. How on earth did a risk assessment ever assess Grok’s new AI tools as being safe for children? It is a complete joke. The noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Clement-Jones, say that these platforms can be moderated, that they can be brought to heel, and that they will abide with the regulator’s will. But we have got to remember that they will not change, because around 25% of their clicks—the page views—come from the children they are targeting, and they are far too reliant on mis-selling those children’s eyeballs as adult eyeballs to advertisers. You cannot regulate far-off tech titans who are reliant on that income. You can only create perimeters in which they can hunt their profits, and that is exactly what the amendment seeks to do.

I recognise that there are sensible, respected voices who take a completely different view. Noble Lords have rightly paid tribute to the Molly Rose Foundation. I know that Ian Russell, and the NSPCC and other charities, have argued that instead of guardrails we should strengthen the Online Safety Act. They say that we should mandate well-being by design requirements, and Ian Russell has said that we should require platforms to prioritise child well-being in algorithmic design, and that age verification creates

“a false sense of security”.

I just do not think that is right. This argument rests on a false premise that we can somehow design our way out of the problem while keeping children on platforms whose entire business model depends on their exploitation. That cannot happen. You cannot algorithmically mitigate something that is not a design problem but a business model problem. The algorithm is not broken; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: maximise engagement, keep eyes on the screen, and amplify provocative content, because provocative content keeps people clicking, including our children. This is not a market failure; this is a market working as designed by the companies that have monetised our children’s childhood as a commodity.

There are other noble Peers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who are flying a kite on the possibility of some kind of film-style certification system. I also share that dream. What a wonderful world it would be to live in. I lived in that world for many years. Previous to being here, I was the strategy director of Capital Radio, in much-loved local radio, which, in the 1990s, was a warm and loving place to work and operate in. For every single local radio station, the Government had a licence which dictated exactly who they could broadcast to and what content they had on their radio station. If you breached that licence, they pulled it and gave it to someone else. It meant that local radio was extremely compliant with the licence details. Our broadcasting was a warm and lovely thing that was safe for children.

It is completely unrealistic that we are going to appoint something like a modern Radio Authority that will issue licences for every single website in the world and in some way oversee what our children access on those websites. How many bureaucrats would be needed to look at all those licences? How many armies of enforcement agents would be needed to issue the fines? How could we possibly read all that content?

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

This is fairly straightforward. There is a bit of passion being stirred up and a nice pace, so let us not delay too long. The reason I am suggesting that we include smartphones as assistance to those with special educational needs is because smartphones fit in your pocket and are a great way of carrying technology with you.

Chris McCausland, who noble Lords have probably seen on “Strictly Come Dancing”, did a lovely little programme showing all the assistance you can get if you are blind that can be loaded on to your phone. I, as a dyslexic, have good voice-operated systems that I can carry with me everywhere and use because they are on my phone. It gives you personal independence. It means that you can operate these systems, and we have only just started to scratch the surface. If there is another personal device that does it, I am all ears. I do not know whether there is another one.

You can block social media so the phone itself can be used for other purposes. It is a plastic and metal box that carries technology; it is not the devil’s passport. If we use it correctly, we can change it so that it actually supports and gives independence to a person who otherwise has it restricted from them. I ask all noble Lords in this Chamber: do we want to give independence to those who have disabilities?

This amendment would not solve everything, but it would address certain things. It would make sure that pupils could interact with lessons more easily. If they are restricted to a computer in front of them, that may well be better, but, for instance, they will not be able to take notes quite as easily—as in my case—or communicate quite as easily. The Carers Trust has been in touch to say that it does not like the proposal and would like an exemption for some of the people it is dealing with. This is moving very fast—there might be other groups.

I appreciate what the noble Baroness is trying to do but let us not be too rigid and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Technology is a way of helping to give independence, allowing people to access education. Please accept the fact that an absolute ban has downsides—downsides we can avoid. I beg to move.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for a very moving speech there, but I will address his point directly.

This amendment does not object to a child having a basic phone for safety. My plucky 11 year-old son travels to and from school every day with a big rucksack and a violin on the Circle line and the Jubilee line, come rain or snow. It worries the hell out of me every time he leaves the house, and I am not happy until he is back home. That is why he has a Nokia dumb phone in his pocket, so he can call me if he needs to. I confess that he sometimes plays “Pong” on a black and white LED screen when he is bored, but that does not damage his frontal cortex or bring him into touch with predators. He does not have a smartphone with all its nasty algorithms. Until they invent such a box as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, quite reasonably described, that is what a smartphone contains.

I do not, for instance, allow my son to go to the local pub, the Westbourne, where he might be beaten up. For the same reason, I do not let him on Instagram, with all its bullying. I do not allow him to go to the Ministry of Sound—wonderful organisation though that is—because he will be confronting sexual predators. For the same reason, I do not let him on Snapchat. I do not give him methamphetamine—whizz—or Es, because they are addictive and would mess with his brain, as do TikTok and YouTube reels. I do not, for instance, allow him on X, where he might see internet filth. For the same reason, he is not allowed to go to Soho to watch peep shows.

Toxic digital platforms are designed for adults and are engineered for addiction, fraudsters and predators—and, I am afraid, they are screwing with too many of our children’s brains. A simple device that makes calls and sends texts poses none of these challenges. That is what children should have. That is why schools should be in a regulatory position to ban smartphones during school hours.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I have spoken on this issue so many times in this House that I am not going to repeat myself—really—except to say that I have never taught in a school that allows mobile phones either in school or on the way to school. I have taught in some of the highest-performing schools—non-selective state schools that are some of the highest performing for pupil progress in the country—and I do not think the two are unconnected.

We do not need mobile phones in schools. They distract and they disturb. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that I am sure we can take a smartphone, take out all the stuff the student needs and give it to them for the day. We do it with laptops for the pupils all the time. We do not need them on the way to school. It is a huge irony that we pack our children off to school with many hundreds of pounds-worth of equipment in their pocket and then worry about their safety. As part of a strategy to build a safe environment for our children online, the first step is very simple: ban phones from schools entirely.