Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, so I declare my interest as chair of and adviser to the Birmingham Education Partnership.

It is 25 years ago, when the Minister and I were in the Department for Education, that we were discussing the rollout of technology in early years. It just was not part of school life; it was not an implement that was used. The thing we were most worried about then, which underpinned every speech I made, was that it should be an innovation that became available to all and was not limited by social class, the family you are born into or how much money you had in your pocket. I never thought that, a quarter of a century later, the debate would be about the damage that that area of technology development has brought to schools, but we must remember that that does not take away from the vision, the hope and the aspiration we saw in this technology a quarter of a century ago.

However, we are clearly not in a place where we want to be. I cannot say anything to counter the evidence that the noble Lord, Lord Nash—indeed, everybody who has spoken—gave about the impact of social media on young minds. It is just terrible. As an adult, I feel responsibility that it has happened and that we moved too slowly to do anything about it. If some of us come to the conclusion that we do not want to ban smartphones in schools, it should not be a political dividing line; we are actually all on the same side. We have at least got to that point, but there is a genuine debate to be had about how we take it forward to protect our children so that they have the advantages that technology can bring while saving them from the risks and the bad things that it can do.

I think that there is a difference between smartphones and social media that has not been clear in this debate, and I am not sure about the definition of smartphones at the end of the proposed new clause. It says that a smartphone is something

“whose main purpose is not the support of learning or study”;

I do not know what that means. A smartphone enables learning and study and good things in life, and it allows social media to reach people that it should not be reaching. The definition is quite difficult to follow.

My main problem is that the smartphone is a bit like the atom bomb; you cannot uninvent it. It is entrenched in our society. There are things that as adults we cannot now do unless we have a smartphone, and every single week, month and year, government and everybody else push us as adults to use smartphones. That is what AI is about. All the advantages that are going to come through AI are connected to smartphones, so whether we like it or not, we have gone too far down the road. For adults, smartphones are here to stay. I do not see how abolishing them in schools allows teachers and educationists in wider civic society to train and help young people come to terms with the adult world in which they are going to live. If smartphones are banned in schools, if they cannot be used, how can we expect young people to be competent and confident adult users of smartphones and to cope with social media? It would be like saying, “We’re not going to teach you to swim, but by the time you get to an adult, we’re going to let you live by the side of a lake”. It is just nonsense. We have got to help children to come to terms with smartphones, and that is why I thought that the speech made by my noble friend Lord Knight was powerful.

I describe myself as being on a bit of a journey. I am a bit of a floating voter on smartphones in schools, but when I am honest with myself, I know that the reason that I nearly come down on the side of banning them in schools is that I am panicking that we are not doing anything else. I almost reach out for anything—at least we could ban them in schools; at least we could protect children between 9 am and 4 pm; at least we could protect them between five and 18. To be honest, that is not enough. If there is this problem, and we all seem to have signed up to the idea that it is a problem, it needs more from us as policymakers than to, yet again, say it is the responsibility of schools. Reducing teenage pregnancy was the responsibility of schools. Healthy eating was the responsibility of schools. Being better citizens was the responsibility of schools. Every time we have a problem that goes through society and we are not quite sure how to deal with it, we put it on the curriculum—it is the responsibility of schools.

I do not say that schools have not got a responsibility—they hold the major responsibility because they are going to be teaching media literacy—but they are not the only ones who have it. If we are serious, adults, parents, government and civic society need to get together with schools and educators to try to solve this problem. It is not sensible to say that all we can do in this Bill is go for schools. That would make a bad policy. When it does not work, we cannot say, “Yes, that’s all we could do in that Bill”. That would be poor policymaking. I hesitate to say that government has got to look at it in the round and do something more than it has, because that is just time, and we have known about this problem for 10 years at least and we have not moved fast enough. I end up probably coming down on the side of my noble friend Lord Knight and saying that there are things that need to be done in schools that mean we ought to keep smartphones in schools.

I have some specific questions on that. The proposed new clause in Amendment 458 would ban smartphones, except in two or three circumstances. My noble friend Lord Knight then puts down an amendment, which is great, excepting another circumstance. We know what is going to happen: people will be putting forward amendments as to why, in a particular case, smartphones should not be banned in schools, and eventually it will all be a muddle and we will have to start again. In truth, you cannot ban smartphones in schools. There will always be reasons why you will need to use them, so you end up coming down on the side of saying that we have got to use them well and we have got to support young people.

My last point is, how do you enforce it? It is in the law. If the governing body—that is the noble Lord, Lord Nash, to tell the truth—permits smartphones in schools, who enforces it? Do you get the police in? Do you get parents to report it? Do you get kids to report that they have been allowed to have a smartphone in school? At the moment, it is heads who choose, along with their governing body and staff and the wider school community, not to have smartphones in schools. They own that. It is their law. They have gone through the preparation, talked it through and arrived at a decision, and that makes sense. I may just not be seeing the rationale, but I worry that enforcement, when it is in primary legislation, will be not a great thing for schools. I am coming down on the side of not banning them, but my great worry is that it is just another couple of months passed where the real dangers that were outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and others have not been addressed in this House or elsewhere.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I think she spoke for many of us on the challenge of edtech: how our hopes that this would be a transformational technology have now changed emphatically, and how we now find ourselves in a place we really did not intend to be.

I would like to say a word about Amendment 183CA, from my noble friend Lady Penn, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass. My noble friend Lady Shephard put it well: our children do need respite, and a school is a wonderful place to be spared that kind of respite. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, spoke well about the harsh impact on education.

However, it is Amendment 177 that I primarily want to address. For that reason, I see Amendment 183CA as a stepping stone to getting rid of mobile phones from the lives of under-16s altogether at some stage; that is what I will address my comments to. I do this as a former Health Minister and I declare my interest as a trustee of the Royal Society for Public Health.

The neurobiological evidence of the harms of social media on children is not ambiguous any more. It is irrefutable, as it is, for instance, for tobacco. We can see the causes and the correlations. One three-year longitudinal study published two years ago found that adolescents who habitually checked social media showed “distinct neurodevelopmental trajectories” in brain regions governing social reward and punishment, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In other words, social media exploits the dopamine pathways involved in addiction, creating cycles that exploit the neurochemical pathways that determine their actions.

I personally struggle with addiction. I find it extremely tough. Our children’s plastic brains are just not in a shape to be able to survive that struggle. This challenge is not a teenage rebellion or some kind of moral panic. It is a systematic neurological manipulation by megacompanies that know exactly what they are doing.

Social media is a major driver of the mental health crisis that this country faces, and the consequences are contributing to the overwhelming of our NHS. In 2024-25, NHS mental health services supported 800,012 under-18s, an increase of nearly 300,000 since the NHS long-term plan first started. I will not go into the figures in detail, but I assure the Chamber that this is not a question of “snowflakery” or wokery; it is a genuine public health emergency, and the problem is not going away.

I say this with some delicacy. I am one of the few Peers in this House who has children of this age. Mine are 18, 15, 13 and 10. In answer to my noble friend Lady Shephard, they are all at different schools, which is a logistical problem for me. None of the schools is winning this battle. In fact, I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that, each year, I have seen this problem get worse. You can feel the algorithms getting more effective and having more of a grip on your children’s lives.

Each year, children spend more hours on the phone. The communal social pressure each year is more intense. Mental health, and self-harming among friends in schools, gets worse. There is more and more disgusting pornographic filth available to young children. Statistically, there are more predators, activated by the addictive escalator of increasingly violent porn, seeking meet-ups with my children. There are more frustrated parents each year watching their children’s attention and well-being deteriorate. The kids simply are not mature enough to handle these toxic tools and this content—and this is even before AI gets to work on their brains with superpowered social algorithms that screw with their heads. It is going to get worse and worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, has suggested is indeed happening: private schools, grammar schools and schools in wealthy areas are doubling down on their success by pursuing smartphone bans. Schools in areas of deprivation, where family and community ties are the weakest, are being left behind.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I had not planned to speak to this group of amendments, having tabled an amendment that we will debate in the following group. But as I have interests in the founding of Parent Gym and in the early years in particular—about which I hope to speak later—it would be remiss of me not to add a few comments, given some of the very esteemed contributions made in this debate.

I support all the amendments in the group with the exception of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for the reasons that have been outlined. My noble friend Lord Bethell touched on an important point in his intervention: we have a real issue around the different types of parenting and families, from those who are aware of the dangers to their children to those who deploy smartphones as substitute childcare. I fear that all the evidence—as very eloquently put by my noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lord Nash, who cited at length the reports and data around all this—show us that there are families who do not have the resource or means to engage in this daily battle.

I declare another interest: I am on that front line daily with my 14 year-old daughter; I hoped that she might have been here this afternoon, but she has conveniently not made it. It is a daily battle. What children will tell their godparents, when you are not around to hear it, is that they actually agree that you are right and that they wish they did not have their phone. They wish that phones did not exist and that they were not part of their life; they want them because their peers have them.

The report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, published last week, has very notable commentary about the safety of some of the girls who were groomed by gangs. She talks with real concern—it is in an early section, for those who have not read the entire thing, as I have—about the fact that online activity means that we no longer know what is going on for children. We literally do not know who is in their bedroom at night. Who are they engaging with? Who can forget the case of Molly Russell—the terrible case that an Instagram post led to? There is one place where we can surely assume our child should be safe: at school. It is not an unreasonable request that we, as a society, look seriously at this to care for the health and safety of our children.

I am very aware of the comment by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but it is the opposite to asking schools to police the use of phones. I completely empathise with the concern about asking schools to do more, but this is removing from them the need to police phones. It gets them off the premises, or at least locked up within the premises, so that bullying cannot happen online, grooming cannot be going on, boys who are being recruited into county lines cannot be harassed or intimidated while they are meant to be learning at school, and on it goes. Your Lordships have heard plenty from others on the various points.

I end on another note. Let us look at what the people who invented these things are doing. We all agree; no one has disagreed with the fact that they are addictive—we all feel it every day. What do the people who invented them to be addictive and who use behavioural science and neuroscience to do that, do with their children? They have screen-free schools—completely screen-free, incidentally: no tablets or laptops—and screen-free homes. What is China doing? It is hoovering up our children’s data to understand everything about our society and drive their behaviours in the most destructive way possible. If you ask AI, “If I were China, what would I do to destroy the West?”, the answer is exactly what it is doing: to destroy and undermine the mental health of whole generations of people. What does China do with its children? It gives them one hour a day, and it drives them to watch science and maths videos. I support these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I do note that I was coming to the end of my comments at 18 minutes—just so the Whips know I was sticking to the rules. The noble Lord tempts me to say that that was exactly the point I made at the beginning: there has been conflation in this debate of the use of mobile phones in schools, the impact of screen time across children’s lives—I can quite understand people’s concerns about that—and, as I have said, the need for us, at a very early stage in children’s lives, to be clear with them about the appropriate use of screens, which is probably practically none, and clear in the information that we provide to parents. The Government are taking action on all those areas, alongside gathering appropriate evidence. On that basis, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The Minister is quite right to point out that the Online Safety Act did not get much of a mention: maybe it is some kind of PTSD, because some of us did hard yards during that difficult passage. One of the most difficult things was the debate on age verification for porn, which started with all the same arguments we have just heard: it is not technically possible; maybe children can learn by watching pornography; the moral rules around telling children what to do are not crystal clear; the science of whether porn is good for children is not cast in stone, and does not have the longitudinal studies that we need to make decisions on it. All that was heard.

At the end of next month, Ofcom will finally bring in a deadline so that all websites that carry a risk of children seeing porn will have to put in age-verification software. Who in this Chamber now genuinely thinks that was a bad decision? Yet it was fought tooth and nail from that Bench by the previous Government, who had to be dragged to that decision by rebellion in the Commons and a four corners of the Chamber effort here.

The Minister faces a similar storm brewing on social media use by under-16s. Could she, with her multidimensional approach to this problem, help us understand the metrics she will use to judge whether it is right to revisit this issue? How many hours a day do children have to spend on social media? How many predators have to get through? How many grooming gangs have to recruit children in order to abuse them? What metrics will she apply to reviewing this decision?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Well, the noble Lord added considerably to his speech there. I did not use some of the arguments that he suggested were used in this Chamber about porn. I was not in this House so I do not know what arguments and debates went on. Nor did I suggest that there are not considerable issues around young people’s use of social media and the amount of their screen time. The noble Lord is very clear that he believes there should be a complete ban on social media for young people aged under 16. I do not know whether that carries a majority in this House, to be honest. Given that, it is important to demonstrate, as I attempted to do, the action that the Government are already taking to address all those issues, whether it is screen time, the impact of social media on young people, or mobile phones in schools. The Government are taking action on all of them, without necessarily thinking that there is one single silver bullet of a ban that can solve all those problems.