Cracking The Screen: Josh MacAlister on his bid to get kids off their phones
Josh MacAlister on the Houses of Parliament terrace. Photography by Elio Zhang
10 min read
Josh MacAlister wants children to spend less time on their phones and far fewer of them in residential care. The former teacher tells Tali Fraser his experience of working across party lines is helping build support. Photography by Elio Zhang
“You can’t move in the UK now without bumping into a parent or family member who can see the issue this is causing,” says Josh MacAlister.
When the new Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington was successful in the ballot for the chance to introduce a Private Members’ Bill (PMB), he was clear he wanted to make phones safer for children.
“People sometimes try to equate it with moral panic around the rise of TV or computer games, but it is different. This isn’t just about kids spending time on screens. It is the low-level dopamine hit that they’re getting from scrolling through TikTok for hours and hours and hours, not getting anything from it.”
He adds: “It is designed to capture the attention of brains to the extent that we’ve now got kids spending often seven, eight hours a day doing this stuff – and think of what they are not doing instead.”
MacAlister has first-hand experience, having started his career as a secondary school teacher in 2009, a product of the TeachFirst scheme, set up with the aim of recruiting “high-potential” graduates and career changers to disadvantaged schools.
“That was when a major change started to happen with kids’ access to smartphones,” he says. “All of the data and research now shows that there was a big series of changes in children’s mental health, sleep, educational outcomes around the early 2010s.”
MacAlister’s Safer Phones Bill proposes a series of measures. They include that the age online companies can receive data consent from children without permission from parents be raised from 13 to 16; that Ofcom’s powers be strengthened to enforce a code of conduct preventing children being exposed to apps and services that are “addictive by design”; a commitment for government to review further regulation of the design, supply, marketing and use of mobile phones by under-16s, if needed; and a legal requirement for schools to be mobile-free.
Already it is set to be chopped and changed after Science Secretary Peter Kyle expressed his scepticism over banning phones from schools, telling The House last month: “The guidance is working, so I don’t think we need to disrupt the direction of travel that we already have.” So, is the new MP preparing to drop part of his bill?
“I want to pass a bill with government support – it’s the only way it will happen – so that within five years we would bend the curve on the number of hours children are spending on social media and doom scrolling on their smartphones,” MacAlister says.
“One of the measures in the original version of the bill was to make the phone-free school policy statutory. The government is not keen to pursue that. I respect that decision. I think it would make a difference, but I respect where they’ve landed on that – and I want to pursue the content of the bill that will get passed and get government support.”
The children’s social care system should not be one where there is a profit motive
Meeting in his parliamentary office, the Labour MP is still unpacking – with cardboard moving boxes still strewn around the room – but he has managed to get his books out onto shelves and set a reading list for his staff.
“As soon as I read a book, I turn to the guys working with me and say ‘Well, you should all read this now, it’s really good,” MacAlister jokes.
That includes former political adviser Sam Freedman’s recent book Failed State, about how government can’t bring about change in a broken system. “It is a great recipe if you want to pull out all the follicles from your head. I had to pause all the way through reading it because of the frustration of the state of things and how we run government,” MacAlister says.
Another is The Anxious Generation by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which warns of the toll of “phone-based childhoods”. The day after submitting his bill, the publisher Penguin Random House posted a copy of Haidt’s book to MacAlister’s parliamentary office “being like, in case you haven’t read it yet”, the MP laughs. Happily, they didn’t have anything to worry about as the former teacher was already familiar with Haidt’s work, who also argues for school phone bans, raising the age of internet adulthood to 16 and using proper age verification.
“Jonathan has got this great mega spreadsheet that sets out what different countries are trying to do on this issue, and you can pull out some themes,” MacAlister says.
“We have as a society, to some extent, and certainly in politics, got to the wrong conclusion that the genie is out of the bottle. It is a runaway train. We can’t do anything about it. I just don’t accept that conclusion. We can set guardrail rules around a system. This is a collective action problem, and the very definition of what we should be doing in this place is creating rules to solve collective action problems, so it is totally surmountable,” MacAlister says.
He has been looking to other countries for inspiration on how exactly to implement a policy like his. “If we were in Estonia, we’d be using a digital ID card to do age verification, which is an interesting idea for all sorts of other public service reform measures,” MacAlister says, but he flags that there are plenty of “great” British companies who have developed successful age verification tools, including Yoti that has recently been contracted by social media giant Meta to provide third-party camera verification in its apps.
Another element MacAlister is keen to include to “give this some teeth” is a civil liability clause. “If there is an increase in the GDPR rules around age of consent for data sharing to 16, plus a civil liability clause, which would essentially allow groups of parents to take class action against big tech, it creates a whole second strand of legal recourse and liability for tech companies. It puts pressure into the system.”
He adds that there is a clear way the PMB finds success: “The average 12-year-old is spending 21 hours a week on their smartphone. If we could free up six hours a week from kids doing that and actually doing something else instead, that’d be success.”
A card-carrying member of the Labour Party for 22 years, since he was 15, most of MacAlister’s work before entering Parliament was done alongside and, at times, within a Conservative government: “For me, being political has been about trying to make things happen in the world, not just talking about things. Meeting the world where it is.”
Aged 23, he wrote a 500-word piece suggesting the model of Teach First be applied to social work. It was read by Lord Adonis, a former Labour education minister who grew up in care. He got in touch with MacAlister and said that he should set up an organisation: “It was a ridiculous idea at the time… but then I did the work, and he was a huge champion for it.” That became the charity Frontline.
“Having done Teach First myself… I had seen the extra issues for kids that are in the care system and how variable the support was from children’s social care. Kids who were leaving the school gate to go back to a home that was potentially not safe, or where their parents just didn’t have the capacity to look after them as they needed to,” MacAlister says.
Frontline was established, he says, on a cross-party basis, with messages from Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg at its first meeting: “I’m really proud of that.”
That was not the last of his work with what is now the opposition party, as MacAlister was eventually brought into the Department for Education by then-education secretary Gavin Williamson to conduct an independent review of children’s social care.
It urged help for families before they reach crisis point and called for £2.6bn over five years to transform the system and prevent the number of children in care rising above 100,000.
We have got to the wrong conclusion that the genie is out of the bottle… I don’t accept that
“In both leading and setting up Frontline and then doing the review, all of which was done under versions of a Conservative government, I know that there are more things that we agree on across party lines than there are that we disagree on,” MacAlister says, having secured former education secretary Kit Malthouse and shadow Desnz secretary Claire Coutinho as co-sponsors to his PMB.
He also went on to write, alongside former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and former Liberal Democrat education minister David Laws, in support of the government expanding access to independent schools for children in care, but doesn’t now see eye-to-eye with Conservatives on the implementation of VAT against independent schools.
“It should be the moral responsibility for the independent sector to offer these sorts of opportunities and pay VAT. Pay your tax and add social value. A lot of them are doing that, and are keen to do that, so I don’t see any tension there,” MacAlister says.
In the independent review he called for an expansion in private school bursaries for children in care because, he argues, “as long as we have a private education system, we need to make sure that equal access is there for those that are in the care system”.
“It would cost less to actually just have a kid in Eton than it would to be in almost every children’s home in England. The opportunities, the enrichment; there’s ways of making it work. You could add into that approving foster carers for the holidays and weekends from the staff team.”
It’s shocking to MacAlister that carer numbers are down, but the country has found itself in a situation where it is trying to build more children’s homes. “At the start of the 2010s we had about 8,000 children in residential care in England, it has now gone to 16,000… How have we got to the point where it’s doubled and now we’re talking about more?” he asks.
“On the care plan this morning, for one-in-three kids in a children’s home, it says they should be in a foster home. In a home, in a house, within a family setting, that’s stable, can hold onto them and provide that loving relationship way beyond they are 18. That’s where they should be.”
MacAlister adds: “We end up spending all of our time talking about market incentives, price caps, the number of children’s homes we’ve got. It is all a symptom of the fact that the rest of the children’s social care system is struggling, and that is where the solution primarily lies.”
But he recognises there needs to be urgent work done when it comes to children’s homes as “there is evidence of profiteering”.
“As a point of principle, residential care for children and the children’s social care system should not be one where there is a profit motive. Full stop.
“We’ve got to a point where 80 per cent-plus of children’s homes in England are run on a for-profit basis, which is staggering. It is a completely broken and dysfunctional market,” he says.
“If we could boost some of the interventions we know work – higher foster carer numbers, support for kinship carers, help so families stay safely together with really good interventions on things like drug, alcohol and mental health support – that reduces the demand on that very last stop of residential care. It is reducing demand that will put public-service ethos back in charge of residential care.”
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