Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

Will the Minister give way? We had a debate a few months ago on this very subject and I visited the Fulham Boys School, which is a large all-male school with about 1,200 students, to speak at some length to the headmaster. That school has had a ban on phones for about 10 years. The issue is not about having a ban in school but, as the headmaster said very clearly, what happens outside the school. It does not matter what policies you have in place; they will not solve what young people are doing outside of school time. He said the biggest problem he has had in trying to tackle this issue has not been with the pupils themselves but the parents, some of whom are very challenging and regard it as an infringement of civil liberties that anybody should tell them what their children should or should not do. The real problem is what happens outside the school. The school can have as many policies as it likes, but until and unless we find a way of influencing what happens outside the school—which, as I said, means getting to the young people, because they know themselves some of the harm being done, and perhaps through them getting to the parents to make them realise how their children feel—we will not start to tackle the psychology behind some of the problems we are confronted with.