Contribution
My hon. Friend is completely correct, and I was going to come on to that very point.
The Children’s Commissioner has said,
“I honestly think that we will look back in 20 years’ time and be absolutely horrified by what we allowed our children to be exposed to”,
and she is right. the very first thing Government could do is implement a proper ban on phones in our schools. Parentkind recently said to me, “Effectively, we are allowing our kids to be fed digital drugs and we are even allowing the dealers into the schools.” That has to change.
The last Government issued guidance; it was a good start, but it is not enough and is not working. While 90% of schools say they have some sort of policy or some sort of ban, a survey by Policy Exchange last year found that only one in 10 secondary schools has a full start-to-finish ban, the policy that works best. Lots of schools are still trying policies where kids have their phones on them but are not supposed to have them out. The effect is that the kids are distracted, the teachers have to stop lessons to tell them to put them away, and we get all of the issues about bullying and social media during break times and more.
As the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), a Labour Member, pointed out the other day, guidance introduced by the previous Government is not working. We still have students using phones during break time and during lessons and this causes significant problems. I have had many teachers say to me, “This takes up so much time. It’s a huge distraction. It interferes with learning.” That is right and we are now in the strange situation where Labour MPs and the Conservative party agree that the guidance has turned out not to be enough, but the Labour Front Bench is insisting that it is; we are through the looking glass.
Why do we need a full ban, not just guidance? Our general approach is of course to give autonomy to schools but, first, the guidance is not working. The Department for Education’s own national behaviour survey published in April last year found that 35% of secondary school teachers reported mobile phones being used during lessons without permission, and the problem was more pronounced for older children: 46% of pupils in years 10 to 11 reported mobile phones being used when they should not have been during most or all lessons, and last month a survey by Parentkind found that nearly half of secondary school children say they see phones being used in class where they should not be every single day. So the idea that the guidance has done the trick and there is no longer a problem to solve is contradicted by the Department’s and the Government’s own data.
Secondly, we need to support schools and have their back. I know from speaking to teachers and school leaders that the pressures from a minority of parents to allow phones can be very severe. A minority of parents can be unreasonably determined that they must be able to contact their child directly at any minute of the day, but unfortunately that comes at a cost to everyone else’s education. As my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson) pointed out, a national ban would make things much simpler. We, the politicians, should take the flack and take the heat off schools.
Thirdly, a full and full-on ban is needed as the start of a wider resetting of social norms about children and smartphones and social media. We need a proper ban so that kids’ smartphones are put away for a whole day, including breaks. Breaks should be about physical activity, not just scrolling and scrolling. Schools should be the beachhead and the first place where we re-create the smartphone-free childhood that most of us got to enjoy—seven hours in which we de-normalise being on the phone all the time for young people.
A ban on smartphones in schools will, of course, not solve all the problems overnight, but it is a vital first step. When I was a Health Minister, I wanted us to develop an equivalent of the five bits of fruit and veg a day campaign, or public health campaigns such as “Don’t Die of Ignorance” or “Clunk Click Every Trip”, which older Members might remember. We need to do some big things to reset the culture. The heavy exposure of our kids to addictive-by-design products from the tech industry is the smoking of our generation.