Banning Social Media: The Right Idea; not yet the right Answer
The announcement that the government intends to ban children under sixteen from using social media was genuinely welcome. When Keir Starmer says that children are being “robbed of their childhoods” by social media platforms, he is right. When he adds that he will also prevent under-eighteens from accessing AI chatbots used for romantic or sexual purposes, and will tackle late-night scrolling by under-eighteens, the instinct behind all of it is sound. The question — as always — is whether the reality will match the messaging. When it doesn’t, all credibility is lost.
The scale of public concern is not in doubt. The government’s own consultation, published in May 2026, received 120,000 submissions — the second largest consultation response in British history, surpassed only by the consultation on equal marriage in 2012 (The Times, 12 June 2026). Ninety percent of parents who responded were in favour of a ban. This is not a fringe anxiety. It is a mainstream demand from the people who live with the consequences every day.
Under the bonnet
Look more closely, however, and the proposal begins to unravel at the edges. The ban will cover TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — but not WhatsApp. Given that WhatsApp is the primary platform through which school-age children organise their social lives, conduct their group chats, and, all too often, experience cyberbullying, this is not a minor omission. Nothing will happen quickly either: the ban is not expected to take effect before next summer at the earliest.
The implementation questions are equally troubling. Ofcom — the regulator being asked to enforce the ban — has written to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) spelling out the practical hurdles and making clear it needs, in its own words, “clarity in the law.” The age verification technology central to the government’s approach — including AI-powered facial checks — works better at eighteen than at sixteen, and even the most optimistic projections acknowledge that determined teenagers will find ways around it. Australia implemented a comparable ban a year ago and reports from there suggest it is frequently circumvented. The details of the new age-checking regime are promised for September, but the government does not yet know whether it can be delivered effectively.
There is a further practical problem that no technology can solve. Adults have purchased alcohol on behalf of minors for decades. It is entirely plausible that a significant number of parents, or older siblings or mates — reluctant to have their own screen time interrupted by verification requirements — will actively help their children access the very platforms the ban is designed to block. The Age Verification Providers Association argues that VPNs can be detected and platforms can prevent youngsters circumventing rules that way. Whether the largest technology companies, whose entire business model depends on keeping children on screens for as long as possible, will implement this rigorously is another question.
Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, has warned Ofcom about the speed and decisiveness of its approach, adding that if further steps are needed she will not hesitate to take them. The words are fine. They always are.
The wrong problem, half-solved
There is a more fundamental issue with the framing of this debate. In all the campaigning around social media, a crucial distinction has been largely forgotten: social media is principally a problem for girls. The mental health crisis among adolescent boys has far more to do with gaming and pornography — and the government is treating those as entirely separate exercises, with age verification for pornographic sites already promised but, in practice, still routinely circumvented.
Banning under-sixteens from social media is a necessary step. It is not sufficient, and it does not address half the problem.
The question nobody is answering
Lost in the debate about bans and verification technology is the question that actually matters: what are children supposed to do instead? The easy answer — let them be bored, boredom is good for creativity — is not wrong, but it is not enough. Unstructured boredom, without the skills or habits to fill it, has historically been filled by teenage pregnancy, drug-taking, and other risks that no one wants to return to.
If a child has never learned to draw, play an instrument, act, or make something with their hands, they do not suddenly discover those activities the moment their phone is taken away. They stare at the wall. One child, quoted in the government’s own State of the Nation survey of 14,000 young people, described exactly this when asked what she would do if she was not spending seven to nine hours a day on her phone: “Stare at the wall.” In one sentence she summarised the scale of the challenge.
This is where UNICEF’s latest data should stop our politicians in their tracks. Report Card 20, published in May 2026, ranks 37 wealthy countries on children’s physical health, mental well-being, and skills. The United Kingdom ranks 24th overall. On mental health specifically, the UK ranks 28th — below Romania, Lithuania, Hungary, and Spain. The Netherlands, which tops the table, provides a clear illustration of what a different approach looks like: children cycle or walk to school, families eat together, and children regularly take part in swimming, cycling, and community events. Only eighteen percent of Dutch children are overweight, compared with twenty-eight percent in the UK. When children have things to do, places to go, and people to be with, they thrive.
What actually fills the gap
This is where Cotswolds Arts Through Schools comes in — not as a minor footnote, but as evidence of what works. When a CATS artist works with a class of primary school children on music, drama, or collaborative art, something happens that no algorithm can replicate. Children are in the same physical space, attending to each other, responding in real time. They discover that they can make something — and that discovery travels home with them.
Parents regularly tell us that children who have learned in a CATS workshop how to make animals from scrap cardboard, paint and perform with masks, build sculptures from old bottles, or simply use a pencil to draw what they see, return home and do exactly that. An activity that began in a school classroom becomes an evening occupation, then a habit, then a skill. That is what displacing screen time actually requires: not a ban alone, but something better to do.
The same principle applies beyond primary school. A local choir that had been predominantly grey-haired has recently welcomed a number of teenagers into its ranks. They are enjoying themselves, enjoying the challenge of demanding music, and discovering that they are every bit as capable as the adults around them — and occasionally rather better. Every choir, drama group, fishing club, chess society, and sports team can have a youth section. Most sports clubs already run junior teams, but often only on Saturdays; the after-school hours are where the real battle for children’s attention should be fought, currently the tech companies have won.
What government must do
Banning social media is a start. But a ban without alternatives is a policy that treats the symptom while ignoring the disease.
The primary responsibility must rest with government to fund the activities — artistic, sporting, civic, and cultural — that give children reasons to put their phones away. Not because they are forced to, but because they have found something that matters more. That requires ring-fenced investment in arts and creative education in primary schools, not the £14.85 per child spread across five categories of activity that the Every Child Can programme offers. It requires after-school provision at a scale that matches the ambition of the rhetoric. And it requires recognition that the pipeline from early arts education to confident, creative, socially engaged adulthood is exactly as important as any algorithm Ofcom might deploy to keep children off TikTok.
The government has grasped that something is seriously wrong. It has not yet grasped what it will cost to put it right — or that banning something is only ever half an answer. The other half is building something better in its place – messaging without substance lacks credibility and looks hypocritical.
