Banning phones in schools is a good start. But children go home.

Every time we go on holiday, my daughters make friends. It always happens naturally, at the beach or by the pool or over breakfast somewhere, and as we are packing up to leave the same thing plays out. We take addresses, we promise to write, and we genuinely mean it. Then we get home and life takes over and the letters never get sent, and a friendship that felt completely real just quietly disappears because nobody could ever find the stamps or remember where they put the address.

That gap between what we intend and what actually happens is part of what eventually led me to build Stamplo. I have spent nearly twenty years in UX, designing secure digital systems for banks and technology companies, and I understand how modern apps are built to capture and hold attention. I have also been watching other children over the past few years and I have seen them change since they got phones. Fallouts that used to stay at school now follow them home. Friendships that once felt easy now carry a brittleness they did not have before. The more I have learned about how the internet actually works and about how algorithms shape what children see and feel, the more certain I have become that my daughters should not be on social media while they are young.

So when the government announced today that smartphones will be legally banned from schools in England, I welcomed it. And I also think it is worth saying honestly that it does not really change very much.

A signal, not a solution

Pepe Di’Iasio, the head of the Association of School and College Leaders, said today that a statutory ban does not really change very much, and the Children’s Commissioner’s research gives him a point. Data shows that 99.8% of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools in England already had phone policies in place before this announcement. In that sense the government has largely legislated for something schools were already doing.

But I do not think that makes it meaningless. A national legal standard matters even when practice has already moved in that direction. It removes the ambiguity that individual headteachers were navigating on their own, it takes the decision out of reach of parent complaints, and perhaps most importantly it sends a clear signal to the technology industry that government is paying attention and prepared to act. That signal matters because the changes that would make the most difference need to happen much further upstream than the school gate.

What the ban cannot do, and what no school policy ever could do, is follow children home when the bell rings at three o’clock.

The out of office problem

I want to be careful here because I have been guilty of this myself and I am not writing from any kind of high ground. But one of the things I have learned as I have got older is how to switch off properly, and I think that ability is exactly what is missing for children on social media.

Since my daughters were born I have made it a non-negotiable that my evenings are my own. Nobody from work can reach me after a certain hour. I have no social media notifications turned on so there is nothing pulling me back to my phone, and I physically put the phone away rather than leaving it on the table. That is something I have had to learn and I am still not always perfect at it, but the important thing is that the option exists. I can create distance between myself and the noise, and the noise respects that boundary.

Children on social media cannot do that. There is no out of office for an algorithm. There is no way to tell Instagram or TikTok that you are offline until tomorrow morning and that nothing important should happen until then. The social world that lives inside those apps runs constantly and the anxiety that comes with it runs just as constantly. Who has liked something, who has not replied, who is in the group chat and what are they saying, what did that comment mean. These questions do not pause because it is bedtime or because school starts in eight hours. The ban keeps phones out of classrooms, but at three o’clock the algorithm is waiting at the school gate, and it goes home with every child who has a phone in their pocket.

Polished lives and what they cost

I will admit something here. I still have social media accounts and sometimes I scroll through them and feel a familiar sting of inadequacy. Someone’s holiday looks better than mine, someone’s career appears to be moving faster, someone’s life seems tidier and more deliberate than the one I am actually living. And I know, rationally, that I am looking at the curated highlight reel of someone else’s existence and not the reality of it. I can talk myself down from that feeling in a way that most children simply cannot.

Social media is not really about connection in the way we tell ourselves it is. It is about performance. The photo is chosen carefully, the caption is written and rewritten, the timing of the post is considered. What children are consuming, for hours at a time, is not a window into how other people genuinely live but a relentlessly polished version of it, and the effect on children’s mental health of spending hours inside that world is not subtle or theoretical.

I have watched documentaries about what children are being exposed to online, including what happens when an algorithm learns from a child’s behaviour and starts serving them content they should never have seen. There are documented cases, examined in formal legal proceedings in this country, where that process contributed to outcomes that no parent should ever have to face. These are not edge cases. They are the result of a system designed to maximise engagement without any meaningful regard for who is on the other side of the screen, and that reality has shaped every decision I have made about how Stamplo works.

What actually helps

Parents looking for genuine alternatives to social media for their children often frame it as a question of what to remove, but I think the better question is what to offer instead. The answer, as far as I can see it, is not less connection but slower and more intentional connection. Children are curious and social and they want to communicate with the world and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is what kind of communication actually serves that instinct well. On Stamplo, children typically come on once or twice a week to write a letter and to learn something about the person and the country on the other side of it. They are not pulled back by notifications or kept there by an algorithm working out how to hold their attention for longer. They come with a purpose, they fulfil it, and they go and do something else. You can read more about how Stamplo works if you are curious, but the principle is simple: technology that respects a child’s time rather than consuming it. That is, in a small way, what I think the internet was supposed to be before it became something else entirely.

Who is actually responsible

The phone ban is a step and I am glad it has happened. But the harder conversation is about what comes next and who is responsible for it. I do not think blanket identity verification across every website is workable or even clearly desirable and I am genuinely uncertain how it would function at scale without creating its own significant problems. But when a platform knows it is being accessed by children, or when it has been designed for them, the legal and moral responsibility to ensure those children are supervised and safe should not be negotiable. That is not a technical problem. The technology to do it exists and it is not expensive to implement. It is a question of whether the people building these products choose to see children as children or as users to be retained and monetised.

That distinction matters more than any single piece of legislation. The people sitting in product meetings deciding how to increase session length among twelve year olds are making choices and those choices have consequences that the children experiencing them have no way to consent to or even understand. A statutory phone ban in schools sends the right signal. But the signal needs to reach the people actually building these products, and it needs to carry real weight when they ignore it.

To parents who are reading this feeling stuck, the instinct you have that something is not quite right is worth trusting. You do not need to wait for regulation to catch up or for the perfect alternative to arrive. You can simply choose a slower, more intentional path for your child and find that others are already walking it.