Conference Agenda

This Network 16 symposium addresses the ECER 2026 theme “Education in Times of Uncertainty” by examining a critical turning point in European educational policy: the global shift toward restricting children’s digital device use. Drawing on Biesta’s (2013) notion of the ‘risk of education’, we question whether these new ‘disconnect’ policies attempt to eliminate the inherent uncertainty of digital socialization through control, or if they represent a necessary safeguarding of the pedagogical space.

Comparing four distinct European contexts (France, UK, Portugal, and Scandinavia), this session moves beyond simple “pro/anti-screen” binaries to analyze the underlying political and pedagogical rationales of these new regulations.

Paper 1 (France) opens the discussion with a longitudinal analysis of the French “prohibitionist turn” (2016-2026). Gabriel demonstrates how public policy has shifted from a health-based paradigm to a disciplinary one, culminating in the 2025 “Digital Pause”. The paper highlights the tension for teachers, now tasked with being “screen regulators” without adequate professional training in digital sociology.

Paper 2 (UK) provides a critical theoretical counterpoint. Costa. challenges the “misplaced accountability” of UK policies (like the Dorset Council ban), arguing that they offload systemic failures of platform governance onto young individuals. Using Honneth’s theory of recognition, she critiques these “pedagogies of fear” and calls for addressing the structural conditions of digital harm rather than simply removing devices.

Paper 3 (Portugal) offers a contrasting Southern European perspective. Freitas and colleagues examine how Portugal’s 2025 recommendations balance restriction with a framework of “ethical care”. By framing digital citizenship as a constellation of rights and duties, this contribution illustrates how schools can foster moral agency and participation, moving from prohibition to “ethical mediation”.

Paper 4 (Scandinavie) expands the scope to the Nordic model. Hillen’s systematic review questions whether recent regulations in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland align with traditional Scandinavian values of trust and democracy. It investigates whether these measures represent a “technological step back” or a necessary recalibration to protect children’s development within highly digitized welfare states.

Collectively, these contributions reveal a “European paradox”: while policymakers increasingly restrict access to protect youth, TALIS 2024 data (OECD, 2025) shows that teachers lack the “digital mediation competencies” required to navigate this landscape. The symposium concludes that moving beyond bans requires re-professionalizing teachers not as enforcers, but as critical mediators of a complex digital reality.

In a context where French children aged 6 to 17 spend an average of more than 4 hours a day in front of a screen (Esteban, 2020), France has radically changed its regulatory framework over the last decade. This contribution analyses how French public policies have shifted from a framework based on health protection (2016-2020) to one based on educational regulation and restriction (2024-2026). We explore the justification for these policies through scientific reports and their implementation in school and family contexts. We conducted a critical analysis of official texts and scientific reports published between 2016 and 2026. The initial phase (2019-2022) was justified by health authorities (ANSES, 2020; HCSP, 2020), which highlighted risks to sleep, physical inactivity, and mental health. These reports legitimised ‘soft law’ approaches (Plan 2022; DITP, 2022). A break occurred in 2024 with the Presidential Commission on Screens (2024). Beyond developmental threats, the commission highlighted systemic risks associated with exposure to unregulated content (pornography, algorithmic addiction), citing ARCOM (2023) on pornography exposure (30% of 11-18 year-olds) and ANSES (2024) on algorithmic addiction, paving the way for ‘hard law’. This transition culminated in the 2024 law aimed at securing and regulating the digital space (RF, 2024), and the 2025 ‘Digital Pause’, which imposes a ban on smartphones and restricts digital workspaces (ENT) to sanitize the learning environment. We analyze the tension between protection (interdiction) and education (digital citizenship). This regulatory hardening is not a panic reaction but a doctrinal build-up visible in institutional discourse since 2020, shifting from technical protection (filtering) to critical digital citizenship (AI, fake news, cyberbullying). While the “Digital Break” (2025) reduces immediate exposure, it poses challenges regarding social inequalities. Furthermore, drawing on the work of Roebroeck and Gabriel, we argue that this shift fundamentally alters the professionality of teachers. Educators are now required to navigate between the roles of “screen regulators”, “literacy builders“, and “critical mediators” against emerging threats (AI misuse, disinformation, foreign influence). However, this policy shift dramatically outpaces the training engineering necessary to support professionals, occurring amidst a stalled national teacher training reform that leaves educators in a state of uncertainty. Implicitly comparing the French “prohibitionist” turn with international trends, we conclude that regulation is necessary but risks ineffectiveness without massive investment in support and professional development. Keywords: Screen time regulation, Educational Policy, Digital well-being, Teacher Professionality, French Education System.

ANSES. (2025). Avis de l’Anses relatif aux « effets de l’usage des réseaux sociaux numériques sur la santé des adolescents ». Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire. ARCOM (2023). La fréquentation des sites « adultes » par les mineurs. Commission d’experts sur l’exposition des enfants aux écrans. (2024). Enfants et écrans : à la recherche du temps perdu. République française. Gabriel, P. et Roebroeck, E. (2025). Ingénierie de formation dans les milieux ruraux : Analyse des besoins, adaptation aux publics et aux territoires isolés, et intégration des outils numériques pour les formations médico-techniques. Dans S. Guillon, J.-Y. Causer et S. Zaouani-Denoux (dir.), L’accompagnement au temps des vulnérabilités : professionnaliser les espaces d’éducation et de formation. Peter Lang. Haut Conseil de la santé publique (HCSP). (2020). Analyse des données scientifiques : Effets de l'exposition des enfants et des jeunes aux écrans. Paris. Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale. (2025). Circulaire MENE2519904C: Promouvoir un numérique raisonné à l’École. Bulletin Officiel de l'Éducation Nationale. République Française (2024). Loi n° 2024-449 du 21 mai 2024 visant à sécuriser et à réguler l'espace numérique. Journal Officiel de la République Française. Santé publique France (2020 février). Étude de santé sur l'environnement, la biosurveillance, l'activité physique et la nutrition (Esteban 2014-2016) – 2ème éd.

Across the UK and internationally, governments are increasingly proposing or implementing restrictive measures on young people’s digital participation. Particularly smartphone bans in and around schools are framed as safeguarding and mental-health interventions (see Rahali, Kidron, and Livingstone,2024). This symposium contribution interrogates the assumptions underpinning these policy responses and their implications for digital well-being. It argues that such measures reflect a misplaced attribution of accountability, whereby young people are made to bear the consequences of systemic failures in platform governance, educational policy, and commercial digital infrastructures. Rather than addressing the social, cultural, and relational conditions that shape digital harm (Costa and Oliver, 2025), risk-management approaches reduce digital well-being to a technical problem solvable through prohibition. Focusing on the UK context, where local authorities such as Dorset Council (see Tappenden, 2026) as well as the House of Lords1 aim to introduce phone bans, the paper critically examines how these interventions obscure the ethical, pedagogical, and participatory dimensions of digital life (Costa et al., 2025). These policies not only curtail young people’s freedoms but also sit in direct conflict with national ambitions for a digitally skilled workforce. Moreover, they are often informed by psychological discourses of addiction that promote pedagogies of fear, restriction, and mistrust. In response, the paper advances a pedagogy of empowerment grounded in intersubjective understandings of digital life, drawing on Honneth's (1996) seminal work of interpersonal recognition. It reframes digital well-being as a collective ethical project, calling for nuanced policy approaches that move beyond digital bans and towards a pedagogy of empowerment and shared responsibility. Keywords: digital wellbeing; mobile phone bans; risk management; digital freedoms, recognition ____ 1. On the 20th January 2026, the UK Parliament debated banning phones or social media for under-16s. The House of Lords backed an amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, but at the time of writing the government is still consulting on this matter. Driven by mental-health concerns, recommendations include age limits, curfews, and stronger age checks, inspired by the Australian ban.

Costa, C., Bhatia, P., Murphy, M., & Pereira, A. L. (2023). Digital Education Colonized by Design: Curriculum Reimagined. Education Sciences, 13(9), 895. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13090895 Costa, C., & Oliver, M. (2025). Young people and digital literacy learning: Co-producing critical citizenship practices. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2025.2593611 Honneth, A. (1996). Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (New Ed edition). Polity. Rahali, M., Kidron, B., and Livingstone, S. (2024). Smartphone policies in schools: What does the evidence say? Digital Futures for Children centre, LSE and 5Rights Foundation. Tappenden, R. (2026, January 14). Dorset Council encourages schools to ban smart phones. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7v0red888yo

ebates on children’s and adolescents’ digital media use increasingly oscillate between restrictive regulatory approaches and emancipatory educational responses [1]. Digital citizenship education, understood as a constellation of rights, duties, participation, and identity in relation to digital processes, environments, and artefacts [2], provides a useful lens for analysing national policy responses to young people’s digital lives. In Portugal, an internationally recognised legislative framework promoting inclusive education and curricular flexibility enables schools to address digital issues through both regulation and pedagogical-ethical reflection. Recent national recommendations on digital education and school wellbeing further develop this approach by combining measures that limit smartphone use in schools [3] with calls for critical, participatory, and formative engagement with students’ digital practices [4]. Situated within this context, this paper presents findings from an international literature review conducted as part of a mixed-methods exploratory research project examining digital ethics as a structural dimension of inclusive K-12 digital education. Acknowledging the complexities of researching children’s lived experiences [5], the review draws on systematic searches across EBSCO, Web of Science, and Scopus, identifying four core dimensions of digital ethics in compulsory education: responsible and safe technology use; values, virtues, and digital citizenship; moral reasoning and social interaction; and emerging and interactive technologies. Building on this framework, the analysis proposes six educational dimensions shaping students’ educational experiences and trajectories, including curricular integration of digital ethics; critical reflection on use, privacy, and rights; experiential learning through gamification and collaborative digital tools; engagement with concepts such as ethical hacking; the role of whole-school cultures and institutional policies; and the development of socio-emotional competencies such as empathy, collaboration, and harm prevention (e.g. cyberbullying and sexting). By foregrounding participation, responsibility, and moral imagination, the paper positions digital citizenship education as a form of political and ethical care, emphasising teachers as ethical mediators and schools as spaces for moral agency and collective responsibility in children’s and adolescents’ digital lives. Keywords: digital ethics; digital citizenship; k-12 education; students’ educational experiences; Portuguese policy

[1] Emejulu, A., & McGregor, C. (2019). Towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 131–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1234494 [2] Richardson, J., & Milovidov, E. (2023). Digital citizenship education handbook: Being online, well-being online, rights online. Council of Europe Education Department. https://www.coe.int/en/web/education/-/digital-citizenship-education-handbook [3] Portuguese Government (2025). Recomendações às escolas para a operacionalização das regras e recomendações sobre o uso de smartphones nos espaços escolares [Recommendations to schools for the implementation of rules and guidance on the use of smartphones in school premises]. Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação - recomendação 2025-08-25. https://www.portugal.gov.pt/pt/gc25/comunicacao/documento?i=recomendacoes-as-escolas-para-a-operacionalizacao-das-regras-e-recomendacoes-sobre-o-uso-de-smartphones-nos-espacos-escolares [4] Nada, C. et al. (2025). Recomendações para a promoção do bem-estar digital nas escolas [Recommendations for the promotion of digital wellbeing in schools]. Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação - Direção-Geral da Educação. https://www.dge.mec.pt/noticias/divulgacao-das-recomendacoes-para-promocao-do-bem-estar-digital-nas-escolas [5] Freitas, A., & Frangella, R. (2026). Resistance, creativity, and critique in researching with children through arts-based narrative inquiry: Aporetics of subalternity as methodological knowledge in education. European Journal of Education, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70486

Trust, equality and democracy are important pillars of Scandinavian educational systems. Recently, Scandinavian countries have introduced guidelines to regulate the use of digital tools in education. Examples include banning phones, reducing screen time and teaching critical digital literacy. Are these policies intended to free, protect or hinder technological development for the sake of children’s development, or are they seen as safeguards for educational systems? To what extent will these trends affect the previous concept of digitalization in education (Olofsson & Lindberg, 2021)? The research question is: How do education policies in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland regulate the use of digital tools in compulsory school, and what educational, social, and wellbeing intentions and rationales are behind these regulations? A systematic review (Bearman et al., 2012) will be conducted based on white-papers, national curricula, regulation and laws will be conducted. The sub-research questions will address the following: Is there a Nordic policy trend visible? Do individual nations address these concerns differently, yielding different objectives? Are there already empirical results or effects of these kinds of measures? Keywords: digital policies, Scandinavian education, digital use regulations, literature review

Bearman, M., Smith, C. D., Carbone, A., Slade, S., Baik, C., Hughes-Warrington, M., & Neumann, D. L. (2012). Systematic review methodology in higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(5), 625–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.702735 Finnish Government. (2024). Government Bill HE 212/2024 vp: Amendment of the Basic Education Act. https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/vaski/HallituksenEsitys/Sivut/HE_212+2024.aspx Government Offices of Sweden. (2024). Investing in more reading time and less screen time in school. https://www.government.se/articles/2024/02/government-investing-in-more-reading-time-and-less-screen-time/ Ministry of Children and Education, Denmark. (2025). Agreement on mobile-free primary schools and after-school care. https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/uvm/2025/september/250930-ny-aftale-om-mobilfrie-folkeskoler-og-fritidstilbud Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. (2024). NOU 2024:20 – Screen use by children and young people. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nou-2024-20/id3073644/ Olofsson, A. D., & Lindberg, J. O. (2021). A glimpse of a Nordic model? Policy and practice in the digitalisation of the K-12 school and teacher education in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden: Editorial introduction. Education Inquiry, 12(4), 311–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2021.1988451