Meeting of the Parliament 25 March 2026 [Draft]
I absolutely agree, and the member will hear later in my speech that the Scottish Conservatives will introduce legislation to address that point in the next session of Parliament.
Smartphones and excessive social media use pose many dangers to children’s physical and mental health, and they create safeguarding issues. I will now refer to some eye-opening statistics. The average teenager today spends five and a half hours a day on their smartphone. If they continue at that pace, that will amount to 25 years of their lifetime. Teens are twice as likely to have anxiety and three times as likely to have depression as other groups, with one in five 16 to 18-year-olds saying that social media makes them feel that life is not worth living. Two out of three 11 to 17-year-olds find it difficult to put their phones down. Pre-teens lose the equivalent of a night’s sleep per week due to their use of social media. At the same time, 73 per cent of teens take their phones to bed with them.
Those statistics are shocking. At the same time, we must not forget that excessive smartphone and social media use exposes children to inappropriate content such as violence, pornography and the generation of deepfakes involving, for example, girls’ faces being put on naked bodies. Predators are not hanging around our playgrounds any more, because it is now much easier to find vulnerable children online.
We all know that, in schools, children are often distracted by their phones, which undermines their ability to focus in the classroom. Mobile devices disrupt learning and are sometimes used to record pupils, teachers and staff without their consent. We have heard in the chamber numerous examples of girls being filmed in unisex school toilets by boys. There has also been a sharp rise in road accidents and children being mugged after school as they have been walking around staring at their smartphones, completely unaware of their surroundings.
The Conservatives were the first party in Britain to support a ban on social media use for under-16s and have long backed a full ban on mobile phones in schools in Scotland. In the next session of Parliament, we will introduce a mobile phone ban bill, to ensure that pupils can focus on learning and to end the postcode lottery of differing school policies.
Current guidance that has been produced by the Scottish Government allows individual headteachers to limit the use of mobile phones as they see fit. That risks creating a postcode lottery whereby phones are banned in some schools but not in others. Luckily, some schools have implemented such bans, and the Scottish Conservatives support their efforts, as case studies have shown that such bans work. Portobello and Queensferry high schools, in Edinburgh, are taking part in a two-year trial that involves pupils locking their phones in pouches during the school day, with consultation responses showing that 97 per cent of staff and 94 per cent of parents favour limiting phone access.
North London now has more than 400 smartphone-free schools, while Northern Ireland has introduced guidance to ban or heavily restrict phone use throughout the day. Other countries, too, have or are considering a ban on the use of mobile phones in schools. Those include France, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Georgia, Malta and many others. Let us not make Scotland the last place to implement such a ban. We must be proactive in keeping our children safe while improving the quality of the education that they receive.
There will be many reasons for parents saying that their children still need mobile phones—which can easily be addressed—such as the need to contact their children during the school day or the fear that their children might feel excluded from their peers. However, on balance, mobile phones do more harm than good, and it is worth sharing good practice from schools that have moved forward with a ban.
The evidence is clear: excessive smartphone and social media use harms children’s wellbeing, safety and ability to learn. As MSPs, we all have a duty to protect young people. A ban on mobile phones in schools in Scotland is the right way forward.
I look forward to hearing the cabinet secretary’s remarks in her closing speech. I hope that she can put her back and some teeth into the issue, to give us a bit more than just the passing of guidance to schools—to make sure that we have legislation. That is what the Scottish Conservatives will bring back in the next session of Parliament, to make sure that we ban smartphones in all Scottish schools.