Perhaps I should no longer be surprised – it happens so often. Yet I’m still always shocked when teachers tell me about the impact social media is having on the children in their care. The other day, for example, I was running a focus group with classroom staff that I鈥檇 planned to centre on the usual big education issues such as workload, salary, funding etc. My jaw hit the desk when these teachers, unprompted, started discussing the rise of misogyny in their schools and how some teenage boys were now trying to avoid being educated by their female colleagues. To be clear, this was a focus group made up of teachers who didn鈥檛 know each other, and yet they had this experience in common. 11-year-olds pretending to be 18 A couple of months earlier I ran a group for the Commission for Countering Online Conspiracy in Schools. This time it was with primary staff. But the playbook was the same. One question and they were off. Some 75 eye-watering minutes later I was left exhausted trying to work out quite how we鈥檇 got ourselves into a situation in which it is normal for nine-year-olds to be seeing soft porn, conspiracy theories and hate crimes in their day-to-day lives. One of the teachers in that group explained what was happening. 鈥淐hildren are signing up and [saying they are] the age of 13. They are lying about their date of birth鈥� [and so the platform thinks] they are 18. 鈥淪o they get exposed to a lot of information and the Andrew Tate stuff gets bombarded on them. These people who are allegedly 18 might only be 11 years old.鈥� ‘It’s getting earlier and earlier’ Another primary teacher set out the consequences. 鈥淥n social media, we are finding that that鈥檚 coming into our schools, and it鈥檚 getting earlier and earlier 鈥�. so that does bring problems into school. It used to be just year 6, year 5, year 4 and even now some of the younger years have access to it [social media].鈥� All of which leads me on to what the hell we can do about it. It is worth saying at the outset that, of course, a full, unalloyed ban on phones in schools is not going to stop young people accessing the very worst of social media when they immediately step outside the school gates. Nonetheless it is essential that ministers are full-throated in the implementation of the legislation they set out last week. Why? Because a successful ban will give each and every young person a break. A few hours out of every day in which they literally cannot get to the beeping catnip in their bags. In which they can learn free from distraction and socialise free of a buzzing screen. ‘We’re all too addicted’ I have a strong feeling students will thanks us for it. Another focus group I ran in the autumn for , this time with a group of deprived teenagers in the northeast, included one of the most poignant moments of my career. We were talking about social media and one articulate year 10 turned to me and said: 鈥淢y mam has told me about her childhood without phones and it sounds mint.鈥� So I asked the teenagers to raise their hands if they鈥檇 rather not have mobiles at all and slowly, one by one, they did so. 鈥淏ut,鈥� the same student added, speaking for her friends, 鈥渋t would never work 鈥� we鈥檙e all too addicted鈥�. Something we must do It is not yet clear if the government will fully follow Australia鈥檚 example and ban all social media for under 16s (though it should) and how successful such a move would be. Ministers have also done well to recognise that teachers play an important role in battling the scourge of online mis and disinformation by adopting the curriculum review’s recommendation that education in this space be part of the citizenship teaching in primaries. But we also know from experience that schools can successfully completely remove phones from the lives of children for six and a half hours a day. This is something we can do. It is something we must do. It is something our children will be grateful for in the future.