Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Shephard of Northwold

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight. He makes a very compelling case for better media literacy. He and other noble Lords will recall that we did push very hard for that during the Online Safety Act’s rather lengthy passage, but without as much success as we would have hoped. Every week that we wait before we implement more effective media literacy is a week lost, and probably part of a generation lost as well.

I was very happy to put my name to Amendments 183CA and 183CB in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn. As noble Lords have heard, this is a very live subject. Countries and societies all over the world are wrestling with the effects of the technology that is all-pervading—to a greater extent than most of us would wish. When the noble Lord was talking about geolocation at Westminster School, I thought for a fleeting moment, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had geolocation in the Palace of Westminster?”. Once one entered here, one could no longer have access to news websites telling us things that are distracting and probably not very helpful for what we are trying to do. I exclude important things such as messages from your club about the lunchtime and the availability of the wine list.

The Online Safety Act took a very long time to happen. As we have learned since its enactment, making it flesh and making its intent have teeth is a very lengthy and protracted process—far longer than we had hoped and envisaged. We may still be two or three years away from knowing whether some of the key protections for children are working.

We do not have the luxury of being able to take this slowly. We need speed and we need clarity. When the noble Lord was talking about the distractions of the screen for young children, I thought of how often I, like others, pass parents or carers in the street pushing a pram; the child may well be in distress or asking for something, but whoever is pushing the pram is so deeply into their telephone or so deeply engaged in a conversation with their earphones in that they cannot even hear the child. They cannot even see it, if it is facing forward. That, in some ways, is a very good summary of the dilemma we have got ourselves into.

The Education Select Committee of another place produced a sensible report, just over a year ago in May 2024, called—perhaps the name of the Bill is a tribute to the name of the report—Screen Time: Impacts on Education and Wellbeing. As it happens, almost exactly a month ago, His Majesty’s Government—and, I assume, the Department for Education—issued their response. It is quite lengthy and fairly comprehensive. I would be surprised if, when the Minister responds to this group, she does not talk about many elements of the department’s response to the Select Committee’s report.

The import of the Government’s detailed response and its underlying theme is that this is very complicated and there are lots of different moving parts: “We are still not really on top of it. We are engaged and listening, but not ready to do anything yet”. One message that we all sense is that we do not have time on our side. Society, parents, teachers, those who look after young people, educators and the companies responsible for education technology want clarity and a sense of direction. They want to know that the Government are engaged—we will never be on top of this—looking at this carefully, and willing and able to act, quite quickly if required.

Equally, and importantly, if the Government act but the consequences are not quite as intended, they should have the courage to say, “We did not get that right. We need to change it and tweak it in the light of new evidence”. This is such a dynamic situation that we need a dynamic approach to deal with it.

Lastly, I think we need to look carefully at the psychology of this. For nearly 40 years, I have been involved with a charity that is now part of Coram, of which I am a governor, called Coram Life Education. It is the largest provider of health education in primary schools in the United Kingdom; we teach about half a million children a year. The essence of the way we teach is completely contradictory to schools’ normal pedagogic approaches: we do not tell the children what to do; we listen. We give the children information without saying whether it is good or bad; then we ask the children to give their views on the information they been given and what conclusions they have come to—whether it is good or less good for them. In this way, the children feel they have some control over what they are asked to do.

The least effective thing would be going for any sort of blanket ban. Children, as we all know, are probably far better versed in technology than we are. The more we try to ban it, the more clever ways will be found to get around it. It simply would not work. The way to get this to work is to get the children involved and engaged, because they will come to their own conclusions. They are not stupid. The more intelligent ones know exactly what social media and these addictive applications are doing to them. We should listen and learn from them the ways to respond to this, rather than thinking that we know best. We have allowed this situation to develop in plain sight over the last 15 to 20 years, and we have been very ineffective in dealing with it. Perhaps listening to the generations who are most directly involved and on whom this is having the greatest effect would be a smart way to look at it.

Finally, my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lady Cass are unable to be with us today but, as the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, will know, they have convened a very impressive group of genuine experts in this field. There is a growing, deeply worrying and compelling body of evidence that the effects of screen time on children before the age of six will have a lifelong impact on their cognitive skills, behaviour—everything about them. The longer we take to acknowledge what is going on and to do something about it, the more we will regret it.

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently and persuasively described by my noble friends Lord Nash and Lady Penn. I was also extremely struck by the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on the need for education. It is about education, which is one of the safeguards on which we can rely. I was also struck by the points made by noble Lord, Lord Russell, which in some ways echoed but added to those made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight.

In April this year, the Times published the wide-ranging and comprehensive findings of its crime and justice commission. Its conclusions on the effects of social media on children aged under 16 were damning. They ranged from radicalisation, criminalisation and antisocial attitudes, right through to mental health problems and extremist views. The commission recommended that children under 16 be banned from accessing social media. It added that two-thirds of the population support that view, and that a higher number of the 16 to 24 year-old group do so. That is significant, because that is the group that has experienced the pressures.

As was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, Australia has recently imposed such a ban, and many other countries are preparing to do so. A total ban is self-evidently beyond the scope of the Bill, but a ban on the use of smartphones in schools is within its scope, given its focus on the safeguarding of children.

The vast majority of our schools will have policies in place to deal with the use of smartphones. There can be problems in implementing them, not least because the technology is constantly evolving and policies have to adapt to keep up. Some parents have understandable anxieties, feeling the need to be in contact with their children at all times, and they might well oppose a complete ban. There are also anxieties about age limits and other issues. The fact is that the decision is left to the school, and as a result there is a huge range of policies across the school spectrum.

Many will maintain that the decision should be left to the school, in accordance with its circumstances. I have sympathy with that view, but I have a couple of points to make; indeed, I have a question for the Minister when she winds up. I hope she can tell us the view of heads of schools on an overall ban, perhaps by year group, on smartphones in school. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, might also be able to help us with this. My guess is that the majority of school heads and teachers would welcome at least knowing where they stood on this issue and having one less thing to justify or argue about to parents and colleagues. It would certainly be time-saving in developing the school’s own policy and they themselves having to police it, whatever it might be.

Restrictions on smartphone use, especially in the classroom, would cut out phone-related bullying in school, which frequently transfers to the playground and sometimes into the community. It would also reduce child-on-child abuse—an important safeguarding issue. Of course, this Bill is also about safeguarding. More positively, and I am sure former teachers in the Chamber will agree, schools that have introduced a reduction in access to social media through smartphones have reported better communication and participation skills in their pupils.