It was a senior leadership meeting, and a colleague had brought a genuinely good idea. A screen-free day, held periodically, when pupils would leave their tablets at home and we teachers would remember how to teach without them. She was making a serious case: children should see that a screen is a choice rather than a reflex.
Then, around the table, the idea began to fray. Her colleagues, who all taught significant loads and line-managed staff with full teaching timetables, started to picture the day in practice. No tablet to airplay to the front, so modelling a method meant digging out equipment nobody had touched in years. Worksheets that lived on the learning platform would need to be printed, collated and handed round. Routines children had taken months to internalise would need to be suspended for a day, at a cost in confusion anyone who has covered a lesson will recognise.
The screen-free day was never an argument that screens do not help children learn. It rested on an unspoken assumption, that screen time is bad in itself, regardless of what the child was doing on the screen. And the measure of the idea’s success was simply its own occurrence. A day with no screens would be, by definition, a good day. The aim and the yardstick had become the same thing.
I have been thinking about that meeting since 15 June, when the government announced a ban on social media for under-16s, modelled on Australia’s, with legislation expected before Christmas and the restrictions arriving in spring 2027. Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X are all closed to children, though messaging apps like WhatsApp are curiously left out. Many parents and school leaders will feel their concerns about phones, social media and safeguarding have finally been vindicated.
Access is the easy part
The thing is, there is a strong case for the ban. Children are involved, the potential harm is serious and may not be easily undone, and these platforms are built to hog attention by design. When that is true, you do not always wait for proof of cause before you act. We did not run randomised controlled trials before putting seatbelts in cars. But a blanket ban reaches everyone: the vulnerable to online harm as well as the lonely teenager who has found their tribe online. I am not convinced the second and third order consequences have been fully explored.
So the question matters, and we may be asking the wrong one. Instead of asking whether children should have access to social media, shouldn’t we be asking what kind of social media we want our children to grow up with? But I accept that question is far harder, because actual harm does not live in access. It lives in design.
We must do something
In Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby set it out as the politician’s syllogism: we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this. It has the reassuring shape of logic but remarkably little substance.
So how we judge its success becomes the challenge. The economist Charles Goodhart gave us the warning that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The psychologist Donald Campbell said much the same about schools, that when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they lose their value as indicators. Both describe a measure that starts out meaning something real and is then corrupted by the weight we place on it. A social media ban goes even further, because its measure of success is the absence of social media, which is the policy itself. In other words, the ban cannot fail on its own terms, because the banning is the definition of success.
”The ban cannot fail on its own terms, because the banning is the definition of success.
We have run this experiment before
We do not have to guess how this goes. Although it is too soon to determine the success of the Australian ban, we can look at the largest English study of school phone policies, published in 2025 by researchers at the University of Birmingham, which compared schools that restrict phones with schools that allow them. It found no link between restrictive policies and better mental wellbeing, lower anxiety or depression, better sleep, or higher attainment. Restrictive schools did cut phone use during the day. The children made up the time outside school, so overall screen time barely moved. The behaviour was simply displaced. To boot, a later finding from the same programme put the running cost of all this at more than a hundred staff hours a week for the average school.
Whether we view this as a failure of regulation or as the inability of the social media companies to do the right thing, we cannot say we did not try. The Online Safety Act took the best part of a decade to pass, but still leaves gaps wide enough for AI chatbots to fall through. The ban is the blunt tool we reach for once the precise instruments have been tried and found ineffective, and we should be honest that this is what it is. But blunt is not always a win. At best, it is a gamble.
The shadow and the thing that casts it
Which brings me back to the question we are avoiding. A child with no social media account is an outcome we can see and count. It can look a great deal like a protected childhood while telling us almost nothing about whether we have built one. Many different states of affairs cast that same shadow. The shadow is easy to produce. The thing that casts it is the hard part.
”A child with no social media account can look a great deal like a protected childhood while telling us almost nothing about whether we have built one.
None of this makes the ban indefensible. As a holding action, a way to buy a few years while we force the platforms to change what they are and how they work, it could be the right call. But that is the condition, and it is the part most likely to go undone. A ban with design regulation behind it is a bridge to somewhere better. A ban on its own is sweeping the issue under the carpet, if not underground. And the unglamorous work of building social media worth growing up with gets postponed, because the headline has already announced that the problem is solved.
My colleague’s idea fell apart because she put it in front of people who would have to live with it, and it could not survive contact with reality. She had the good grace to let it be picked apart in the room. The syllogism behind the ban is built to avoid that test. We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this. Banning children from these platforms has proved far easier than making the platforms fit for childhood, and so we have, at last, done something.
Photo by Shutter Speed on Unsplash
