Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support what my noble friend Lady Jenkin has just said—it seems to be an excellent prescription for the right way forward.

We approached these technologies with such innocent optimism when they arrived. I absolutely remember what it was like at the beginning of smartphones. We were worried about how we would get them to everybody and how people could afford them. I remember an early example, with my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold, when I was briefly her Whip in the Lords and she was in charge of education. We were looking at this wonderful new system which would enable us to replace all maths masters with machines—I am delighted that it has not happened. Even Alpha School in Texas, which is part of the latest round of optimism that AI can do everything, is not looking at replacing maths masters either but merely at having AI to help them. We have to be careful about optimism when it comes to new things.

I think we have reached the point with smartphones when we know that they are damaging. We know this from all of the research that has been done and from personal experience—which in my case very much echoes what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, described. Children’s lives at school should be full and social, but the spaces between classes are dominated by phones. All their social interactions are mediated through phones. Even when they are talking to each other, they are talking about what is on social media. The effect on boys, and on their relationships with and ability to relate to girls, is not good.

We have reached the point where we ought to start doing something. We cannot allow this level of harm to continue. I suggest that the Government do something along the lines of the West Dunbartonshire experiment. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, remembers the set-up in West Dunbartonshire where they tested various approaches to teaching children reading. It was supposed to be a five-year experiment but it collapsed after a year and a half, because part of the design of the study was that the schools running various different methods were talking to each other. After a year and a half, the schools that had not been assigned phonics said, “I’m not putting my child through this. The phonics works—we’re going to do that”. It produced a real sea change in the way schools approached teaching children reading, because teachers could absolutely see what the difference was. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin described, we would expect such differences.

Let us set something up and see how it works and what the differences are between schools that have various models—the current model, the intermediate model proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the total ban that I would favour—and see what happens. Let them talk to each other about how they are experiencing this process. Do not try to run it as a total blind trial with only the academics pronouncing at the end; let it be an interactive thing between the schools involved. We would very quickly find out what was working and get a good groundswell for the right solution, which may well be that of the noble Lord, Lord Knight—I do not know.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Is that not what is happening at the moment? A vast number of schools are, in effect, banning smartphones—as many people would like—some have an intermediate approach, and then there are a few outliers that are not banning them. Is it not the case that the noble Lord is making a good argument not for proceeding with this right now but for going ahead with a proper study on the impact of those various regimes and then acting once we know what we are talking about?

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there are indeed a number of these things going on, but no organised study with an organised direction is taking place. There is no communication between schools, with them saying to each other, “Yes, we could do it that way”. I am looking at a Government who, I suspect, have not been persuaded of the need to act now. Let us do a study now and get something set up, so that we can definitively get to the best answer. While academies are allowed to be different from other schools, a wide range of policies are being enforced. If we take advantage of that, understand what is going on and allow the schools to share that information as the process goes on, I think we will find ourselves with an answer quite quickly.