A ban on all technology for children has been called for by a member of the House of Lords.
The call comes just weeks after Labour announced that a mandatory phone ban would be imposed in schools across the UK.
The Department of Education insist the change would be made through changes to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Under existing rules, schools are encouraged to implement phone bans, but the decision ultimately rests with individual headteachers who retain the authority to disregard the recommendations.
Baroness Kidron, a former filmmaker and member of the House of Lords, has been a vocal opponent of phones in schools, and when asked by GB News if the Government was taking children’s online safety seriously, she told us: “Sadly not.
“I prefer the language of banning tech from our kids unless and until they accept their duty of care – to provide safe and secure products by design – that respects children’s development and their privacy.
“Let’s only ban what is bad or careless and let’s ban that, not our kids.
“It is absolutely stupid to put an addictive product in a child’s hands and say, ‘use it carefully’.
Baroness Kidron has called for a ban on all technology for children
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“The Government and frankly the official Opposition have been very poor at child protection online.
“I have had a dozen amendments that it should be ‘everyone’s policy’ – and the willingness to push things into the never never without tackling the enforcement and weakness of our current law – is both dismaying and disappointing.
“I think we need a much more critical relationship with tech – in general.
“Not because tech is bad, but because we are being governed by the terms of service of US and Chinese companies – not by UK law.”
17-year-old Flossie McShea joined a legal challenge aiming to ban phones in school, a rule the Government recently announced they would introduce
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GB NEWSWhen announcing the mobile phone ban, the DofE said: “We have been consistently clear that mobile phones have no place in schools, and the majority already prohibit them.
“This amendment makes existing guidance statutory, giving legal force to what schools are already doing in practice.”
As part of the amendments to the bill, ministers will gain power to reduce children’s social media use with curfews, scrolling limits and restrictions on location sharing.
17-year-old Flossie McShea told GB News in November about the impact smartphones had on her as she joined a legal challenge calling for phones to be banned in schools.
She told the People’s Channel: “The worst one actually happened to me when I had just got off the bus.
“One of my friends came over and said, ‘Look at this video.’ I had to go home because I was so disturbed by it.
“I was talking to a friend about this recently, and she said she had been shown the same video and had to sleep in her mum’s bed for a year when she was 11. That’s just really, really damaging.
“This kind of thing was happening so often, and it is so harmful for young children to go from being completely innocent to being thrown into a world where they are shown content they don’t want to see. It’s honestly extremely damaging.”