1st Report - Growing up in the online world: The Education Committee’s response to the Government’s consultation

Key findings

• Online harms are widespread and severe: children face documented mental health deterioration, sexual exploitation, bullying, and misogyny linked to harmful content exposure and algorithmic amplification.
• Platform design choices—infinite scrolling, autoplay, algorithmic feeds, private messaging—drive repeated exposure to harmful content; reactive moderation is ineffective at scale.
• Schools and teachers bear disproportionate safeguarding burden managing online harms originating outside school hours, diverting significant staff time from teaching and pastoral support.
• Social media companies rely on incremental improvements and voluntary measures while framing harms as inevitable rather than consequences of their design; commercial incentives to maximise engagement outweigh child safety.
• Current regulatory approaches and age-assurance systems are unreliable; targeted, risk-based restrictions on specific harmful features are widely supported alongside a ban.

Recommendations

• Introduce a statutory ban on social media platform use for children under 16 as a foundation for protecting children and resetting their relationship with digital devices.
• Treat online harms to children explicitly as a safeguarding and public health issue; require preventative regulation focused on reducing exposure by design rather than relying on content moderation and reactive reporting.
• Impose clear, enforceable duties on platforms to prioritise child safety by design, backed by meaningful sanctions for non-compliance.
• Introduce mandatory restrictions on high-risk and addictive design features (infinite scrolling, disappearing messages, algorithmic feeds) for under-18s, enabled by default rather than opt-in.
• Develop and promote clear, evidence-based national guidance for parents and carers on age-appropriate screen use for children aged 5–18, co-designed with parents, educators and child development experts, integrated across schools, health services and online platforms.
• Rebalance responsibility for child online safety decisively toward social media and technology companies; ensure schools, teachers and families are supported by regulation rather than left to compensate for unsafe environments.
• Introduce a risk-based and age-appropriate regulatory framework applying consistently across social media, gaming, hybrid platforms, private messaging and AI chatbots.
• Establish a clear and enforceable framework for age assurance across platforms likely to be accessed by children, with independent oversight and regular effectiveness assessment.
• Work with mobile phone manufacturers to ensure robust safety-by-design features are available on all phones used by children, including strengthened age-verification for app downloads.
• Publish evidence-based screentime guidance for children aged 5–18 with appropriate age-related strata and detailed guidance on exemptions to phone-free school policies.
• Fund independent research on social media and gaming harms for under-18s and effectiveness of new restrictions, including access for independent researchers to platforms' internal data.
• Place mobile phone guidance for schools on a statutory footing and provide funding to schools wishing to implement phone-lock-away policies using pouches or lockers.

Key actors

Helen Hayes, Education Committee, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Roblox, Esther Ghey, Daniel Kebede