The Social Media Ban: A GCSE and A-Level English Teacher's Perspective

Harriet Foster is one of Sherpa Tutors' most respected and experienced English Tutors. She has taught GCSE and A-Level English and English Literature in secondary schools for over 15 years. 

She is also a GCSE and A-Level English Examiner, and has extensive experience supporting students, including SEN, on a one-to-one basis as an online tutor on Sherpa.  

Her supportive and empathetic approach, and appreciation of the anxieties that can come over teenage years, is evidenced in her writing as she outlines her view on the Government’s proposed Social Media Ban for under 16s. 

Online tutoring with Harriet can be booked through her profile here.

While Our Children Were Held Captive

By Harriet Foster, GCSE and A-Level English Teacher at Sherpa Tutors

“Having taught English Language and Literature in secondary schools for almost eighteen years, I have seen a noticeable shift in the way many young people engage with information. The challenge is not intelligence. Today's teenagers are every bit as capable, creative and insightful as the generations before them. The challenge is attention. How could it be otherwise when so much of the content they consume is designed to be digested in seconds? Social media has trained young minds to expect novelty at an extraordinary pace.”

The Pressures Facing Teenagers

I remember being at school. The pressure to learn the terminology in Biology classes, the equations in Maths (or The Dark Arts, as I jokingly call it now to my students) and the endless quotations from novels, plays and poems for English literature examinations. I also remember the difficulty of peer group dynamics, the anxiety of wearing the wrong clothes on mufti days and the bullying that happened on the playground.

Remembering these days doesn't feel like looking back down the corridors of my life with rose-tinted glasses because I remember the struggles, the butterflies that pummelled my stomach before getting on the bus and the darkness of puberty, wondering if I was normal. It was hard. Being in education sometimes feels like an act of self-harm because I have immersed myself in the world of teenagers for almost all my working life. But the reality is that I wouldn't want to be young again now because I believe the lives of teenagers today are harder than they were in the early 2000s.

To be a young person growing up today is to still live with the worries of friendship groups, bullying and a world of academic pressure and expectation that feels at once suffocating and exciting. But today's teenagers have also grown up with a small rectangle in their pockets. A device that follows them everywhere. A device that means the school day never truly ends. Friendship dramas continue long after the bell rings. Embarrassments are recorded and replayed. Comparison is no longer occasional but constant. For the first time in history, young people are carrying their entire social world in their hands.

I believe the step the government has taken will be regarded as a moment in history that rewrites the mistakes we have made for almost a decade. Allowing young people portals into the world of social media has always been a safeguarding problem. How can we look at what we have allowed young people access to for so long without coming to this conclusion? We only need to look at the statistics around mental health in young people to understand that there has been a problem for too many years.

Johnathan Haidt’s powerful book, The Anxious Generation, makes a clear and deeply troubling connection between the collapse in teenage mental health and the rise of social media. One line has stayed with me since reading it: “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.” To me, this speaks directly to the quarantining of the teenage mind. For too long, tech giants such as Meta have been allowed to hold young people’s attention, confidence and sense of self hostage. The government’s decisive step to prise these minds away from these faceless captors feels not only necessary, but overdue. It may come to be seen as a victory for childhood itself.

Having taught English Language and Literature for almost eighteen years, I have seen a noticeable shift in the way many young people engage with information. The challenge is not intelligence. Today's teenagers are every bit as capable, creative and insightful as the generations before them. The challenge is attention. How could it be otherwise when so much of the content they consume is designed to be digested in seconds? Social media has trained young minds to expect novelty at an extraordinary pace. The result is that sustained concentration increasingly feels unnatural. Reading a lengthy article, wrestling with a difficult idea or persisting with a complex piece of writing requires a different kind of mental stamina.

I am not naïve enough to imagine that teenagers before social media were spending their evenings eagerly devouring Shakespeare. They weren't. But there was still space for boredom, and in those moments of boredom, creativity and the art of inquiry had space to grow and bloom. Today, those spaces are constantly under threat. As a teacher, I see the consequences in classrooms every day: students who are bright, articulate and full of potential, yet who often struggle to remain on a single task long enough to discover what they are truly capable of. 

It’s a tragedy.

But unlike a Shakespearean tragedy, this one seems to have a happy ending. With the banning of social media for young people under the age of sixteen, we have made the pivotal decision to hand children back the torch of youth, boredom and creativity. And I, for one, am celebrating.