Owning a mobile phone is a ‘rite of passage’ for children, says schools minister
Getting a mobile phone has become a “rite of passage” for children between primary and secondary school, the schools minister has said.
Damian Hinds said “close to” everybody is given a smartphone now between year 6 and year 7, aged 10 to 11, and that there was “something of a rite of passage” about that.
He told the Commons education select committee on Tuesday that some children get them “quite a lot earlier” than year 6 and that the Government does not advise parents of a minimum age limit.
He said ministers were “trying to create a new norm” under new guidance given to schools where “the entirety of the school day, including break and lunchtime” is free of mobile phones, though he accepted they might be needed for travel outside of school hours.
But he rejected the suggestion from MPs that mobile phones are needed to access timetables, many of which are now online in schools, as he called for pupils to go back to basics and print them out instead.
“We have thought about timetables and to be honest, we don’t think it is insurmountable to copy out a timetable,” Mr Hinds said.
As some young people sitting in the chamber began laughing, Flick Drummond, a Conservative MP on the committee, responded: “So you’d expect them all to print out their timetables – I’m just looking as we’ve got some students behind you and I’m sure they use their phones to find out where their next lectures are.”
Mr Hinds responded: “That may well be so and obviously I can’t speak for them, I think all of us, MPs, people working in industry, we’ve all done things like take photographs of shopping lists that in days gone by we would just have, like, copied it out... It doesn’t mean we can’t copy out the shopping list again in the same way that we used to.”
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Last month, the Department for Education published guidance, which is non-statutory, which instructed head teachers on how to ban the use of phones during lessons, break and lunch periods.
Mr Hinds admitted that the “option remains” to make the guidance mandatory, as campaigners such as Esther Ghey, the mother of the murdered 16-year-old Brianna Ghey, step up calls for an under-16s smartphone ban.
Elsewhere in the session, Mark Bunting, the director of online safety strategy delivery at Ofcom, said that although many social media companies’ lower age limits are 13, “there are a lot of under-13s who are using services, whether it’s social media or messaging services. I think that is a concern.”
But he cautioned that “there’s nothing very magical about the boundary at 13 and if a service is safe for a 13-year-old then that will help ensure it is safe for under-13s who are there when they shouldn’t be”.
