Mobile Phones in Schools

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Josh MacAlister]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight this matter. He has been a massive campaigner on these issues in his constituency and in this House, as have others. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham and Penge (Liam Conlon) has also been a big advocate for these issues. Earlier this year I was in Estonia, which has a high-performing school system and is adept at making good use of technology. While I was there, I saw the care and thought that went into the development of generative AI models that could be Socratic with pupils—they could coach and teach back and forth. Anything like that would need to go through rigorous testing to ensure that educational outcomes would be improved, but that shows the care and thought that needs to go into the deployment of such technologies.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I welcome the Minister’s statement on smart glasses, which I profoundly believe should be banned from all public buildings as a matter of urgency. In the Information Commissioner’s findings about edtech, it already has concerns about the data that those companies admit they are farming on children. My concern is about the totality of the information that can be gleaned about children from across both the technology they use at home—such as their smartphones, including their location, and from apps that they might have, such as menstrual trackers, where children might not understand the importance of the personal data that they are sharing—and edtech. I am concerned that by the time AI recruitment decisions are being made, when the current generation are 25, 30 or 40 years old, the totality of information that could be known about them online will be staggering. Will the Minister take an approach that involves high levels of scrutiny of the totality of information that could be held about children, both from the edtech sector and outside of it?

[Josh MacAlister]

My hon. Friend has done a very good job of describing the complicated nature of some of the risks and concerns that will affect this generation of children, the first to grow up online to this extent. It is because of the issues my hon. Friend raises that we are proposing an edtech certification scheme. As I have stressed in response to other hon. Members, it is about not just edtech in the classroom, but any use of technology in education settings, including colleges and early years settings and schools, that captures data in order to improve the running of the school or homework or other services. We want to ensure that that certification scheme covers all those services.