Tabitha Fitzgerald, is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).
Go for a late-afternoon walk in the park this week and try to spot a teenager. It’s a lot more difficult than it used to be. Yet teens have not disappeared; they are hiding away in their bedrooms, on their phones. Screens have filled a vacuum in many teenagers’ lives. Kemi Badenoch fired the starting pistol when she called for a ban on social media for under-16s five months before Starmer’s Government caught up. But taking phones out of teenagers’ hands can only be half the job: we must give them something better to do instead.
New Centre for Social Justice research has revealed that more than a third of 15-year-olds in England hardly ever leave their bedroom except to go to school. For at least 250,000 15-year-olds, school is now the only place beyond their bedroom where they regularly spend time. In other words, school is their only opportunity to discover new interests, spend time with others and experience life beyond a screen.
But whether a pupil can sign up for a football team, dance club or outdoor adventure such as the Duke of Edinburgh award is a postcode lottery. While independent schools offer a wide range of activities to their students, state-educated pupils are given few choices. One in seven secondary schools reported cutting back on sport and extra-curricular activities in the past year alone.
Opposition parties across the political spectrum, including shadow Schools Minister Saqib Bhatti, highlighted the Department for Education’s cuts to the school PE and sport budget in a recent Education question time. Sport is being treated as an optional extra for young people, while a quarter of a million 15-year-olds are spending their youth living like a hermit in their bedroom.
The tragedy is that teenagers do not want this life. Half of 15-year-olds say they spend more time in their bedroom than they would like to, three quarters want to spend more time doing activities outside their home, and two thirds say they would do more sport or physical activity if their school offered a wider choice.
They are telling us, loud and clear, that they want opportunities to get out, put down their phone and find something life-giving and meaningful to do. Now is the time to start listening.
Sport is game-changing for lonely, bored teenagers, as it is consistently linked to better mental health, boosted self-esteem, and lower rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness.
The goal is not to make every teenager into an Olympic athlete but to let them play a part in a team. Many will recall formative, character-building experiences from their teenage years taking place on muddy pitches on cold autumn afternoons or in fiercely contested matches against local rival schools.
Sport has an unrivalled ability to bring school communities together and produce fond memories for many years to come. Sometimes deemed ‘the fun side of school’, extra-curricular activities are a necessary pillar holding up a well-rounded education – hence why they are so widely seen in the independent school sector.
Having moved quickly on tackling social media harms for teenagers, the Conservatives should now focus on what comes next: giving youngsters an alternative to spending endless hours online, alone in their bedrooms.
The Centre for Social Justice has long advocated for an Enrichment Guarantee and Right to Sport in order to give all pupils, not just the privileged few, guaranteed extra-curricular activities at school. Our policy blueprint would give schools the resources, incentives and accountability needed to help every teenager discover something extra-curricular that they love doing –
The balance of teenage life must be shifted away from the quick but isolating dopamine-hit of scrolling in the bedroom and into the adventure and belonging of the real world. Restricting social media is the first step in giving teenagers their childhoods back. Now, we must rebuild the healthy, active alternative things for them to do. At a time when too many young people are spending their free time sedentary and alone, strengthening school sport is the best place to start.
The Centre for Social Justice report Inactive Nation part two: Getting England’s teenagers moving is available to read here.