SafeScreens raises serious safeguarding concerns around EdTech with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson
SafeScreens is featured in The Telegraph as Sophie Winkleman issues one of the clearest warnings yet about the damage screens are causing inside UK classrooms. The evidence she highlights mirrors exactly what parents and teachers have been telling us for months.
SafeScreens has formally raised these concerns with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, highlighting serious safeguarding failures with school-issued iPads and Chromebooks, including access to extreme pornography, graphic violence, and harmful content via supposedly “filtered” devices.
In Sophie’s interview with The Telegraph, she says there is a “commonly held fallacy” that digital learning is “progressive and futuristic”, when in reality there is “rock-solid clinical research showing that children do not learn well on screens”. She warns ministers that the damage to children’s intellectual capacity “will be lifelong”.
SafeScreens have heard from parents whose children have used school-issued devices to access “grossly inappropriate content, including extreme pornography and images of dead bodies, as well as videos of beheadings, shootings and other graphic violence”.
Health concerns were also raised: eyesight deterioration, headaches, sleep disruption, and posture-related issues, all exacerbated by device dependency.
On Monday 24th November Sophie Winklemen, Laura Trott MP, SafeScreens and Close Screens Open Minds are holding a cross-party event in Parliament to examine the research evidence and hear directly from parents and teachers about what is happening in schools.
Sophie says that instead of coherent textbooks, teenagers now have “a series of links, videos, apps and PowerPoints, what a chaotic, flimsy, maddening way to learn”. She argues that money spent on EdTech should instead be spent on teachers and textbooks.
SafeScreens agrees: children must learn to use technology in a dedicated IT setting, not have every subject infused with digital tools that distract, expose them to risk, and undermine deep learning. This conversation is now in Parliament because families have insisted it must be.
