{"id":245598,"date":"2026-04-30T23:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T22:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoolsweek.co.uk\/?p=245598"},"modified":"2026-04-30T22:31:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T21:31:26","slug":"phone-bans-and-social-media-restrictions-cant-come-soon-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoolsweek.co.uk\/phone-bans-and-social-media-restrictions-cant-come-soon-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Phone bans and social media restrictions can’t come soon enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps I should no longer be surprised – it happens so often.<\/p>\n

Yet I’m still always shocked when teachers tell me about the impact social media is having on the children in their care.<\/p>\n

The other day, for example, I was running a focus group with classroom staff that I\u2019d planned to centre on the usual big education issues such as workload, salary, funding etc.<\/p>\n

My jaw hit the desk when these teachers, unprompted, started discussing the rise of misogyny in their schools and how some teenage boys were now trying to avoid being educated by their female colleagues.<\/p>\n

To be clear, this was a focus group made up of teachers who didn\u2019t know each other, and yet they had this experience in common.<\/p>\n

11-year-olds pretending to be 18<\/h2>\n

A couple of months earlier I ran a group for the Commission for Countering Online Conspiracy in Schools<\/a>. This time it was with primary staff. But the playbook was the same. One question and they were off.<\/p>\n

Some 75 eye-watering minutes later I was left exhausted trying to work out quite how we\u2019d got ourselves into a situation in which it is normal for nine-year-olds to be seeing soft porn, conspiracy theories and hate crimes in their day-to-day lives.<\/p>\n

One of the teachers in that group explained what was happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cChildren are signing up and [saying they are] the age of 13. They are lying about their date of birth\u2026 [and so the platform thinks] they are 18.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they get exposed to a lot of information and the Andrew Tate stuff gets bombarded on them. These people who are allegedly 18 might only be 11 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘It’s getting earlier and earlier’<\/h2>\n

Another primary teacher set out the consequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn social media, we are finding that that\u2019s coming into our schools, and it\u2019s getting earlier and earlier \u2026. so that does bring problems into school. It used to be just year 6, year 5, year 4 and even now some of the younger years have access to it [social media].\u201d<\/p>\n

All of which leads me on to what the hell we can do about it.<\/p>\n

It is worth saying at the outset that, of course, a full, unalloyed ban on phones in schools is not going to stop young people accessing the very worst of social media when they immediately step outside the school gates.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless it is essential that ministers are full-throated in the implementation of the legislation they set out last week.<\/p>\n

Why? Because a successful ban will give each and every young person a break. A few hours out of every day in which they literally cannot get to the beeping catnip in their bags. In which they can learn free from distraction and socialise free of a buzzing screen.<\/p>\n

‘We’re all too addicted’<\/h2>\n

I have a strong feeling students will thanks us for it. Another focus group I ran in the autumn for the Commission<\/a>, this time with a group of deprived teenagers in the northeast, included one of the most poignant moments of my career.<\/p>\n

We were talking about social media and one articulate year 10 turned to me and said: \u201cMy mam has told me about her childhood without phones and it sounds mint.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I asked the teenagers to raise their hands if they\u2019d rather not have mobiles at all and slowly, one by one, they did so. \u201cBut,\u201d the same student added, speaking for her friends, \u201cit would never work \u2013 we\u2019re all too addicted\u201d.<\/p>\n

Something we must do<\/h2>\n

It is not yet clear if the government will fully follow Australia\u2019s example and ban all social media for under 16s (though it should) and how successful such a move would be.<\/p>\n

Ministers have also done well to recognise that teachers play an important role in battling the scourge of online mis and disinformation by adopting the curriculum review’s recommendation that education in this space be part of the citizenship teaching in primaries.<\/p>\n

But we also know from experience that schools can successfully completely remove phones from the lives of children for six and a half hours a day.<\/p>\n

This is something we can do. It is something we must do. It is something our children will be grateful for in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The things I hear from teachers are shocking, and highlight the need for swift action<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":245603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"post-theme":[],"class_list":["post-245598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t