Contribution
My Lords, as this is my first substantive contribution in Committee, I declare my education interests as chair of E-ACT multi-academy trust, of STEM Learning, of Century-Tech and of COBIS. I also own half of Suklaa Ltd, which has a number of education clients.
Amendment 458A in my name is an amendment to Amendment 458 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I am seeking to add an exemption for educational purposes to the exemptions from the policy of smartphone bans in schools proposed by her amendment. I have read Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, Christine Rosen’s Extinction of Experience and Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s excellent Disengaged Teen. I know that our children are losing out on the vital developmental impact of unstructured outdoor play, thanks to the distractions of technology.
We are all losing the multisensory benefits of engaging with real-life experiences because we are too busy on our phones, including in this Chamber, and we are losing empathy as a result. The overconsumption of violent online content is increasing the bystander effect that distinguishes us as communities of people.
Our children are increasingly disengaged from learning, partly due to boring content at school and partly due to diminishing attention spans, thanks to too much time scrolling short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram. I am only too aware that social media is addictive by design and is the main culprit in this complex set of problems. Multiple systemic reviews and surveys confirm that excessive smartphone use is associated with poor sleep quality, increased depression and anxiety and lower life satisfaction among teens, something that this country has a particular problem with and that cannot be solely blamed on phones and social media.
This month, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a large study tracking more than 4,000 adolescents and finding that the smartphone risk to youth mental health is primarily linked to the addictive use of smartphones, social media or video games. Those who reported compulsive use were two or three times more likely to experience suicidal thoughts or self-harm by the age of 14, compared with their peers. The study found that it was the addictive behaviour that was the strong predictor, not the amount of screen time per se.
I therefore have some sympathy with Amendment 177 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and I compliment him on the way he introduced his amendment—echoing, almost word for word at times, the speech he made on the very first group of amendments in this Committee. However, I am unpersuaded that Chief Medical Officers are the right people to lead on this. I am concerned that Ofcom may not be as rigorous as I had understood when we passed the Online Safety Act in enforcing the terms and conditions of platforms relating to their minimum age limits. It may well be that this House should look to another opportunity in the next Session to toughen Ofcom’s responsibilities and duties in this regard, once we have seen a little more of the impact of the Act as Ofcom is implementing it. Amendment 183CA from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, seems quite sensible, and I think Amendment 183CB should be pursued by the DfE, but in close partnership with Ofcom as the regulator.
Amendment 458 clearly has merit. Most schools have adopted such policies to ban or control smartphones following the previous Government’s guidance. At E-ACT we are now piloting the use of signal-blocking pouches that pupils are required to store their phones in during the school day. The early findings are that this has had a really positive impact on the schools concerned in terms of learning and behaviour. I am told by a friend who is a parent of children at Westminster School, over the road, that it is using geofencing technology so that when pupils enter the location, phones’ functionality is changed to turn off social media but to retain their use for emergency broadcasting, due to the security risk related to their proximity to Parliament.
In all these schools, children are benefiting from having a rest from their phones. Teachers benefit from the lessening of distraction and the absence of a back channel of conversation going on through lessons. In some other schools that have done this, there is even a reduction in playground fights because pupils are no longer able to film and share them online.
However, I am also working hard on issues related to media literacy, in part as a member of your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee. The issues relating to social media addiction are now being amplified by the ease of creating highly credible false content using generative AI. The algorithms will not only continue to be addictive but feed content that is misleading, upsetting and disturbing, as any of us can now create images, audio and video, at will, of anything that we can imagine. This needs a more sophisticated response than simply a ban. This needs education, in schools and for adult parents and grandparents. It was clear from the committee’s witnesses that just relying on a knowledge-rich teaching of media literacy will not work. If we just tell young people what is dangerous and harmful, what to look out for, we will fail. Children do not want this to be yet another thing that we tell them off about.