Sir Keir Starmer has announced a full social media ban for children under 16. He is following Australia by introducing minimum age restrictions on sites including TikTok, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, which will come into force next year. He is also planning “world-leading action on gaming services”, and is expected to announce restrictions for older teenagers that prevent late-night scrolling. Here, an experienced teacher tells India Sturgis how technology has changed the nature of her job dramatically – she now spends large amounts of time dealing with bullying, sexting and children’s lack of social skills.
After 20 years working as a teacher across state and private schools, not a lot shocks me.
But one summer afternoon, during a discussion related to news while teaching a classroom of 17-year-old girls, we began discussing being sent unsolicited and unwanted messages by someone they knew: specifically, “dick pics”. This happened, it turned out, far more than I’d imagined. I asked all of the young girls in front of me to put their hands up if they’d received one. All but two did (about 90 per cent). I was horrified. They were matter of fact. It was, they said, a regular and unremarkable part of their lives. They didn’t find it funny but they weren’t emotional about it. This was normalised behaviour.
