Laura CressTechnology reporter
Getty Images
The authorities has launched a session on banning social media for under 16s in the UK as part of a sequence of measures which it says are supposed to “protect young people’s wellbeing.”
The package deal may also see England’s schooling inspectorate, Ofsted, given the ability to verify insurance policies on cellphone use when it goes into faculties, with ministers saying they anticipate faculties to be “phone-free by default” in consequence.
The world’s first social media ban for younger folks took impact in Australia in December 2025, prompting different nations, together with the UK, to contemplate following go well with.
Some specialists and kids’s charities have cautioned in opposition to the concept – but it surely has robust backing elsewhere.
On Sunday, greater than 60 Labour MPs wrote to the prime minister saying the backed a ban with the mom of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey additionally calling on the federal government to behave.
“Some argue that vulnerable children need access to social media to find their community,” Brianna’s mom Esther Ghey wrote in a letter seen by the BBC.
“As the parent of an extremely vulnerable and trans child, I strongly disagree.
“In Brianna’s case, social media restricted her potential to have interaction in real-world social interactions. She had actual mates, however she selected to stay on-line as a substitute.”
The former school standards minister Catherine McKinnell, who is one of the MPs who signed the open letter to Sir Keir Starmer, told BBC News parents currently “felt unprepared to take care of the tempo at which social media has modified.”
Speaking on Breakfast, on BBC 5Live, she added that while children should still be able to be “related in an internet world”, she didn’t believe that meant “being bombarded with info despatched to you by algorithms devised to create cash by tech corporations.”
Parents and young people
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in a statement to the Commons on Tuesday, “I can inform the House we are going to deliver ahead a swift three-month session on additional measures to maintain kids protected on-line.”
According to The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, the consultation will “search views from dad and mom, younger folks and civil society” to determine the effectiveness of a ban.
It would also look at whether more robust age checks could be implemented by social media firms, which could be forced to remove or limit features “which drive compulsive use of social media”.
And Ofsted will give tougher guidance to schools to reduce phone use – including telling staff not to use their devices for personal reasons in front of pupils.
On Monday Kendall said the laws in the Online Safety Act were “by no means meant to be the top level” and said she understood “dad and mom nonetheless have severe considerations”.
“We are decided to make sure know-how enriches kids’s lives, not harms them – and to offer each little one the childhood they deserve,” she said.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has already said her party would introduce a social media ban for under-16s if it was in power.
She said the consultation was “extra dither and delay” from Labour.
“The prime minister is making an attempt to repeat an announcement that the Conservatives made every week in the past, and nonetheless not getting it proper,” she said.
Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Munira Wilson said there was “no time to waste in defending our kids from social media giants” and “this session dangers kicking the can down the highway but once more”.
National Education Union (NEU) general secretary Daniel Kebede called the move a “welcome shift”.
“Every day, dad and mom and lecturers see how social media shapes kids’s identities and a spotlight lengthy earlier than they sit their GCSEs, pulling them into isolating, limitless loops of content material,” he mentioned.
Getty Images
The Association of School and College Leaders also welcomed the consultation on social media, but said the government had been “sluggish” in responding to the online risks posed to children.
The union’s general secretary Pepe Di’Iasio said there was “clearly a a lot wider drawback of youngsters and younger folks spending far an excessive amount of time on screens and being uncovered to inappropriate content material”.
And Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, also welcomed the plans to consult on a potential social media ban.
But he said the suggestion that Ofsted should “police” phones in schools was “deeply unhelpful and misguided”.
“School leaders want assist from authorities, not the specter of heavy-handed inspection,” he added.
‘Not strong evidence’
It comes as the government faces additional pressure from the House of Lords, which is expected to vote on a proposed ban on Wednesday.
The amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has backing from several prominent figures such as former children’s TV presenter Baroness Benjamin and former education minister Lord Nash.
There is also a separate amendment calling for the introduction of film-style age ratings which could limit the social media apps children can access.
Professor Amy Orben, who leads the Digital Mental Health programme at the University of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, told the BBC there was “broad settlement” more needed to be done to keep children safe online.
However, she said there was still “not robust proof” that age-based social media bans were effective.
Dr Holly Bear from Oxford University, whose work focuses on developing, evaluating, and implementing mental health interventions for young people, agreed the evidence for the effects of a social media ban was “nonetheless unfolding”.
“A balanced strategy is likely to be making an attempt to scale back algorithm-driven publicity to dangerous content material, enhancing safeguards, supporting digital literacy and thoroughly evaluating any main coverage interventions,” she said.
The NSPCC, Childnet, and suicide prevention charity the Molly Rose Foundation were among 42 individuals and bodies to argue a ban would be the “unsuitable answer” on Saturday.
“It would create a false sense of security that might see kids – but in addition the threats to them – migrate to different areas on-line,” the organisations wrote.
“Though well-intentioned, blanket bans on social media would fail to ship the development in kids’s security and wellbeing that they so urgently want.”
