Is a ban on phones in schools enough to protect our kids?

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. Hello, I'm Kamali Melbourne and this is the Sky News Daily. There's a new call to ban kids from using phones in schools, but should it go further?

0:39Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

1:15Many people can't be without them. But what damage are they doing? Esther Jai says she lost her daughter twice. First to her phone, then to her killers. Brianna was 16 and she was stabbed to death by two 15-year-olds after being lured into a park in Warrington. In the lead-up to the attack, the killers had spent time on the dark web. But at the same time, Brianna was struggling with a phone addiction. Since her daughter's death in 2023, Esther has campaigned tirelessly for social media reform, calling for a ban on under-16s from accessing social media and its damaging content. Now she's writing to the government to make it compulsory for children to leave their phones locked away during lesson time, claiming the time her daughter spent on her mobile impacted her learning and made her issues in the classroom all the worse.

2:10Well, shortly we'll hear from a mum and GP who has campaigned for a total ban on smartphones for younger people. But first, our North of England correspondent Shinge Marike, who's interviewed Esther Jai about her campaign. Esther's calling for a statutory ban on phones in schools. And I think that's important because there is current guidance that the government have put in place, guidance that prohibits the use of phones, but she wants them totally banned. And she also wants funding for the equipment to make sure that the bans are enforced. So that's her campaign, which is off the back of the death and life of her daughter, Brianna.

2:46And she said during the conversation that you guys had that Brianna was addicted to her phone. Did she go into detail as to just how that addiction played out in their lives? Yeah, she did. And she did it in a way that was really forthright and really honest. And at points in the conversation, you could see herself really searching for the right words to describe the difficulty that it caused their relationship. She said that Brianna's phone addiction meant that while she was at school, she would often be sneaking to the toilet to record TikTok videos, that it resulted in hundreds of safeguarding issues being raised by the school and hundreds of behaviour issues.

3:18And I thought one thing that was telling in the conversation was when she spoke about the impact on their relationship. All of the arguments that me and Brianna had was down to her phone use. But even in school, she had issues. And I used to have phone calls from the school saying that Brianna wouldn't put her phone away. It was so difficult as a parent because I felt in one way that I was failing. And then in another way, and this is really difficult for me to speak about. but I was so annoyed with Brianna because I thought, why can't you just go to school, get your head down and just focus on your education because this is important.

3:55And only now, after two years of being immersed in this world, do I realise that actually it's so much harder than that. There are many parents listening to Esther will be thinking about their own kids and their own relationship with their kids and their phones. It's a worry, isn't it? Does she reflect on giving Brianna a smartphone and that decision at that time? I think her reflections look at how the smartphone exacerbated some of Brianna's other issues. Brianna had an eating disorder. She was viewing self-harm content and that there were also concerns around sexual exploitation. When you spend so much time in school, the fact that you have access to a phone in school means that all of those issues that are deep-rooted already, you're able to access in school, then you bring them back home and it becomes a bit of a cycle.

4:46So I think for her, it was about broadening it into her daughter's wider wellbeing. And it's the flip side, isn't it? I mean, you've got the access, the information, but also you've got this dark, dangerous world. There's a lot of content out there that people, certainly when they're teenagers, should not have any access to. Now, this campaign by Esther, it's not the only campaign similar to this, isn't it? There are many sort of groups that are calling for us to re-evaluate teenagers having access to smartphones? The thing that makes hers different is that experience that you mentioned, the fact that Brianna's two killers had spent time on the dark web.

5:22And at the same time, she was trapped in an online world as well, where she was constantly scrolling, constantly putting on a front for whether it was TikTok or some of the content creation sites that she was on while things were really hard for her. So Esther's campaign has the added emotional element of her lived experience that I think sets her apart a little. She was very thoughtful about how hard it made parenting and how hard it made Breonna's education. What are the next steps then for her in this campaign and what responses she had from people in political life in government? So her next step is delivering a letter to 10 Downing Streets, which is addressed to both Sir Keir Starmer, but also Bridget Philipson, who's the Secretary of State for Education.

6:03and in it she's just hammering home her points. One of the big ones is that this shouldn't be a postcode lottery. There's a lack of legislation which means that each school can enforce this in their own way and that means that there isn't that consistency. She also wants to make the case that this is a societal issue. Phone addiction is a broader issue that if we don't protect future generations from it, it could have real issues down the line. And one thing about that letter is There are quite a few high profile signatories. One of them is Stephen Graham, who wrote and produced and starred in Adolescence, which obviously looks at the impact of the online world and the darkness of that.

6:41And you spoke to some young people as well, often kind of missed out this conversation as parents and people like you and I talk about their smartphone addictions. What did they have to say to you about this idea about phones being banned in schools? So we thought it was really important to broaden the conversation. And we spoke to young people who were 18, 19, 20, so it just left the education system. And their thoughts were a bit more complicated, a bit more of like a dose of reality that only a teenager can give you. Some kids might need to limit it because, you know, focus can be affected, especially if you're on your phone texting people.

7:17It, you know, affects your focus and you don't listen. I don't think it would have made a difference at all. People would still find ways to distract themselves. and bullying would have been the same because you can use your phones after school. The reason you would take them away is also the reason they should be there. They also said it's hard to enforce because some people need them for safety reasons, some people need them for maybe medical exemptions and also we just live in a society where phones are everywhere, being online is everywhere. Esther's counter-argument was that there will be exemptions for students who need them and that they spend so much time in school, why not try and ban it in school at the very least.

7:52Shingy, thank you for the reporting as always, thank you Now to find out more about how this is impacting wider society we can speak to Dr Susie Davies who's a mum of three, a GP and the founder of Papaya that's Parents Against Phone Addiction in Young Adolescents So it's about helping and empowering young people to use technology but to use it well in a way that benefits them and to try and protect young people from a lot of the harms that we're now seeing more and more every day that are happening to them online. You said up in 2018, was there a thing that happened around about that time that led you to say, you know what, I think we need to be doing more to try and deal with how much our kids are addicted to phones?

8:32Well, actually, I was working at Bristol University as a student GP at the time, and I was seeing everyday young people with severe mental health problems, students who should have been in the sort of prime of their life, having a great time and actually struggling with anxiety, depression, self-harm. And actually, in that year, Bristol had lost 10 students really tragically to suicide. And it got me really deeply thinking as to why, what was the problem? And I became aware that lots of the students with the worst mental health actually had the poorest relationships with their devices. And at exactly the same moment, my daughter was in year six and asking me for a smartphone.

9:10And I thought, actually, we need to think about doing this differently, both as parents, so that we can protect our young people from some of these harms that I was seeing every day in my workplace. Can you give us a bit of the science bit as to how smartphones affect the adolescent mind? Well, smartphones are designed to be incredibly addictive. They've been designed to reward us with dopamine for using them and to make us feel good for spending time online. So it's not by chance that you might find all of us scrolling on social media late at night or when we're meant to be doing something more productive.

9:46It's because technology has these inbuilt addictive design features. And also it's there to reward us socially to gain social validation. But the more time you're spending on social media, the more you can get used to those dopamine highs. And that can result in you spending less time doing things in the real world that are good for you. So it's incredibly addictive and unfortunately stops you maybe doing things like your homework or playing with your friends or being outside in the garden that are actually really good for well-being. Obviously, it's a technology that has grown as we have grown.

10:20You know, it wasn't around when I was very small. It's now everywhere. But I guess it's a technology as well that we've never had to encounter before. So the difficulty of dealing with this technology that we're sort of evolving with as it's evolving must make it even more challenging. We don't know the impact it's having on us even today. And lots of people say, well, we need more studies, we need more evidence to see what impact social media is actually having. But actually, what I'm seeing day in, day out as a GP is that young people's mental health is being really adversely impacted now. And so I don't think we can wait till we really understand this technology.

10:58I think we need to act now to limit social media use and time online for young people so that they can thrive in the years to come. I don't want another generation of young people to have severe mental health problems. We want to see them happy and well. The conversation I have with people when I talk about this, and I wonder if this is the same for you, is that on the other side of this, social media, smartphones for young people allow them to connect with their friends, not only in their locality, but across the world. It allows them access to all sorts of information that my generation or maybe your generation didn't have access to.

11:29Does that benefit, outweigh the harm? Well, there are obviously benefits of being online. You can find out anything, anywhere, exactly. You can connect with people, you can meet up with them. It's become much easier. But really, when we think about the harms of being online, cyber grooming, access to inappropriate content, the pornography, the risk of being groomed, you know, we have to really consider weighing up those risks and the mental health risks, the physical risks of obesity, of impact on eyesight with the benefits. And I would say that really, when you think about the risks and benefits, I feel that the risks far outweigh the benefits at the moment of unrestricted access to the Internet.

12:13I think obviously, if you can take the best bits, maybe the information gathering, messaging friends to meet up with them, but without the harms, then it's more hangs in the balance. But as the internet is at the moment with the huge amount of exposure to inappropriate content and to the risks, I think really the balance is against doing something drastically different for our young people. So broadly, would you describe it as a net negative on adolescents? I think it's hugely changed adolescents. I think young people we know are not as happy as they used to be. they are lonelier. 12 to 17 year olds are now the loneliest group in society.

12:50Their mental health is the poorest it's ever been with one in six young people with a suspected mental health disorder. And the thing that's changed in the last 10 years is their access to the internet and the fact that 97 % of them now have a smartphone in their pocket. And I don't think we can ignore this decline in wellbeing. And I think we need to think really proactively about and what we can do differently to protect their mental health. We're talking today, Dr. Davis, because Esther Jai, mother of Brianna Jai, has got a campaign coming out to try and get smartphones banned during school hours.

13:22I'm sure you will support that campaign, but I wonder what you think of it and whether we can actually go further with trying to limit teenage use of smartphones. I think it's a fantastic campaign because it will make such a huge difference to give young people six or seven hours a day apart from their phones where they can concentrate on their learning and focus on their in real world relationships and things that they're interested in. So I think their campaign is actually will make a huge difference because it can impact everybody. And it can be implemented quite easily and quite quickly if we can just get the sort of political weight behind it.

13:59I think we can go further. I'd love to see social media banned in under 16s, like in Australia. But I think what we need is action that can happen quickly and happen today. And I think that this campaign is certainly something that could have a tremendous impact on every single child in the UK in a really, really positive way. Our reporter, Shingi Marike, who did the interview with SGI, spoke to some kids as well up in Warrington about their feelings about the ban potential, ban on phones in schools. And they were kind of nuanced in it. But one of the arguments that they said was that phones are just everywhere.

14:33And it got me thinking about addiction to smoking, Like cigarettes seem to be everywhere quite a while ago, but eventually we managed to move ourselves away from that because we realised the harms of that. Do we need to see this as like a public health issue? Certainly. I mean, we are calling for a public health campaign to really look at the huge physical and mental health problems caused by social media. So exactly. I think it's very, very similar to smoking. It took us a long time as a society to realise the harms it was causing to health. But then it's taken us years, decades to act in the interest of society.

15:07And particularly because social media is affecting children, it's affecting their mental health and well-being that I think a huge amount needs to be done to protect them. And sometimes I think when there's such harms that it's exposing them to, they're actually a really proactive approach to protect them and actually give them childhood back, give them back playtime, give them back lessons where they can concentrate, give them back their ability to do well in their exams, to have other interests and hobbies. Talk to us about the ways we saw in the case of Brianna that phones compound issues that teenagers have at schools with their peers.

15:45When we were at school, bullying may have happened in the classroom and the playground, perhaps on the way home from school. But with mobile phones, that bullying is everywhere. Exactly. You used to come home if you'd been bullied at school, shut the door and you could be safe. And your bedroom and your home were a safe place. But now with cyberbullying and grooming, it can be 24-7. And that safe place of the bedroom is actually where you're most vulnerable when you're on your own in the dark with no adults around. The public nature of cyberbullying, so if they're bullied, it's not just one person seeing it.

16:18It can be a huge WhatsApp group, up to a thousand people. It's very, very humiliating. It can make young people feel really negatively about themselves and impact their self-esteem. and really not enough is being done, I think, to protect young people from this. What does need to be done, in your opinion, at this point, to try and improve the situation for adolescents? So obviously government policy, looking at banning phones in schools and access to social media is really, really important. I think educating parents about some of these harms and that actually we don't all have to give our child a smartphone just because everyone else is doing it.

16:57And then also, if your child does have a smartphone, taking some proactive steps to keep them safe. So keeping phones out of the bedroom at night and making sure they've got some filters on their phone can make a huge difference. It's not just the kids that find themselves addicted to phones. Some adults, many adults find themselves addicted as well. Can you give us some tips, advice as to how people can wean themselves off those black mirrors? It's incredibly difficult, isn't it? I think recognising it is always the first thing. So check your screen time on your phone, see how long you're spending.

17:28Look at how many pickups you have every day. The average adult has 200 pickups of their phone every day. And once you think, oh, my goodness, my screen time's four hours, try and cut it back. So use the screen time limits on your phone or adding in an app blocker so that you can cut back your own screen time is really, really important. Setting yourself some boundaries where you don't use your phone. So maybe mealtimes. And then thirdly, my favourite one is just do more things that help you forget about your phone. Take up new hobbies, spend more time outside, try and do things that distract you and are really good for your mental health.

18:02And instead of checking your phone, really focus on the real world and nature or the people around you. Dr. Suti Davis, thank you very much. Thank you. Well, if you're listening to this on Spotify and have any thoughts on banning phones in schools, do join in on the conversation and add your comments below. That's all for today. The Daily is back tomorrow.

18:49The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.