From March, anyone under 16 will be barred from ten of the biggest platforms, among them Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.

Ofcom has now named four ways to prove age: photo ID checked against a live image, bank records, face age estimation and digital ID. The government will decide by the end of the year.

Nobody expects it to be watertight.

Many children in Australia found their way round a similar ban, and Ofcom concedes that ‘the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated.’

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Jonny Blunt of BT says the ban will work ‘only if regulators, tech companies, families, and educators come together to make it a success.’ Of the four, schools are the only ones who see pupils every day.

Many schools have spent years competing with the screen for pupils’ attention. From March, some of that attention may come back on site. Whether there is room for it, time will tell.

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The more telling line came from Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive.

The real prize, she said, is for today’s eight to ten-year-olds to start secondary school ‘without it being the norm to go on Snap in your class group chat, without it being the norm to have all your sports fixtures organised on Instagram.’

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For a decade, much of school life has run through phones. Team sheets went out on Instagram. Year groups organised themselves on Snapchat.

Friendships carried on, and fell apart, long after the bell.

From March, they may see the first signs of recovery: the noise, mess, chaos and confusion that come from children figuring things out in person.

So strap in.
Schools are about to get much, much livelier.

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