LONDON — Within a few months of getting a smartphone, Flossie McShea was exposed to violent and sexualized content while at school. She was 11 at the time.
Classmates shared extreme videos during breaks and lessons, McShea said in an interview, sometimes by turning a screen toward her face, sometimes by circulating them in group chats or via AirDrop. Other students took “mugs” — mugshot-style photos — of her and uploaded them online. She also quickly became addicted to social media, she said.
Concerns about children’s smartphone use have been mounting across Britain. The government has cited risks ranging from sexual exploitation and bullying-related distress to premature death, warning that the issue demands “urgent attention.” Campaigners frequently reference tragic cases, including teenagers who have died by suicide after being exposed to distressing social media content.
Now 17, McShea is one of four plaintiffs — alongside two fathers and a mother — in legal action against the British government, arguing that smartphones should be banned from schools. Their case rests on a novel claim that the state has a duty to protect children during the school day, and allowing smartphones in classrooms violates that responsibility.
“Smartphones in schools changed my life,” McShea said in a Zoom interview during a break between classes.
Her lawsuit lands as governments across Europe are grappling with where responsibility lies regarding children’s digital lives — and whether schools and the state have a greater duty to intervene during the school day.
In the United States, parents are increasingly filing lawsuits against social media companies, which historically have been shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from liability for harm to platform users, including children.
In recent years, many European countries have moved toward intervention, often starting with schools before extending to platforms and home life. France, for instance, began banning smartphones in primary and middle schools in 2018. It is now considering a social media ban for children under 15 that could come into force in September.
Other European countries have taken varied but increasingly assertive paths. Italy implemented a ban in schools in 2007 for younger pupils before extending it further; Denmark has moved to make schools legally phone-free for most children ages 7 to 16 and has signaled it will go further, with plans to restrict social media access for those under 15.
Britain has now taken up the question on all these fronts at once.
Last week, the U.K. government announced a three-month period of consultation on a suite of measures, including an Australia-style ban on social media, tighter restrictions on phone use in schools, and changes aimed at making social media less addictive.
The move follows mounting pressure from within Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s own Labour Party after more than 60 lawmakers wrote to him warning that “successive governments” had done too little to protect young people from “unregulated, addictive social media platforms.”
At the same time, the House of Lords backed a proposal to ban under-16’s in the U.K. from social media platforms and next month will debate banning smartphones in schools.
The debate is far from simple. Some analysts and charities have raised concerns that age-based social media bans could be difficult to enforce or might push teenagers into less regulated corners of the internet.
In December, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy voiced skepticism about the Australian model. “The challenge with banning social media is enforcement,” Nandy said. “Are we really saying as a country that we’re going to start prosecuting under-18’s for using social media?”
Others argue that focusing on age verification misses the heart of the problem. Rather than policing access, they say, governments should force platforms to change the content and algorithms that keep children hooked.
McShea’s case, by contrast, asks a narrower — but potentially more powerful — question: What does the state owe children during the school day?
British schools legally are required to “safeguard” pupils, a concept akin to a duty of care, during school hours.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking a judicial review, a process that allows courts to assess whether government policy is lawful. Britain’s unusually strong safeguarding framework makes it one of the few countries where a court can be asked to weigh smartphones in schools as a child-protection issue. In the United States, by contrast, such debates tend to turn on parental choice, school policy and free-speech boundaries.
In Britain, most secondary children bring their phones to school.
The government does not ban smartphones outright, instead leaving that decision to principals. Updated guidance issued last week by Britain’s Education Department says that schools should implement policies to prevent pupils from accessing their phones during lessons, breaks and lunchtime — but it is not mandatory. McShea and other campaigners want the state to go further, with a full ban on smartphones during the school day.
Kirsty Rogers, the principal of a secondary school near Oxford, said she would welcome stricter national rules. Last year, she introduced a smartphone ban at her school, requiring students to place their devices in locked pouches during the day — a move she paid for from the school’s own budget.
“One hundred percent, it helped turn the school around,” Rogers said. Older students began asking for sports equipment during breaks, and staff recorded a sharp drop in pupils leaving lessons to go to the bathroom. “It was mind-blowing,” she said.
Rogers said government officials later asked her to contribute to a set of case studies highlighting the flexibility schools have to manage phone policies independently. She declined.
“If you believe phones are harmful, you need a firmer national stance,” she said. “Right now, thousands of schools are being told to invent the wheel, with no funding and no clear direction.”
Phone bans, even when effective, do not address what happens after the final bell. For policymakers, that has sharpened a second question: Whether limiting smartphone use in schools is sufficient or whether governments must intervene further upstream in how children encounter technology more broadly.
Researchers caution that school bans alone are unlikely to be a silver bullet. There has been relatively little research on phone bans, and the results are mixed. One study in the U.K. found no significant difference in mental health or educational attainment between schools where phones were permitted and those where they were barred, though the sample size was small.
Victoria Goodyear, a professor of health and well-being at the University of Birmingham who led the research, said the key factor was overall time spent on phones, rather than where that time was logged. The study found that school bans could reduce screen use during the school day by about 40 minutes but did little to cut overall phone use, which averaged four to six hours a day.
“We need to focus on policies that address phone use both in school and outside school,” Goodyear said.
That has fed a broader argument in policy circles: that while schools are an obvious place to draw boundaries, they cannot shoulder the burden alone. The debate is increasingly shifting toward social media platforms and the design features that critics say encourage compulsive use, from infinite scrolling to algorithmic amplification of extreme content.
As governments hesitate over how far to go, some parents have begun trying to solve the problem themselves. In Britain and beyond, families frustrated by the absence of clear national rules have banded together to coordinate limits on children’s phone use.
One of the fastest-growing groups is Smartphone-Free Childhood, a British nonprofit co-founded by Daisy Greenwell. The group encourages parents to delay giving children smartphones until age 14 and prohibiting social media until 16. More than 170,000 children worldwide have signed the pledge.
Greenwell said the group’s growth reflected what she called a coordination problem. “A lot of parents don’t actually want to give their child a smartphone at 11,” she said, referring the age when children enter secondary school in the U.K. “But the network effects are so strong that they feel they have no choice. You’re faced with making your child feel excluded from their peer group — which is a very real fear — or giving them a device you believe may be harmful.”
She added that the challenge is compounded by the global nature of social media, which is largely shaped by American free-speech norms and business models that prioritize engagement. “Parents are trying to push back against systems that are much bigger than any one family,” she said.
McShea said that the risks posed by smartphones and social media extend beyond the classroom. But she believes schools are a crucial starting point — and one arena where the state’s responsibility is clearest.
Since her school in Devon introduced a full smartphone ban, she has noticed a change. When she was in her first year of secondary school, she said, students seemed to stop talking almost overnight, their attention fixed on screens. Now, she says, the younger children on her bus to school “actually talk to each other.”
For McShea, those small shifts reinforce her belief that what happens inside schools matters not just academically, but emotionally — and that decisions about smartphones shape daily life in ways adults often underestimate.
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