Sarah Smith MP has labelled children’s phone use as the “public health emergency of our generation,” suggesting the digital dangers posed to them are worse than letting children smoke.
The MP for Hyndburn said: “We will look back and think that the fact that we used to let children smoke is not comparable to what we’re now allowing them to access through digital devices.”
Smith was speaking at a LabourList event held in partnership with Impetus, where panellists discussed the attendance crisis in schools, with figures showing one in five children are now persistently absent from school, double the pre-pandemic average.
Panellists agreed the reasons were complex and interlinked, citing factors such as poor mental health, social media, poverty and cuts to public services.
Susannah Hardyman MBE, CEO of Impetus, cited research conducted with Public First that found “attendance is now viewed as a choice. There’s a conscious decision that young people are making every day, weighing up the benefits of going to school, what they might get out of it and how they’re feeling. There is a sense of this now being an active, rational choice, rather than just something that’s automatic.
“We’ve got this huge rise in online presence and this huge dip in school presence, and really quite terrifying findings around young people feeling they need to be online till three, four in the morning to be present for their friends.”
Dr Chris Tomlinson, CEO of the Co-op Academies Trust, said: “The external agencies are just not there anymore. When it comes to SEN support, when it comes to mental health support, you used to connect all those services up and all that’s now gone. We haven’t replaced them with anything and now, after Covid, we’re really struggling with that.”
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The panellists agreed that schools should be at the centre of their communities, and stressed the importance of extra-curricular activities as a way of making school attendance more enjoyable.
Dr Tomlinson said: “I want students to be happy. We don’t use the word ‘happy’ in school anymore.” He went on to criticise the “accountability system” that “drains the fun out of education.”
The panellists agreed more needed to be done to get children back into the classroom, although Smith stressed the positive work the Labour Government had done to support children that “often gets drowned out by the right-wing media,” citing, amongst other achievements, the expansion of free school meals, capping the cost of uniforms and a “youth-focussed DWP that helps young people who find themselves out of education, employment and training.”
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