DailyDrop.

On Monday the cabinet presented a strategy to better protect children online. The most visible part concerns school. From January 1, 2027, pupils in primary and secondary education are to put their phones away for the whole school day, including during breaks and in the schoolyard. The agreement is called ‘At home or in the locker’. A national agreement to keep phones out of lessons has applied since 2024; it is now being widened. According to the cabinet, many schools already go further than the lesson and keep devices out of the schoolyard too. The new line is meant to make that the same everywhere, so that pupils and parents do not have to learn a different rule for each school. NOS, NU.nl, de Volkskrant, NRC and Trouw all reported the news. It is not a law. The cabinet does not itself decide on phone use in schools, and so speaks of an urgent recommendation. State Secretary Tielen of Education is making agreements on this with the education sector, and the central government calls the start date an aim. According to de Volkskrant, secondary schools reacted sceptically. A school that already has a full ban told NOS that pupils have since spent less time in the toilets.

The phone rule is only one of about forty measures from various ministries; according to State Secretary Aerdts, fifteen are new. Digital services are to make less use of techniques that keep children online for a long time, such as endlessly scrolling videos and addictive algorithms. The cabinet wants a reliable form of age verification, without collecting an unnecessary amount of young people’s data in the process. At European level, the Netherlands is pushing for a minimum age of 15 for social media. The cabinet is also having research done into what services such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Roblox, Fortnite, Netflix and ChatGPT do to children’s wellbeing. Screen time of five to six hours a day is no longer an exception among young people, the cabinet writes. A more extensive response to European legislative proposals follows at the end of October; only then will it become clear how an age limit would work in practice. The same evening, scientists in NRC called for action against social media to protect young people’s health. Other European countries are already further ahead. France wants to ban social media for children under 15, and the European Commission is working on rules for age checks. For the Netherlands, the outcome in Brussels is therefore more important than what The Hague can arrange on its own. For schools the work begins now: lockers, agreements with parents about reachability, and exceptions for pupils who need their phone for medical reasons.