I need to post here, because I think there's a glaring point that's missing in the discussion so far. I'm based in the Borders. And what's happening in the Scottish Borders right now should be a massive red flag for anyone writing guidance on screen time for young children. Because this isn’t about parents struggling to "find balance" at home – it’s about a council system where very young nursery and primary kids are being pushed into high levels of screen use as standard, whether families are comfortable with it or not.
Parents across the Borders are reporting that children well before P4 (the official point our council issues each child with their own iPad) are using school-issued iPads during the school day, sometimes without parents even being told devices had been introduced (my own P1 got her dedicated iPad at school and I only learned about it because my daughter told me age 5!). In some cases, those children are interacting with AI tools – including voice input and image generation – with little more than verbal instructions like "just don’t click that" when I asked how the in=built browser was locked down. It wasn't! That's not meaningful safeguarding for early years children, it's wishful thinking. And it's happening in nurseries and classrooms, not just at home, and often being justified with the "it's taeaching them digital skills, it's mandatory for their education, you can't opt out" from our local council.
Even more worrying, there are repeated reports of children accessing inappropriate or distressing content on those devices during class time. When parents raise concerns, they're often told the internet is a place to be careful, and safety can't be guaranteed – or that responsibility sits partly with the child!! For nursery and primary-aged kids!!
That completely flips the idea of safeguarding on its head, and it shows how far reality has drifted from the kind of calm, supportive advice being asked for as part of the conversation here.
There's also a bigger issue about how much screen time children are getting by default. In Borders primary schools, screens are being used right across the curriculum, with no clear limits and, according to other parents Iv'e checked with (I wanted to find out if our school was going off message), no published guidance on maximum usage. That sits completely at odds with public health advice that young children should have tightly limited screen exposure. Parents aren't just trying to manage screens at home anymore; they’re trying to undo hours of it that are effectively mandated during the school day.
And underpinning all of this is a lack of transparency and choice. Families report unclear or blocked opt-outs, children being signed up to multiple apps without informed consent (including some truly horrific, gamification apps that SBC has called "core apps" for education), and no clear explanation of how their data is being used. This isn’t just a "screen time" issue – it's about safeguarding, consent, and whether parents actually have any control over their child's digital environment in the early years.
So if this new guidance is going to mean anything, it needs to recognise a really uncomfortable truth: for some families, the problem isn't too much screen time at home – it's that high screen use is being built into education systems themselves, with huge profits to be made by educational technology companies, with very young children exposed to risks parents neither chose nor can easily avoid even if they explicitly ask to tone it down or opt out.
We're havingg an horific time with all this in the Borders. Please, please consider these experiences as part of your guidance, because parents need government support - the local council is just ignoring, denying and gaslighting parents who are raising concerns. YOU might have more luck in getting them to listen to evidence-based, risk-managed decision making on what tech they silently roll out to our most vulnerable citizens - because we, and many other parents I've gently prodded over the last few weeks of increasing alarm, aren't getting anywhere.