Meeting of the Parliament 25 March 2026 [Draft]
I thank my colleague Pam Gosal not only for bringing this important debate to the chamber, but for telling me what I need to speak about for the next four minutes.
We are all very aware of the significant impact on health that the use of social media and smartphones can have, especially on our youngsters’ brain development. One thing that I want to talk about, which has not been spoken about yet, is how we engage with youths to make them part of the decision making. Youth organisations consistently say that decision makers must include young people in conversations about safe social media use and support them to participate meaningfully in the digital world and with new emerging technologies.
I was speaking with a girl guide leader—let us call her Kaley from my office—who told me that leaders and girls in her unit create rules together, including rules on mobile phones. In her unit, the girls unanimously voted to ban phones during the unit meetings, and she told me that that has been replicated across the other units that she knows.
We are very good at banning things and taking things away from youths without involving them in those decisions. I also think that what we are talking about doing in this debate is not too far removed from what the youth of today want themselves. It is interesting that the girls attitudes survey carried out by Girlguiding UK in 2025 found that girls are restricting their online activity in order to protect themselves, with more than a third of respondents reporting that they avoid using certain apps and platforms in order to protect themselves. More than two fifths of the young people surveyed think that more needs to be done to ensure that they are safe online. Girls are disproportionately affected, with over a third of 11 to 21-year-old girls saying that
“they often feel depressed after spending time on social media.”
To put the issue in context, we have to understand that those who were born in the early 2000s will never have known a life without social media. Those who were born from the 2010s onwards will never have known a life without smartphones. Speaking as somebody who got his first mobile phone—a brick of a thing—at the age of 32, I find that quite astonishing.
It is important that pupils have the opportunity to put their phones down in school, but also important is what happens outside school. We must remember that children have access to smartphones and social media when the school day is over. What are we doing to educate them on their safe usage, to model positive behaviour and to discourage misogyny online?
I talked about what I learned from a girl guides leader, which was about activities that they have decided they will put their phones down for. It would not be a speech by me, Deputy Presiding Officer, if I did not slide sport into it. I have never known of, nor ever seen, somebody dribbling a basketball down a basketball court while scrolling through social media. I have never seen anybody play piano while scrolling through social media. It is not just about what we want to limit in terms of mobile phone usage, but about what we are offering as an alternative to encourage young people into other activities.
It is also not necessarily just our children we need to persuade; we also need to persuade parents that it is a good idea. It used to be that, when parents wanted to contact their children at school, they phoned the office. If children wanted to contact their parents, they, too, did so through the office. We need to consider all of that in the round.
It is not like me to agree with Willie Rennie on much, but on this issue I do. If we are going to restrict or ban mobile phones in schools, which I fully support, we must ensure that other things are available to our children that take their attention away from their phones.