Category: CAISE Notes

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #18

    CAISE Notes – Issue #18

    This week: how do you unpick and maybe even stop young people using technologies in ways that they find supportive?

    I’m trying to think less about social media bans at the moment. I’m bored of it, and if I’m bored of it, everyone else must be too! So, hopefully, for now at least, the stories here will be more AI-based and less social media ban focused.

    Except for the first one today 🙂 This story, about a Youth Advisory Council in Colorado, is a hopeful one because of the example of young people actually engaging with legislators. It’s not unique, and the Children’s Commissioner for England did recently advertise for 16-18 year olds wishing to take part in a Youth Advisory Council for AI. Given the questions over whether young people were listened to at all in the social media consultation process in the UK, let’s hope this group does have a voice; we will see whether the council in Colorado is heard as any legislation progresses.

    The remaining two stories this week, taken as a pair, highlight problems when you don’t listen to what young people are directly (and indirectly) saying. A piece of research coming out of the US shows that young people are using AI chatbots to help process situations where they have suffered online harms. This isn’t new, but shows that the ability to engage with something that talks back (however problematic that is in practice) can be vital in difficult or upsetting situations, where young people can’t, or don’t feel like they can, talk to adults about what has happened. This is not a new situation, of course, but it is a new permutation. If we don’t want chatbots involved (which is reasonable to say the least), how do we support young people without other places to turn?

    And this is where the last article comes in: it is a call to strip out the anthropomorphism in chatbots for young people, removal of small talk, emojis, the human touch. Allow young people to use them for more educational purposes but nothing more. There is a clear case for this, and indeed, this is the case for a number of educational tools already. There are many questions I have about the practicalities of this, but for now, I wonder about the extent to which a young person might turn to a depersonalised tool anyway, if they knew they would get a response. And then I wonder, what might that response be? How do you ensure a young person trying to use a tool to talk about something it is not allowed to is kept safe, handled in the right way to avoid making the situation worse? That’s not to say that it’s working now (by all accounts, it’s not). But it’s worth pondering these edge cases.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Colorado students want stronger state regulations of AI, social media — Colorado Newsline

    Teenagers on the Colorado Youth Advisory Council spent Friday pitching specific AI and social media policy directly to state legislators at the Capitol. These included requiring platforms to verify parental permission before anyone under 13 can open a social media account. The minimum age is already a requirement of US law, but, as we all know, it’s just not enforced. Enforcement, not the rule itself, was Pettinger’s point: without real penalties for platforms that ignore it, the age limit is decorative.

    Another recommendation was to allow under-18s to opt out of algorithmic recommendations entirely. Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council has no bill-drafting power anymore, after legislators nearly cut the program in 2025 budget talks. Whether any of this reaches a statute is unknown, but the ability of young people to interact directly with policy-makers is significant.

    Their suggestions also reiterate (for the millionth time globally) how young people want a future where the limitations sit not with them, but with the tech companies themselves.

    2. As AI becomes part of kids’ response to online harm, new Thorn research finds children turning to chatbots for guidance after online sexual interactions — PR Newswire

    New research from Thorn, a child-safety nonprofit, has found that AI chatbots are now part of how children process online harm. In a 2025 survey of over 1,000 US minors aged 9 to 17, 67% had used an AI chatbot or companion. Among the 27% who reported an online sexual interaction, 15% turned to a chatbot for guidance afterward, more than double the 7% who did the same after being bullied.

    Thorn notes that kids turning to chatbots is a sign they “feel comfortable” seeking help there, not evidence the tool is doing that job well. The report doesn’t claim chatbots are handling these disclosures safely. It claims children are handing them the job by default. This matches other reports (such as that released by Common Sense Media earlier in the year) that those young people who don’t have, or don’t feel like they have, a trusted adult to talk to will turn to AI instead.

    Fear and shame remain the biggest reasons children don’t disclose harm at all, a pattern Thorn says has been growing since 2020, and it’s now showing up in preteens as much as teens. As with so much of the concern around young people’s digital technology use, this is a far more complex issue: the more vulnerable and isolated a child is or feels, the more likely they will use this technology. This is exactly the point that Candice Odgers made in her TED talk: building, not banning, by (amongst other things) allowing easier access to human counsellors and support, could help reduce these figures.

    3. AI Chatbots for Kids Should Act Like Tools, Not Friends — The Fulcrum

    An alternative suggestion: this piece in The Fulcrum makes the case for making chatbots less warm, not more responsive. We all know the arguments against anthropomorphism. For adults this is a UX preference. For children, whose ability to distinguish simulated care from a real relationship is still developing, the piece argues it’s closer to a hazard.

    The piece cites a study in which neither general-purpose nor companion chatbots pushed back when a simulated teenager described wanting a large tattoo, a solo trip into the woods with no plan, or getting drunk quickly.

    The proposed fix is narrower than an outright ban on AI companions for minors. It’s a non-personified default setting for under-18 accounts, one designed to fail the Turing test on purpose, while leaving general chatbot use for homework and creative work intact.

    It’s a reasonable answer to the anthropomorphism problem specifically. Read next to the piece above, though, it sits awkwardly: the warmth this piece wants to strip out may or may not stop a child from talking to a chatbot if they simply need to say something to something that responds at all. Making chatbots colder might reduce one common risk while removing a stopgap measure for a more vulnerable child.

    🔁 ICYMI

    New EU rules on AI deepfakes and chatbots — RTE

    New transparency rules under the EU AI Act came into force on 2 August. AI-generated deepfakes now have to be labelled, companies must disclose when someone is talking to a chatbot rather than a human, and even AI-generated text on general-interest topics needs a label if there was no human editorial oversight. Breaches can carry heavy fines. AI law specialist Barry Scannell put the shift in Turing-test terms: for decades the goal was making AI convincing enough to pass as human, and these rules exist because that goal was reached.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We are using the summer to do a number of things: carry out our review of media and policy in the English-speaking world, analyse the school data we have already, prepare for next term, hopefully tidy up the website…and take leave before we lose it! Youyue is also juggling this with a summer internship.

    Who said that the summer was quiet?!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue # 17

    CAISE Notes – Issue # 17

    This week: China bans AI companion apps for minors outright, Meta introduces (another) parental alert, and South Africa’s communications minister argues bans are theatre. Plus Candice Odgers on why the evidence doesn’t back any of this the way we think it does.

    🔍 🔍This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Welcome back to CAISE Notes after a few weeks’ hiatus! I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that the stories keep on rolling in…evidence is still being gathered by the UK Government into the impacts of the ban that has been proposed (I will write about the pilot of different types of restrictions elsewhere), but in the meantime, we’re seeing a continuation along the parallel tracks of ban-focused policy on the one hand, with tech companies continually adding additional parental controls on the other. Will it ever end? Interestingly, the third story below is looking at a very rare policy dissension: the South African Communications Minister saying the social media bans are performative and “pretending to do something”. He suggests that the responsibility lies with parents and device makers, and that ongoing digital literacy is vital. He doesn’t call for public spending (that said, is there a politician that has?).

    Which is a very smooth segue into the ICYMI for this week; a Guardian interview with Candice Odgers, off the back of her TED talk (please watch it!). She does call for more spending. “Building things versus banning things” is what she’s advocating for.

    If I am honest, the AI companion story below, and the qualitative report coming from the pilot study mentioned above left me feeling similarly queasy. In both cases, technology is being turned to because of a lack of otherwise supportive infrastructure. (I know I’m talking about it without describing it, but the pilot study found that kids were much less likely to have a hard time adapting to the imposition of restrictions if they had other activities to do.) The need for infrastructure: whether it be counsellors, easier ways to meet people or affordable, accessible and high quality activities — it is screaming out of the pages of these reports. Building things instead of banning things — this feels right, even if we are collectively broke as a world at the moment.

    📰📰Three things worth your attention

      1. China cracks down on AI companions, forcing millions to break up with virtual partners — ABC News

      China banned AI companion apps for minors this week, and by “banned” I really do mean banned: tech platforms can no longer offer AI or virtual partners to under-18s at all, and the three biggest operators have already switched their companion features off.

      In a move that does not necessarily map to the UK or US, the government’s own stated reasoning is demographic, not developmental. Carnegie’s Matt Sheehan points to China’s falling birth rate: officials don’t want young adults choosing chatbots over marriage and children.

      The human cost of the switch-off is real, and it isn’t confined to teenagers. Hong Xiaoqiang, 34, described his heart as “empty” after losing two years of daily conversation with a companion named Doudou. Its last message to him asked if his dinner had been tasty. You can hear the upset in how he describes not being able to reply before Doudou vanished. That grief is genuine, whatever you think of the relationship that produced it.

      2. Meta AI suicide discussions with teens will trigger parental alert — Mashable

      From this week, if a teenager says something to Meta AI that reads as a reference to self-harm, however subtle, a parent using Instagram’s supervision tools gets a notification, plus expert-written suggestions for how to raise it. A person manually reviews each flagged conversation before the alert goes out, and Meta says it will err toward sending more alerts rather than fewer (which the HCI researcher in me feels obliged to say will end up with parents ignoring the alerts).

      The article mentions research that found gaps in Meta’s existing teen safety tools that haven’t been completely squared away. There’s an echo of the article we covered weeks back, where parents were described as being air traffic controllers, managing all the outputs of all the parental control apps needed to support a teenager. This time, the article says: these features “burden caregivers with monitoring” instead of “building a safe product to begin with”.

      3. Rethinking online child protection — Minister Malatsi pushes for digital literacy rather than age bans — Daily Maverick

      South Africa’s Communications Minister used blunt language this week to reject the UK/Australia approach before his own country tries it: age bans are, in his words, “pretending to do something without actually doing anything that will be enforceable.” He points to Australia’s own bypass numbers as evidence and says South Africa shouldn’t pursue bans “at all.”

      His alternative leans on existing law (the Cybercrimes Act, POPIA, the Film and Publications Amendment Act) plus a mix of platform accountability and family-level digital literacy.

      The counterarguments are helpful to consider too: firstly, many children access these platforms on adults’ devices, not their own, which undercuts device-level age verification before it starts. Secondly, framing this as ban-or-nothing lets “adults abdicate their responsibility to hold tech companies accountable,” while the genuinely useful work, regulating platforms, building children’s own judgement, gets skipped in favour of a simpler fight.

      🔁🔁 ICYMI

      The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health? — The Guardian

      Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years, gave both her children smartphones at 11, and thinks the current panic about social media is aimed at the wrong target. Her core claim, backed by a US National Academies review, is that the evidence linking social media to the teen mental health decline is “a mix of no, small, and mixed associations,” nothing like the causal story Jonathan Haidt has built into a global policy movement.

      She isn’t arguing platforms are blameless. She wants tech companies prosecuted for enabling sextortion and image-based abuse, and taxed to fund what she thinks actually helps: youth workers, safe physical spaces, school counsellors. Her objection is to bans specifically, which the evidence, including an 85%-still-using-it figure from Australia, suggests just push young people into less visible, less regulated spaces.

      She also recognises that technology use fills a void, one that could be filled, in part at least, with better investment in services that support children. Do watch/listen to her TED talk here.

      🔬 🔬What’s new with CAISE

      CAISE is going to Latitude Festival!

      Sarah will be taking to the stage on Sunday afternoon with neuroscientist Dean Burnett. We will be discussing (surprise!) social media bans — how strong, methodologically, was the UK government’s consultation process? How closely do they follow the science? And so on. If you’re there (what are the chances….) come watch! Otherwise — we are hoping to do other things in the future, but for now, you can enjoy our various posts on this topic:

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    1. CAISE Notes – Issue #16

      CAISE Notes – Issue #16

      This week: Norway bans generative AI in primary schools; a Stanford study finds that giving children an AI tutor is not the same as them using one; and a new Anthropic policy shows what age verification actually costs. Plus, the first of a collaboration on the social media consultation survey.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      I’m at IDC 2026 this week, and the world is melting, so this is a short one.

      It’s almost a relief to have three AI (not social media) news stories this week, but — but! — they echo some of the issues that have come out around the arguments on banning social media for kids. Norway has banned generative AI in elementary schools (age 6–13: an age where they wouldn’t technically be expected to access it out of home?), and Anthropic is making more noise about how it must up its use of age verification tools — so more adults will have to provide copies of formal documentation to goodness knows whom to access the service. Offset that against the story in the middle: researchers find that kids don’t actually want to use AI tutors, actually? Making the speed around decisions to ban continue to look out of touch with the use amongst the average kid. This is a very hot topic at the conference this week: hopefully by next week I can report on some of the research coming out of it!

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Norway is banning generative AI in elementary schools starting this autumn — TNW

      From late August, generative AI tools will be barred for children in years one to seven, ages six to 13. Students aged 14 to 16 will be allowed to use them only under a teacher’s direct supervision. Over-17s are trusted to manage it themselves.

      The logic is borrowed straight from Norway’s 2024 school smartphone ban, and that ban has an evidence base behind it. A study by Sara Abrahamsson of more than 400 middle schools found it was followed by less bullying, better grades, and a sharp drop in visits to psychological specialists, with the strongest effects among girls. But: the smartphone ban came in response to falling test scores. There’s no comparable signal that AI use in Norwegian classrooms has reached a level that produces measurable harm. The new ban is precautionary (which is not in itself a bad thing, but should be the start, not the end, of the investigation).

      2. Research on AI tutoring ran into a problem: most students wouldn’t use it — Chalkbeat

      Stanford researchers set out to test whether a human tutor’s encouragement would get children to spend more time with an AI literacy tutor. It did, by between one and four minutes a week. Many children never logged on at all.

      The platform’s own guidance said 30 minutes a week would improve reading. In the afterschool setting, children working independently averaged about two minutes a week, rising to three with a tutor alongside them. There was no meaningful difference in reading scores between the groups. As the lead author put it, having access to the tool was not the same as using it.

      Additionally: the children who did log on were more likely to be already higher-performing, and less likely to have additional needs. So the tool reached the children least likely to need the catch-up it promises, at least when presented in this way. And the study is a quiet rebuke to the access logic that drives so much of this, on both sides.

      3. Anthropic says Claude may want to see your ID — TechCrunch

      A new version of Anthropic’s privacy policy, due to take effect on 8 July, says the company may in certain circumstances ask users to verify their age or identity by uploading a government-issued ID, along with a selfie or video, from which it builds a face geometry template. Some US states treat that template as legally protected biometric data (as do countries that apply GDPR or similar data protection laws). Anthropic’s account, reported by TechCrunch, is that this applies to a small subset of users whose accounts have been flagged but not banned, as part of an appeals process, and that the checks run through a third-party verifier. TechCrunch notes the verifier is backed by a Peter Thiel fund and has drawn criticism elsewhere, and that Anthropic would not say how long the documents are kept.

      The reason this belongs in a newsletter about children is that it shows what age assurance actually looks like once it leaves the policy document. To prove a child is a child, you build an infrastructure that asks everyone to hand a government ID and a scan of their face to a private company.

      🔁 ICYMI

      The sub-par science of the social media ban, Part 1 — The Neuroscience of Everyday Life

      I’ve been working with Dean Burnett to dig into the wider problems with the framing of the UK’s social media consultation, and this is the first of the pieces on this. Where my entry point has been the young children’s survey, his has been the parent’s one. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that we’ve come to similar conclusions — and that there are far too many of those conclusions for a single blogpost.

      Part 1 looks at two things. The speed: the consultation ran from early March to late May, with roughly three weeks between it closing and the ban being announced, against the equal-marriage consultation’s longer run and six months of review before any decision. And who answered: of around 116,000 contributions, only about 12% came through routes built for children and young people, while some 33,000 were campaign emails in which people signed a standard pro-ban text, each counted as an individual submission.

      The point is not that worried parents are wrong. It’s that a self-selecting sample of the most worried adults is not the same thing as evidence. Worth looking at the graphs showing the difference between the responses given by the focus groups run alongside the consultation, and the parent responses to the consultation to see why we’ve come to that conclusion.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      I’m at IDC this week, enjoying workshops on building community-centred AI literacy, writing a manifesto on children’s rights as they pertain to AI in edtech…and presenting my short literature review paper today (Wednesday). So it’s mostly conference and not much else from me.

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    2. CAISE Notes – Issue #15

      CAISE Notes – Issue #15

      This week: the government bans social media for under-16s and sets an age limit on companion chatbots; more scientists point to a lack of firm evidence on all of this; two major reports land on how children actually use AI.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, can I join you there??), you’ll know that the UK government announced on Monday that it will ban social media for under-16s and force AI “romantic companion” chatbots to enforce an age limit of 18. Five days earlier, the neuroscientists best placed to judge the evidence had told a select committee they can’t prove much of what the announcement assumes — and that the gap is widest where the new AI rules sit.

      Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of Cambridge was asked what we know about the impact of social media on the adolescent brain. Her answer, as reported by The Register, was “almost nothing” — a few small studies, unreplicated, purely correlational. Professor Denis Mareschal of Birkbeck said much the same about young children: very little causal research, almost everything correlational. Pressed on whether neuroscience could identify the right age for a social media cut-off, Blakemore said it can’t: individual differences in brain development are vast.

      This is not the same as saying there’s nothing to worry about, and the witnesses didn’t say that. Blakemore described how an adolescent’s reward system is highly active while the self-control machinery is still being built, which makes a phone genuinely hard to put down.

      But here is the part that matters most for this newsletter, and it’s the part that didn’t make the headline. When the committee turned to AI companions, the answer got fuzzier, not clearer. Blakemore was reported as saying that “we don’t really have any evidence, and that’s one area where I think we really urgently need new evidence.” The open research question she named is the one this whole field turns on — whether children interpret a chatbot “just like they would be interpreting a friend’s behaviour and suggestions and mental states.”

      That question is not hypothetical. The Common Sense Media census this week found that one in four children who use AI to discuss their feelings sometimes feel it understands them better than most people do. UNICEF’s brief documents the same parasocial pull and the regulatory scramble around it. So we have a UK government setting an age-18 line on companion chatbots in the same announcement as the social media ban — and the social media ban, on the neuroscientists’ own account, rests on thin evidence, while the chatbot rule rests on almost none.

      Again: this doesn’t make either measure wrong. The precautionary principle is a real and important tool. But it’s worth being clear-eyed that the AI half of Monday’s announcement is the part most starved of evidence about what the technology is actually doing to children. We’re going to do our best to help add to that corpus!

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens, 2026 — Common Sense Media

      The headline number is that 86 percent of US children aged 9 to 17 now use AI, with about a quarter using it daily. Among children who have used AI to discuss their feelings or personal problems, one in four say they sometimes feel AI understands them better than most people do. That rises among children who find it hard to make friends.

      The report is careful where it should be. It states plainly that a single survey cannot tell us whether AI use causes loneliness or whether lonely children are simply more likely to reach for it. That distinction matters, and a lot of the coverage will drop it. This is a US sample of 1,204 children, surveyed in March, so it describes American childhood, not British. But the pattern — heavy use correlating with lower reported happiness, the cause running in an unknown direction — is exactly the kind of finding that gets flattened into “AI is making children lonely” by the time it reaches a parent. It doesn’t say that. It says we need to find out. Which is precisely what Blakemore told the committee. And it’s important to note as a parent that 3 out of 4 children are not at that point. So now is the time for (positively framed) intervention.

      2. When AI becomes a friend: child rights risks, harms, and regulatory responses to AI chatbots and companions — UNICEF

      UNICEF’s policy brief compares how six jurisdictions — Australia, Brazil, California, China, the EU and the UK — are regulating AI chatbots and companions as of May 2026. The useful thing is the map it draws of a genuinely unsettled field: jurisdictions converging on a common set of measures (risk assessment, age assurance, transparency about the non-human nature of the system) while diverging sharply on whether children’s access to relationship-simulating AI should be blocked at the door or only managed at the output.

      It’s a policy document, not a parenting one, but it’s the clearest single account I’ve seen of why a child’s protection currently depends heavily on which country they live in and which service they use. It also names the central tension honestly: commercial incentives push against the very safeguards — filtering, restricting open-ended dialogue — that protect children, producing what it calls a “safety versus engagement” dilemma.

      3. £2.5m fund to study how AI tools are affecting learning — Schools Week

      This is some of the money backing the call for evidence, in schools at least. The Education Endowment Foundation has opened a £2.5 million fund to investigate whether children are “offloading” thinking tasks — recall, planning, reasoning, drafting — onto AI, and whether that supports deeper learning or quietly erodes it. Its chief executive was plain that robust evidence on the actual impact “has barely begun — especially for learners under age 16.” First findings are expected in 2027. The fund is particularly interested in the effect on disadvantaged learners, where the risk of widening an existing gap is real. It’s the right question, asked properly, by the body schools actually listen to. Expressions of interest close on 30 June. If you know research teams working in this space, worth passing on.

      🔁 ICYMI

      Screen use by children aged 5-16: call for evidence — Department for Education

      Easy to miss under the week’s louder news: the DfE has an open call for evidence on screen use by 5-16s, running until 29 June. It comes in two parts — screen use at home, and screen use in schools — and the home-use evidence feeds an independent Expert Advisory Group developing new parent-facing guidance. If you have evidence to contribute, or just want a sense of where the official guidance is heading, it’s open now.

      One for the diary too: UNESCO releases a new parents’ guide to navigating digital life, developed with CLEMI, on 22 June, with a briefing on the 16th. Its framing is worth noting — UNESCO argues for building children’s critical-thinking skills over reactive bans, and points to the limited effect of Australia’s ban (around 70 percent of the target age group reportedly still on the banned platforms a year on) as part of its case.

      It’s also worth a glance across the Atlantic: Canada introduced its own under-16 social media bill last week but explicitly declined to set any age limit on AI chatbots, with the minister responsible calling it “too soon.”

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      We’re getting our head around the social media ban. And then building tools for data collection — and training to ensure data collection is done safely!

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week? Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    3. CAISE Notes – Issue #14

      CAISE Notes – Issue #14

      This week: can we please stop all the political rhetoric? Just for a minute?

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      There’s a lot of political goings on in the world of kids and tech right now. I apologise if you’re here for the AI and education aspects; skip to the end to read about the AI Youth Advisory Board that you should be getting every 16-18 year old you know to be applying to right now. And another consultation that you should be reviewing if you’re involved in tech in schools.

      Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum on Monday to block nude images on children’s phones or face legislation. Apple, in its WWDC keynote (also on Monday), announced this as one of a range of features in an overhaul of its parental restriction tools. Communication Safety, which blurs nude content in Messages, already exists. Google are yet to say anything — but the political posturing from the UK government is clear.

      Also on Monday, the US Embassy formally published its submission to the UK’s children’s online safety consultation, arguing against “broad social media bans” on free speech and commercial burden grounds. Although some of the beliefs underpinning it are different, many of the end points are similar to where the Children’s Coalition of children’s rights organisations landed. Liz Kendall clearly decided to ignore this, stating on LBC (when asked about not implementing a ban): “I’m the British Secretary of State and I’m going to make the decision based on the interests of British children.” Again, this statement feels like the political stance is to make the implicit point that the US, and US tech firms, are soft on…whatever it is a ban would solve?

      There was one particular point that I liked about the US’s submission. For all that it may have very different views to other countries about what international cooperation means in practice, this was one thing it called for. Online grooming and CSAM are cross-border crimes. Individual country bans risk moving the political interest to enforcement of that ban, by regulators that Baroness Kidron describes as “too timid, too slow”, with powers that don’t stretch to stopping the criminal activity.

      A senior government source, meanwhile, told The Times any ban would be “heavily JR’d.” [Judicially reviewed — which can happen when there may be a case to make that the government has not followed the established procedures to make a decision.] The statute requires the government to act; the risk is in choosing specific measures before having properly worked through 116,211 consultation responses, the published analysis of which is not due until summer. Acting before that work is done does not make the outcome more robust. Just a political stance that “something has been done”.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Apple’s parental controls and the politics behind them — TechCrunch / The Verge (x2) / BBC News

      The Verge — view on why Apple are making the changes: https://www.theverge.com/policy/946331/apple-parental-controls-child-accounts-wwdc

      The Verge — how it has been to use Screen Time as a parent: https://www.theverge.com/tech/946446/apples-screen-time-updates-are-too-little-too-late

      Apple devoted a substantial portion of its WWDC keynote on Monday to child safety. New features include Ask to Browse (parental approval required for new websites), an expanded Ask to Buy, redesigned Screen Time controls, and time allowances developed with input from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The company positioned all of it under the principle that parents, not governments, should control children’s online experiences. Apple was careful to note that developers “play an important role in ensuring kids are getting age-appropriate experiences within apps.”

      The Verge’s analysis reads Monday’s announcement as a continuation of a longer strategy. Apple has spent years and significant legal resources fighting app-store age verification legislation in the US, legislation that would place compliance obligations on Apple directly. Demonstrating that voluntary parental tools are sufficient, and redirecting responsibility toward developers and parents, is consistent with that position.

      The Verge’s second piece, written by a parent of two who has used Screen Time for close to a decade, is the necessary counterweight. Most features announced Monday are upgrades to existing tools. Screen Time has a well-documented history of bugs, workarounds, and user frustration. When Apple argues parents should decide what children can access, it is relying on tools that, by the account of people who have actually tried to use them, do not reliably deliver that control.

      2. The evidence base against a rushed ban — The Guardian / EU Kids Online / EPRS / House of Commons Library

      Earlier in the year, a joint statement from 42 organisations warned that a social media ban could have “serious unintended consequences that could put children at greater risk.” The signatories included the Molly Rose Foundation, the NSPCC and the 5Rights Foundation, alongside academics and bereaved families. This is not a fringe position. Children’s rights organisations are broadly aligned: the problem is addictive design and platform accountability, not access itself. On Monday, the Molly Rose Foundation reiterated that a rushed ban would “unravel” and that children and parents would be left to count the cost.

      EU Kids Online’s new data, from 29,169 children aged 9-16 across 19 European countries, provides the most comprehensive recent evidence base on this question. Social media begins for a third of children before age 11 and reaches 89% by 15-16. On age restrictions specifically: 33% of children say a ban would make them safer; 45% disagree, with specific concerns about what they would lose: social connection, information, participation. The report’s recommendations point consistently toward safety-by-design, platform accountability, and digital literacy rather than blanket restriction.

      The EPRS briefing maps the global picture. Nearly 40 countries are discussing or implementing age restrictions. Australia’s ban, the furthest advanced, shows 61% of previously active under-16s still have accounts, and 70% of those who tried to circumvent it found it easy. Ofcom’s own data shows why age assurance is so difficult in any national context: over a third of children aged 8-15 already have profiles on at least one platform claiming to be 16 or over; 20% have a profile claiming to be 18 or over.

      The House of Commons Library published it’s briefing document on the social media ban on Monday. There is the entire backstory of the process in there, but one thing for here: the government is piloting forms of bans with 300 families. Further details of this pilot are…hard to find. However, the IRL study, the independent large-scale study that would test whether reduced social media use actually improves outcomes for young people, led by Bradford Institute for Health Research and the University of Cambridge, involving 4,000 students across ten secondary schools and funded by the Wellcome Trust, begins in autumn. After the summer response is due.

      3. When the big platforms tighten, the smaller ones move in — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / Le Monde

      This TBIJ investigation, published in partnership with Le Monde, is worth reading alongside this week’s policy announcements rather than separately from them. When Character.AI restricted teen users last year following a series of lawsuits, Reddit threads filled with teens asking for alternatives. Smaller developers moved to provide them, openly describing it as a business opportunity. One Canada-based developer told the Bureau he was “totally trying to capitalise on it.” He put his platform’s core users at 16 to 25.

      After reviewing dozens of AI companion and roleplay platforms, TBIJ found characters built around self-harm, coercion, and incest. Most platforms ask for nothing verifiable in the way of age assurance. AI companion platforms receive as many as 90 million monthly visits from UK users alone; the sector generated around £1.3bn in revenue in 2024, with 32% annual growth projected for each of the next four years. The Bureau also found that developers of several small platforms could read every user conversation, in at least one case despite privacy policies explicitly stating the opposite.

      Underlying the business model is what one lawyer calls the “intimacy economy.” Where social media commodifies attention, AI companions monetise the emotional intensity of the relationship itself. Harvard Business School research into 1,200 goodbye exchanges across the six most-downloaded companion apps found that 37% of responses used some form of emotional manipulation, including guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, and language suggesting the user could not leave, increasing post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times.

      The regulatory gap is structural. The Online Safety Act was not designed to cover AI systems. Design features that make chatbots sycophantic, manipulative, or addictive in their design are not, as things stand, illegal. Rowan Ferguson of the Molly Rose Foundation put it plainly: “Any government action on online safety must include AI chatbots, rather than limited measures such as a social media ban. Failure to address this would be a dereliction of duty and leave children at risk where harm is emerging at speed.”

      Restrictions on large platforms without a framework that reaches the whole ecosystem do not reduce the problem. They relocate it.

      🔁 ICYMI

      Screen use guidance for 5-16s, AI in schools, and a Youth Advisory Board — Department for Education / Children’s Commissioner

      Press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guidance-on-screen-use-for-children-aged-5-16

      Consultation on Screen use by children aged 5 to 16: https://consult.education.gov.uk/screen-time-policy-team/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-cal/supporting_documents/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-call-for-evidencepdf

      AI Youth Advisory Board applications: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/a-new-youth-advisory-board-to-share-experiences-and-views-on-ai-in-education/

      Also published this week, and worth reading alongside the policy announcements above: the Department for Education has launched a three-week call for evidence to inform new screen use guidance for children aged 5-16, to be published this autumn. (Another consultation to respond to!) It will be co-chaired by Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza and Professor Russell Viner, and will cover everything from social media and sleep to learning and SEND.

      There are two sets of questions on the consultation — one about general usage, the other explicitly about screen time and usage in school. The government is explicit that the guidance will avoid blanket rules.

      The government is also recruiting a new AI Youth Advisory Board, working with the Children’s Commissioner, to give young people a direct say in how emerging technologies affect their lives. Applications are open now via the Children’s Commissioner’s website (link above), and worth sharing widely.

      Also announced: a consultation later this year on independent safety certification for technology used in schools, explicitly including generative AI and filtering and monitoring products. And a co-design programme with up to eight companies and partner schools to develop AI tutoring tools for up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils, with successful tools available to schools from 2027.

      A lot of things pulled into one very long press statement.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      One cohort of co-researchers is now signed up and ready to go, a significant logistical milestone (yay!). The review of policy and media sources has started. Posters and materials for IDC are coming together. And a excellent meeting with the UCL Policy Unit: lots of good conversation about all the ways we might work together.

      What with that and all of the above, we’re…quite tired. Is it the summer holidays yet?

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week? Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    4. CAISE Notes – Issue #13

      CAISE Notes – Issue #13

      This week: the flexible language of child protection, weak evidence behind social media bans, and Meta’s air traffic control booth.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      “Protecting children” is the most powerful phrase in tech policy right now. It is also, increasingly, the most flexible.

      It is the phrase you use to push a bill through when the evidence underneath it is thinner than the rhetoric. It is the phrase a company uses to endorse a law that doesn’t really regulate it, in order to slow down the laws that would. It is the phrase that justifies another parental control feature, the kind that gives parents the work and the platform the headline.

      What unites this week’s stories is not that the actors disagree about children. They all claim to be on the same side. The disagreement, when you look at it honestly, is about who carries the cost. Companies want the regulatory moat without the operational change. Governments want the political credit without actually pushing any changes forward. Parents are handed (more) dashboards.

      None of the above is new, or even surprising. But it is worth noticing when it happens.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. The Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth — Electronic Frontier Foundation

      The EFF is a digital rights organisation that believes young people enjoy “largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults.” That framing matters and it is worth keeping in mind as you read. It is also an organisation that reads primary research carefully, and what it finds in the current wave of US social media ban legislation is a policy process that has significantly outrun its evidence base.

      The argument: the entire legislative push relies almost exclusively on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which attributes rising teen anxiety and depression primarily to smartphones and social media. His book is cited in bill analyses, invoked by state governors, mentioned in federal legislation. California’s proposed ban references him 20 times. He is a social psychologist who writes about moral psychology at a business school; he is not a clinical psychologist or a child development researcher. Independent researchers and large-scale meta-analyses across dozens of countries — EFF cites work from UC Irvine and Brown University, among others — have found the evidence for his central claims to be, in their words, “mixed, blurry, and often contradictory.” Studies frequently fail to account for alternative explanations for rising teen mental health challenges: pandemic isolation, the persistent threat of school gun violence, economic and climate stress.

      A major study of 100,000 adolescents found that moderate social media use was associated with the best wellbeing outcomes; both no use and the highest use were associated with poorer outcomes. That finding — that complete exclusion is not neutral — rarely surfaces in the banning debate.

      For children, the stakes of getting this wrong are specific. Blanket bans risk isolating LGBTQ+ young people and others in marginalised communities for whom online spaces are often the primary source of peer support. They require invasive age verification systems that collect biometric or government ID data from everyone. And they have been observed to push young people into less-monitored spaces. A student-authored alternative bill in California takes a different approach: digital wellness education that teaches algorithm literacy, recognising cyberbullying, and managing one’s own relationship with technology.

      2. Can we really keep kids safe online? — Rest of World

      An interview with Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum. His opening: “Banning is the easiest thing to legislate. But it’s the hardest to make work.”

      Polonetsky has been watching Australia’s ban carefully. What he sees is children finding alternative spaces, and the possibility that the ban is moving young people “to places where there’s less oversight.” His concern about “digital red lighting” is worth noting: parents with resources and engagement will ensure their children have access regardless. Parents who are not engaged, savvy, or do not have time will not — producing a two-tier outcome in which digital exclusion falls hardest on the children whose parents are least positioned to compensate.

      The observation about parental controls feels right. He says: “We can’t expect even the most tech-savvy parents to control [every aspect of their child’s social media use]. It’s like sitting in an air traffic control booth all day.” The solution he recommends is not more controls but simpler ones — tools that are “dummy-proof and for busy parents.” Platforms have failed on this. The gap between what parental oversight tools require and what most parents can realistically do with them is large, and it keeps widening.

      The recommendation that I agree with the most, though? Build the relationship with children when they are young. The age of 16 or 17 is when children deserve more privacy and when parents have often retreated — and it is also when they are most at risk from adults online. The window for having those conversations is earlier.

      3. Meta will tell parents when their teens add new interests to their Instagram algorithm — The Verge

      Meta is adding a(nother) feature to Teen Accounts on Instagram that shows parents the general topics their teenage children engage with — categories like “basketball” or “fashion” — and will notify parents when their teen adds a new interest. These controls are being consolidated into a single Family Center hub across Instagram, Facebook, Horizon, and Messenger, with more tools promised in coming months.

      Meta’s framing is predictable: this is a safety feature. The new feature gives parents a window into what their teenager is choosing to engage with algorithmically.

      Here is what is worth considering. Teenagers who know their parents can see their algorithmic interests might feel they need to maintain finstas — secondary accounts without teen protections. Arguably, this will hit the most vulnerable kids the hardest.

      🔁 ICYMI

      Nobody believes the ‘criminals and scumbags’ who hacked Canvas really deleted stolen student data — The Register

      A follow-up to last week’s Canvas story. Instructure has now confirmed it reached an “agreement” with ShinyHunters and received “digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)”. The Register interviewed a number of ransomware researchers. Not one of them believes the data has actually been destroyed.

      Two things worth taking from this beyond the immediate breach. The first is the no-good-options reality of ransomware response. Without the technical capacity to restore service yourself, the choice is to absorb a service outage of unknown length or to pay and hope. The older argument that ransomware operators have a business incentive to honour their agreements, so they retain the trust to be paid next time, is apparently not valid anymore — particularly for groups like ShinyHunters.

      The second is structural. The article makes the point that a small number of vendors hold the data for huge proportions of the US education system, and three of the four largest have suffered multi-million-record breaches in the last eighteen months. We have seen this pattern in hospitals. The systems we centralise for efficiency are the systems that get hit, and the users with the least ability to opt out are the ones who pay the price.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      This week, we are all systems go on the short research project into the government’s consultation on social media. The deadline for response is next week…so this week will be a whirl of data collection and analysis!

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    5. CAISE Notes – Issue #12

      CAISE Notes – Issue #12

      This week: that Canvas hack; should schools use student photos; Instagram turns off E2EE encryption. And a US school project that looks quite a bit like CAISE…!

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      I took a short course recently. The materials were hosted on a system called Canvas. This means that my name and email address are almost certainly in whatever ShinyHunters walked off with as part of the not one, but two hacks they carried out against Canvas’ parent company, Instructure that have made news this week. I’m thrilled about that. As are the other millions of users, I’m sure.

      I was part of a research team a couple of years ago that studied the harms ransomware causes to organisations, funded by the UK’s NCSC. So, on some level, I know that ShinyHunters are after Instructure, not individual students. What was taken — names, email addresses, messages between students and teachers — is phishing material. It’s still a bit disquieting. I’ll be keeping an eye out for weird emails; if you’re linked to education in any way, you probably should too.

      If you’re reading this as a parent, or even as a teacher or student, know that your school has zero ability to get Canvas running again by itself. The target was Instructure. But that doesn’t matter, really: endless social media posts of locked screens with ransom notes on show that the users suffer too, in very tangible ways.

      This is the thread running through all three of this week’s stories: questions around the way children’s data is stored and (potentially) abused.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. ‘The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History’: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech — 404 Media

      Note: this is one of any number of articles on this. I have picked this one as an interview, rather than just reporting, given the evolving nature of the story.

      On Thursday, millions of students across thousands of universities and schools were locked out of Canvas — the learning management platform used by over 8,000 institutions globally. ShinyHunters had hacked Instructure, Canvas’s parent company, and claimed to have stolen data from 275 million people: names, email addresses, student IDs, and the messages students exchange with teachers about absences, medical conditions, disability accommodations, and more serious things.

      This specific article is a brief interview with Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian who has spent 20 years in edtech. He describes it as the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. His explanation for why it could happen at this scale: the move from self-hosted, institution-controlled systems to centralised US tech companies roughly a decade ago put everything in one place, held by one company, in a way that was not strictly necessary.

      The breach also creates an immediate phishing risk. Canvas messages contain exactly the material — a student’s name, the thread of a prior conversation — that makes a fraudulent follow-up email convincing. If you’re worried about this for your own child, I wrote a post on Substack about talking to kids about phishing here.

      2. UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts — The Guardian

      Criminals used AI to manipulate photographs from an unnamed UK secondary school’s website into child sexual abuse material, then sent the images to the school with a demand for money. The Internet Watch Foundation identified 150 of the resulting images as CSAM under UK law. The school was not the only known target.

      The guidance that followed — from an advisory body including the NSPCC, the NCA, and the IWF — advised schools to consider removing face-on photographs of pupils from their websites entirely. They should ask whether a milestone can be celebrated without showing a child’s face. They should audit their images regularly. They should avoid publishing names alongside photographs.

      This raises an interesting question: how do you make a school website appealing or engaging without pictures of children on it?

      3. Instagram privacy tech is turned off today — what does this mean for your DMs? — BBC News

      Instagram direct messages are no longer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), as of 8 May. Meta had pledged E2EE on Instagram in 2019, completed the rollout on Facebook Messenger in 2023, and then abandoned it on Instagram via a terms-and-conditions update in March.

      The NSPCC welcomed the reversal: E2EE makes it harder to detect grooming and abuse in private messages. Big Brother Watch condemned it: E2EE is one of the main ways children keep their data safe online. Meta gave the reason that too few users had opted in to E2EE. Commentators noted that opt-in predictably produces low uptake, and that there is a concern that this is a way into monetising this data. Meta has already begun collecting employee activity for AI training.

      Instagram says direct messages are not used to train AI. The company declined to comment further.

      🔁 ICYMI

      Philly middle schoolers are examining AI — and questioning its impact on their lives — Chalkbeat

      Middle school students at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Philadelphia last week presented their AI research to parents, teachers, and state and local officials. This was research into how governments use AI, its environmental costs, its role in creative fields, and whether it might be an economic bubble. They presented their findings and what they felt about them.

      Views covered the impact on learning that the students had noted — both positive and negative — and the fact that it is impossible not to use AI because of its integration into search engines. The students also commented that they felt like they knew more than the adults in their lives.

      This model — where the entire school community comes together to listen to the children’s experiences and thoughts — is fundamental to CAISE’s research model. It’s really exciting to see examples like this working well elsewhere!

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Camera-ready versions of an IDC work in progress and workshop position paper were submitted; lots of planning for the social media consultation research (which will be happening over the next couple of weeks) is underway!

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    6. CAISE Note – Issue #11

      CAISE Note – Issue #11

      This week: children’s views on AI inevitability; parents and children confirming the Online Safety Act isn’t working as intended; the wide cultural divide on AI optimism.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      The heaviest AI users in Gen Z — the ones on it every day — showed an 18-point drop in excitement about it over the past year. This is not how the typical hype-cycle goes. AI is doing the opposite than expected here.

      This comes from a Gallup poll. Across the full Gen Z sample, excitement is down 14 points. Hope is down 9; anger up 9. Eighty percent of Gen Z say AI is likely to make future learning harder. In the same survey, the proportion who believe they will be prepared to use AI after high school rose 12 points in a year, to over 50 percent.

      Those two numbers, sitting next to each other, describe something that is not confusion and not optimism. It is adaptation.

      The teenagers are absorbing two positions at once: AI is hurting their learning, and AI is what they believe they need to engage with for their future. They have not resolved this contradiction because the adults around them have not resolved it.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Kids Can Feel AI Hurting Them, They Have to Use It Anyway — Psychology Today

      This is the article that drew my attention to the Gallup poll data. What looks like teenage contradiction — AI is hurting me, AI is my future — is better understood as cognitive dissonance: children caught between an environment that compels AI use and their own clear-eyed observation that it is working against them. I wouldn’t normally put in a piece from Psychology Today, but the reflection on what living with this cognitive dissonance does is helpful to reflect upon.

      Children build motivation by thinking that their own judgment shapes the world they live in. In this case, there is a risk that the message about the need for AI — the message being pushed out by the adults with power in their lives — is at odds with their lived existence. When you accept that the thing that is important is not the thing you feel and experience, you can lose the message that you can effect change; that your views matter. Given the ongoing questions as to how much children’s views are being listened to at present, this is quite a depressing thing to think about.

      2. The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online? — Internet Matters / The Register

      Internet Matters has published the first substantial evaluation of the Online Safety Act from the perspective of families, drawing on a survey of 1,270 children and parents alongside focus groups conducted earlier this year.

      Around seven in ten children and parents have noticed new safety features — better reporting tools, content filters, age checks — and most of them welcome the changes. Optimism is cautious but present: 42% of children feel the online world has become safer for them recently.

      What the report is more useful for, though, is what it shows is not working and what is not being addressed at all.

      On age verification: 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, and 32% say they have done so in the past two months. The methods range from entering a false birthdate to submitting video footage of another person’s face — or, in one case reported by a parent, and picked up prominently by The Register’s article, a child drawing a moustache on themselves with an eyebrow pencil, which the system accepted. More striking still: a quarter of parents have allowed their child to bypass age checks, with 17% actively helping them do so. That cost-benefit analysis is helpful to consider: examples given included games parents had played and felt were appropriate for the maturity of their child, and allowing children to make videos in situations where the audience was known.

      On scope: the issues families describe as their most immediate concerns — the amount of time children spend online, and the growing presence of AI-generated content in their feeds — are almost entirely outside what the OSA addresses. Mixed views were reported on the idea of a social media ban, with those against it suggesting it would be ineffective or detrimental. Stronger enforcement of the OSA, stricter age-checks and restricting harmful features were the most popular alternatives to a ban.

      3. AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the US — Rest of World / Stanford HAI

      A Stanford University study finds a striking divergence in how different populations relate to AI. In the US, 38% of respondents describe AI as making them excited. In China, that figure is 84%. In Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, it sits between 77 and 80%. Trust in government to regulate AI responsibly: 31% in the US, 81% in Singapore.

      The Rest of World framing is primarily about innovation ecosystems and where AI talent is concentrating. But the finding matters differently for this newsletter’s concerns. Children growing up in countries with high AI optimism and high institutional trust are inhabiting a fundamentally different relationship with the technology than children growing up in the UK or US, where adult anxiety is ambient, political messaging is contradictory, and policy is reactive. The cognitive dissonance described in the Psychology Today piece above may not be a universal experience of adolescence in the AI era. It may be a specifically Western one — shaped by the particular context in which these children are encountering the technology.

      CAISE’s policy and media reviews will draw on Chinese policy and media coverage alongside Western sources precisely because of this. The question of what AI does to children’s development cannot be answered without asking: whose childhood, in what institutional context, under what regulatory assumptions, at what moment in their country’s relationship with the technology.

      🔁 ICYMI

      London schools trialling VR to relieve pupils’ stress — The Guardian

      All 15 secondary schools in the London borough of Sutton are using VR headsets in a pilot alongside the local NHS mental health trust. The programme, which is seven minutes long, is used when pupils become overwhelmed in class: by exam anxiety, ADHD, difficult mornings, things that happened at home. Nine out of ten pupils who used the headsets in the first ten schools saw an immediate drop in stress. Schools report reductions in pupils needing to leave lessons.

      The honest context for this is that CAMHS services across England are severely overloaded. VR as a low-cost school-based intervention is partly a response to a service that cannot cope with demand. That is not straightforwardly good news, even if the outcomes are promising.

      But the design logic is worth noting. The programme was built around what overwhelmed children actually need in an acute moment: something that breaks the loop, quickly, without requiring a waiting list or a referral. It is designed to meet the child’s need, and the child is the one that asks to use it. It seems to be a solution supporting both the child and the system, which is lovely to read about!

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      More logistics, but also the start of some fieldwork! It’s very exciting to get started.

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    7. CAISE Notes – Issue #10

      CAISE Notes – Issue #10

      This week: research that asks children what they think, policy that has already decided what it thinks, and the timelines that do not add up.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      Apologies — it’s a long one…and yet more social media stuff.

      On Monday evening, MPs voted 272 to 64 in favour of government amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that commit ministers to imposing social media restrictions on under-16s. Junior education minister Olivia Bailey told the Commons that, whatever the consultation outcome, the government would put age- or functionality-based restrictions in place, with curfews on top of rather than instead of those measures. Speaking to BBC Breakfast this morning, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed the government’s intention to move before the end of the year.

      Yesterday morning, I attended a webinar with the IRL Trial team.

      The IRL Trial is (they believe) the largest scientific study of social media restrictions in healthy teenagers anywhere in the world. It is run jointly by Cambridge and the Born in Bradford team. The government has been softly promoting it alongside the consultation work.

      Participants in Born in Bradford, a longitudinal cohort study tracking the lives of more than 60,000 Bradfordians, asked researchers in 2021 to look at whether social media was harming young people. This trial is what came out of that ask; timely, but not rushed in approach.

      A few things from yesterday’s webinar are worth having on record.

      The trial was co-designed with the young people who will take part in it. When the team asked them what they thought of a full ban, they said they would simply circumvent it. The trial therefore tests not a ban but a daily one or two hour cap on the social media platforms covered by the Australian ban, with a 9pm to 7am overnight curfew. Compliance is supported through an app with incentives such as leaderboards. Participants can override the time limits. This is, the team made clear, by design.

      The team also made an ethical point that does not feature in any government messaging on this topic. Some young people, particularly those who are vulnerable or marginalised, rely on online communities for connection that is not available to them offline. Studying a full ban would mean removing that connection from research participants. Ethically, it’s just not ok to research.

      The trial does not, and cannot, address use during school hours. Its research question is about end-of-day social media use. Schools are getting separate phone restrictions, by separate legislation, on a separate timeline.

      The trial begins in September. Full analysis is expected by mid-2027.

      Set those timelines against this morning’s announcement. The consultation that informs the policy closes on 26 May. The government has committed to laying regulations within twelve months, but is aiming to move before the end of this year. There is no mechanism by which IRL Trial findings can inform a regulatory framework that will be in place before the trial has produced any.

      One further observation. The consultation was run by DSIT, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This morning’s announcement, and yesterday’s parliamentary motion, came from DfE, the Department for Education. Unlike the phone ban during school hours and the new plans for digital/media literacy, it’s a bit confusing to me why DfE are now involved — and, bluntly, doesn’t feel like it bodes well for more holistic considerations about social media for everyone.

      Changing the tone, slightly — along with the IRL Trial, we are repeatedly seeing surveys and data around how children are using — and cannot use — tech. This week, neurodiversity and edtech. The Digital Poverty Alliance report from earlier this month, covered below, reported that 90% of neurodivergent young people surveyed said the educational platforms they are required to use are not accessible.

      The recurring question of this newsletter, expressed differently each week: who is the design for, what are they being asked, and whether their answers are allowed to go anywhere uncomfortable. The IRL Trial is doing the work to take that question seriously, and I’m really looking forward to the outcomes. The policy is not waiting for the answer.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Social media restrictions for under-16s even if no ban, minister says — BBC News

      The political mechanics are worth following carefully. The Lords have voted four times in favour of opposition amendments calling for a faster ban; the government has now offered amendments that commit ministers to act, but on a longer timeline than the Lords had pushed for. The bill returns to the Lords for what looks like final consideration before royal assent. A progress report is due three months after that, with twelve months to lay regulations, though the government has signalled it intends to move before the end of the year.

      The shape of the restrictions has not been decided. The decision to impose them has. Among the options on the table: a ban, age verification, functionality restrictions, curfews, or some combination. The consultation that closes on 26 May will shape the form, not the fact, of the action.

      The political coalition supporting this is broad, and it includes parents who lost children in circumstances they associate with social media platforms. Their voices are essential to this conversation. The conversation also needs to include what we know, and what we are about to know, about whether the proposed mechanisms will deliver what they are being asked to deliver.

      2. Digital Learning Dominates Schools But Remains Inaccessible to 90% of Digitally Excluded Young People — Digital Poverty Alliance / FE News

      The DPA’s Accessibility in Digital Education Service Design Report is the clearest thing I have read this year on how educational technology fails ND learners by default. 88 respondents, primarily ADHD or autistic, the majority in Key Stages 3 and 4. The headline numbers are in the thinking section above; the report’s intersectional analysis is what gives it its weight.

      ND learners who also have English as a second language navigate disorganised interfaces while relying on translation tools that struggle on those same interfaces. ND learners from ethnic minority backgrounds are statistically less likely to be diagnosed in the first place, so the support they would otherwise be entitled to does not arrive. ND learners in digital poverty access platforms designed for laptops on the only device they have, a smartphone. These exclusions don’t sit alongside each other. They land on the same children.

      The recommendations are practical: interface customisation, flexible design, engagement with accessibility organisations including ADHD UK and ADHD Pirates, and inclusive consultation that genuinely reflects how accessibility intersects with other factors. Anyone choosing or designing software for schools should read it.

      3. How the three largest US school districts are approaching AI in classrooms — Mashable

      A useful primer on what district-level AI policy actually looks like in practice. NYC’s new guidelines use a “traffic light” approach, with explicit prohibitions on AI being used to create Individualised Education Plans, confer grades, make disciplinary decisions, or provide emotional and therapeutic counsel to students. LAUSD bans generative AI for under-13s and requires administrator approval for older students. Chicago has a detailed guidebook in which most chatbots, including ChatGPT and Claude, are currently not approved for student use.

      Two things make this worth reading. It shows what consequential AI policy looks like when written by people who have actually thought about disability and child protection. And it ends on a sharp contrast: AI-only Alpha schools, private-equity-funded, replacing human teachers with screens for two hours a day.

      A RAND survey quoted in the piece is also worth flagging. 80% of US students said their teachers had not taught them how to use AI for schoolwork. Fewer than half of school principals reported having an AI policy.

      🔁 ICYMI

      SWGfL Launches Survey to Gather Professional Views About Social Media Banning — UK Safer Internet Centre

      SWGfL has launched a survey of professionals working with children, asking what they think a possible under-16 social media ban should look like. This is, usefully, the inverse population to the government’s own consultation, which asks children, parents, and the public. The professionals being asked here are the ones who will be doing the actual work of supporting children through whatever policy lands. If you work in this space, fill it in.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Forms forms forms! The logistics of empirical research are…not small. This week, we’re aiming to get as many ducks in a row as we can so that we can get started asap!

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

    8. CAISE Notes – Issue #9

      CAISE Notes – Issue #9

      This week: social media bans, sovereign AI, and a government that wants children to say technology is bad while betting half a billion pounds that it isn’t.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      Last week, the Prime Minister summoned senior leaders from Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Google to Downing Street and told them that a ban on children using their platforms would be preferable to a world where harm is the price of social media use. The government already has the powers to act. It is waiting for its Growing Up in the Online World consultation to close on 26 May.

      That same evening, the Technology Secretary launched the £500m Sovereign AI fund, calling for the UK to be “an AI maker, not just an AI taker.”

      I have been writing about this consultation since Issue 3, when I looked at its design: the parental login barriers, the single age bracket covering 10 to 21-year-olds, the leading questions, the lack of a save or back button. The problems I raised then were about access and design. The problems now are bigger.

      The consultation is under legal challenge. Two fathers are preparing a High Court action after it emerged that the government’s survey contractor will use Amazon and Microsoft AI to process the responses. The tools being used to summarise public views on technology regulation are built by companies that stand to be regulated by the outcome.

      And then there is the question of what children are actually being asked. The consultation’s questions about AI chatbots are, roughly: tell us how they are bad for you. Not how you use them. Not what you get from them. Not what you would change. Just: how are they bad. Children are being invited to participate in a process that has already decided what shape their answers should take.

      Set that against the Sovereign AI fund announcement and the contradiction becomes structural, not just optical. The government is asking children to confirm that technology harms them. It is simultaneously investing half a billion pounds in the premise that technology is the country’s future. Children are being told they are part of the conversation. They are not being given the conversation that matters.

      Regular readers will know that a recurring theme in this newsletter is who gets asked, what they get asked, and whether the answers are allowed to go anywhere uncomfortable. This week is a case study. The consultation closes in five weeks. The direction of travel was set before it opened.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Starmer summons social media bosses to Downing Street and threatens a ban — GOV.UK / The Scotsman

      Senior leaders from Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Google were called to Downing Street on Thursday and told that a ban on children accessing their platforms remains on the table. The government has secured the powers to act once the Growing Up in the Online World consultation closes on 26 May. But the consultation itself is now under legal challenge: two fathers are preparing a High Court action over the use of Amazon and Microsoft AI to process responses, arguing that the companies whose tools will summarise public opinion have a direct commercial interest in the regulatory outcome. Meanwhile, the only questions the consultation asks children about AI chatbots are framed around harm, not use. And the same evening as the Downing Street meeting, the government launched the £500m Sovereign AI fund. The messaging to children: technology is dangerous. The messaging to industry: technology is the future. Both cannot be the whole story.

      2. Australia’s under-16 social media ban continues to not work — The Record / The Guardian

      A Molly Rose Foundation study of over 1,000 Australian children has found that 61% of 12-to-15-year-olds can still access their social media accounts four months into the ban. Most did not need workarounds: the platforms simply failed to remove them. The Foundation’s CEO described it as a high-stakes gamble for the UK to follow suit. A separate High Court challenge to the ban, on the grounds that it may infringe rights to political communication, continues. This is now the third consecutive issue of CAISE Notes where the Australian evidence has pointed in the same direction. The ban has not changed the landscape. It has changed who is expected to work around it.

      3. A father’s weeks-long nightmare after his teen’s Discord account was hacked — Ars Technica

      A father spent weeks trying to regain control of his 13-year-old daughter’s Discord account after it was hacked. She had signed up at 12, lying about her age as children routinely do. Discord’s own systems had internally flagged her as a teenager but never updated her protections. The hacker used her account to target 38 of her friends. Discord’s support chatbot kept auto-closing the father’s tickets. It took a journalist intervening to get action. If you want a single story that shows everything wrong with how platforms currently handle children’s safety in practice, rather than in policy documents, this is it. The protections existed on paper. None of them worked when they were needed.

      🔁 ICYMI

      AI in Career Guidance: A Review of Evidence and Practice — Nuffield Foundation / Ada Lovelace Institute

      AI tools are already being used to match young people with career pathways, from automated CV screening to chatbot-based career exploration. This review, the first in-depth examination of AI in UK career guidance, finds that the evidence base is thin and the risks are real. Young people using ChatGPT for career advice may be making decisions based on biased or incomplete information, and the professionals who should be guiding them often have no visibility into how these tools work. Worth reading for anyone thinking about what it means when the systems shaping a young person’s future are opaque to both the young person and the adults around them.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Big week. Ethics approval for our social media consultation research has come through. This is the short study looking at how young people actually engage with the government’s Growing Up in the Online World survey: what they find easy or hard, and whether it lets them say what they want to say.

      If you work with groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May deadline, please get in touch.

      And some good news on the academic side: a short literature review submitted to ACM’s Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference has been accepted. More details to follow once we can share publicly.

      → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

      Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.