Over the past few days, the government has taken what appear to be decisive actions related to technology and young people’s lives - but these raise important questions about what we expect education to do when social and technological change accelerates.

The first is the announcement of a consultation on restricting social media use for under-16s, influenced in part by Australia’s national ban.

The language around this is familiar and understandable: concern about young people’s mental health, anxiety about online harm, and a sense that existing safeguards are no longer sufficient.

The second action is the announcement of guidance saying that smartphones should be banned in schools. Less distraction is presented as the route to better learning. Greater order is equated with improved wellbeing.

Banning phones and social media

Both responses arise from genuine concern. There is a desire to protect young people, and a wish to restore calm. That concern matters, and it should not be dismissed.

What deserves closer attention, though, is the logic that links these responses, and the role that education is being asked to play as a result.

When uncertainty intensifies, authority often tightens. This is not because educators or policymakers are indifferent to young people’s development, but because restriction offers reassurance when deeper causes feel difficult to address. Policy signals intention. Exclusion appears decisive. Control feels like care.

In such moments, education is not asked to question this logic, but to enact the intention, often without having shaped the decision or been given the tools to respond educationally.

For example, if social media use were restricted or banned for under-16s, the immediate question for schools would not be whether the issue had gone away. It would be whether schools could realistically treat social media as “not our problem”.

In practice, that position would be difficult to sustain.

Teach or enforce?

Schools already teach about drugs, alcohol and relationships, not because these are permitted for children but because they exist. A social media ban would not remove digital life from pupils’ experience. Instead, it would reposition it as something delayed, restricted or conditional.

However, social media is not simply another risky substance to be avoided until a legal threshold is crossed. It is an environment. It shapes how information circulates, how attention is captured, how relationships are formed and how public life is encountered.

Young people do not suddenly encounter this environment at 16. They grow up alongside it. Therefore, even if access is restricted, its influence remains.

For that reason, a ban does not remove educational responsibility - it reshapes it.

If schools are asked primarily to enforce exclusion, without engaging with this wider reality, responsibility begins to drift.

Platform design remains largely unchanged, commercial incentives stay intact and political actors are able to signal action without confronting the structures that generate harm. Meanwhile, schools are left to manage the ethical and pastoral consequences on the ground.

Over time, this risks narrowing education’s role. Instead of supporting young people to develop judgement, discernment and responsibility, schools are positioned as sites of risk management and compliance, with formative work giving way to containment.

The alternative is not permissiveness, nor a denial of harm. Boundaries matter, because they create the conditions under which social life, shared expectations and collective responsibility can take shape. The more important question, therefore, is what purpose those boundaries are intended to serve.

Narrowing the role of education

There is a difference between boundaries that support the development of judgement and those that substitute for it. A formation-centred response would treat digital environments as sites of ethical learning rather than merely threats to be neutralised.

It would involve helping pupils to understand algorithmic influence, attention economies and power, and doing so in ways that cultivate discernment rather than fear.

For schools, this requires more than another rule to enforce. Teachers need permission to exercise judgement. Curriculum space must be protected for careful, sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

Schools need to be understood not as buffers insulating young people from risk, but as places where risk can be encountered reflectively and with support.

The danger of a simple ban, therefore, is not that it fails to protect. It is that it offers the appearance of protection while quietly narrowing education’s role, away from cultivating responsibility and towards managing exposure.

If social media is restricted for under-16s, schools will not be able to opt out of that choice. The real question then will be whether they are supported to do the educational work that follows or left to manage the consequences.

Simon Lightman is a secondary school teacher in England

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