Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

It is perfectly possible for children to log in on different devices. They can log into a social media account and the school can use broader control facilities to ensure that all information is wiped, or all personal details are wiped, at the end of a session. That contains the range of what children are doing in any given session.

To give another analogy, we do not teach children about the risks and harms of drugs with drugs and the paraphernalia for using them in their hands or on their desks. More generally, I am afraid that the history of teaching children about risks and sensible and safe behaviour do not have that much to show that they can be successful.

One of the saddest reports that we published during my time at Ofsted was on child obesity. It showed, sadly, that the schools that were doing the most to promote and encourage healthy eating did not have measurably different obesity rates from the schools that were doing the least. So I think there is reason to fear that simply an educational approach, as has also been advocated here, might not be all that effective.

Finally, I will explain why, although I agree with so much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, I have come to the opposite conclusion. It is important that we think about how to reinforce the authority of head teachers and teachers in this difficult space. With legislation, they would not have to argue the toss with parents to sustain a school policy that will always be disliked by some parents. What we have seen and heard, including expressed so eloquently in this Chamber today, shows that mobile phone use by the young is likely to be at least as harmful to them as smoking, and we have no difficulty with having a ban on smoking in schools. I believe that a ban will reduce arguments and give time back to schools—to heads and teachers—as well as helping children. So I hope that this amendment will be included in the final Bill.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 458 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and my noble friend Lady Kidron. I have spoken on this issue several times in your Lordships’ House, and I will not repeat those speeches here. I am a teacher and have taught for 10 years, but never in a school that allows students outside the sixth form to carry phones to or in school. My noble friend Lady Cass says about mobile phones that the stakeholder view and desire for action in this area is overwhelming. I will talk not about the separate issue of whether smartphones themselves are harmful but rather about whether they should be in school at all for the under-16s.

Students who do not carry phones do not get mugged for phones. In schools that do not allow mobile phones, students talk to each other at break and lunchtime, or play games or go to clubs, rather than staring at their phones. So I am about to be rather brave here: for the first time I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley—at the same time. I do not think that an exception for educational purposes would be workable. You cannot teach these students how to use phones; they know far better than we do. What you can teach them are the dangers. Again, I am going to do a first here and say that it might be rather better on a PowerPoint slide than doing it practically. I really worry about 30 students in a room with their mobile phones—what carnage could happen there? But this is back of a fag packet stuff.

The excuse quite often is that carers need to communicate with people. Actually, carers do not need phones; they need time away to be children. Quite often, the people they are caring for can be very demanding, and sometimes too demanding. Schools are very good at getting messages to students in emergencies. If it is not an emergency, perhaps the child does not need to know right away. Parents do not need to know exactly where their children are at every given moment. If there are emergencies with transport, they can go to a responsible adult and ask for a message to be sent or to borrow a phone. We managed over 100 years in education without mobile phones in schools—why start now?

The Minister said recently that it is up to school heads to make the decision. At a time when, with this Bill, decisions about uniform, pay, admissions and the curriculum are being taken away from school leaders, I think a lot of them would be secretly delighted to have the Government take this decision away from them and take the lead on it, allowing them just to police the phone ban without getting the blame.

Children need time to be children: to learn, to play, to interact and to build and rebuild friendships, face to face. Leaving aside the view of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, which I can see—but schools can provide the technology themselves—none of these is improved with a mobile phone.

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 177, 183CA, 183CB and 458. As my noble friends Lord Nash, Lord Bethell, Lady Penn and many others have so eloquently laid out, the devastating impact of social media on children is not speculative anymore. It is an irrefutable fact. Social media, as many have said, is addictive; it impedes brain development and exposes children to sexual predators and harmful content, including body imaging. It is fuelling a crisis in adolescent mental health. Last year, more than 800,000 children under 18 needed NHS mental health support. This is a national crisis.