I'm a former headteacher. Here's why social media ban for under-16s won't work

The announcement last week by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that his government proposes to ban the use of social media by young people under the age of 16, has, as expected, been met with approval in some quarters in this country and worldwide.

There are many of us over the age of, well, say 40, who don’t really ‘get’ why children and young people spend so much time looking at their phones. Why can’t they go to the library and find some improving books, or watch ‘Morecambe and Wise’ with their parents, or spend endless days, regardless of the weather, kicking a ball about with their mates – people they will still meet up with in years to come even when they are all married, overweight and bald? And that’s just the men.

I’m old – I have some sympathy with this rose-tinted view of the way we were. I too worry that our kids sometimes appear to be very isolated (something inevitably enhanced by the pandemic) and seem to love their wee phone more than their best friend or their mother.

I accept the argument that says that social media can be responsible for bullying and collective hysteria, and may well be a leading contributor to the decline in young people’s mental health, with every detail of their clothes, their taste in music or TV, their friendships, their personal relationships, and their lives being open to the 24-hour scrutiny of their friends, their enemies and, no doubt, some highly dodgy adults, because they choose to plaster it all over Instagram or TikTok, like everybody else does.

Many children are more adept at using technology than their parents (Picture: Sean Gallup) | Getty Images

More achievable targets

However, I don’t think that a blanket ban is right in theory or in practice. It is the bluntest of blunt instruments, and it will prove ineffective. This particular stable door has been wide open for decades, and a few reactionary politicians straining to shut it won’t work.

I accept that if social media didn’t exist we might have a very prolonged debate before we invented it. If I were Mr Albanese, or indeed John Swinney, I might be more inclined to focus on more achievable targets. I would try very hard to prevent young people under 16 from accessing hardcore pornography, the use of which is absolutely endemic. I would ban any website or message board that encouraged self-harm and suicidal ideation, or made people believe they are fat when they’re not, or encouraged radicalisation.

I would certainly be encouraging adults to take more interest in what’s going on upstairs on their teenager’s screen. But a blanket ban that prevents Shona in Glasgow Facebooking pictures of her new kitten, for the pleasure of her Gran in Adelaide, has the taste of a joyless Big Brother. I know, incidentally, that very few teenagers use Facebook these days, but Shona does.

Stolen fruit

In any case, it won’t work. Young people aren’t allowed to drink in pubs and clubs, but they have, since time immemorial, done so by dint of fake ID – that and a basketful of other sins that adults, regardless of their own actual emotional maturity, like to keep for themselves.

Given that many parents depend on their ten-year-old to show them how the new TV works, it seems scarcely credible they think they can keep them away from latter-day entities to which they have been addicted for years.

Stolen fruit is always sweetest, particularly in the adolescent years; take away TikTok, which is, after all, mainly an avenue for daft boys and girls to dance and juggle or play jokes on others (often, it should be said, quite creatively) and you can be sure the ‘dark web’, whatever that is, will fill the gap pretty quickly. And then, of course, there’s the issue of what happens when they are 16, and the whole world of social media is theirs. Might put a bit of a dent in the revision for their Highers…

A force for good?

But even if we could stop our teenagers from looking at Instagram (or, heaven forfend, Snapchat, that major repository of silly ephemera), should we? I’m not actually convinced that social media, across the piece, isn’t a force for the good.

Any form of communication can be misused and, while older generations are (as ever) inherently distrustful of younger folk’s interactions (”I know he’s been bad, Mr Wyllie, but he’s under the influence of that Damien”), our young people need their friends more than ever. Anything they can do on social media can be done elsewhere on the web or on WhatsApp (is that to be banned?) or live.

We are taking the risk of banning this huge part of our young people’s lives because a tiny part of it is pernicious; well, then, let’s ban going to the football, because that might be where they learn sectarianism, or dance classes, because they might start to worry about their figures. Social media is, in essence, a large part of the way in which our young people communicate, and we limit it at our peril.

The actual experts

Still, we can at least watch and learn from Australia (not too often one writes that!). Mr Albanese says his government consulted with parents, social media platforms and experts about the age limits.

I expect the experts were social psychologists, adolescence psychiatrists and academics. I wonder if the actual experts – young people under the age of 16 – were consulted at all. If we move towards this kind of thinking in Scotland, I sincerely hope that is where the consultation will start.

Cameron Wyllie is a former head teacher. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa and is the author of a book called Is There A Pigeon in the Room? My Life in Schools