Science and Technology Committee (Commons)
3 November 2026
Contents updated on 3 Nov 2026
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Science and Technology Committee (Commons) Actual start House of Commons
Follow its sittings18:42 - 20:05
Speaker 1
Order and welcome to today's meeting of the Science and Technology Committee. This is the final evidence session in our Neuroscience and digital childhoods inquiry. And over the course of the inquiry, we've heard a wide range of evidence about both the potential benefits and harms of digital technologies for children and young people, including directly from teachers and students. And today, I'm very pleased to say that we're going to we have the opportunity to put that evidence to ministers and officials from across three departments most touched by digital technologies and children, the Department of Health, Education, and Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. And thank you very much for joining us this morning.
I'll ask each of you to introduce yourself when a question is first put to you. We want to understand how the government reacts to the evidence base, what it is doing to fill important gaps in the evidence, and how it makes policy when the evidence is uncertain or contested, as appears to be the case with regards to the impact of digital technologies on child brain development and child development more generally. So, I'm going to ask Emily to start us off.
20:05 - 21:00
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Chair, and welcome to you all on this very important inquiry. Many of us are parents, and I'm sure many of you on the panel are as well. But this is the Science, Innovation and Tech Committee, and what we are looking for is evidence. And you'll be aware that we This is the third session in the digital childhoods session, where we have been collating evidence.
So, I want to start with a very general question. So, I want We want to understand what is the evidence base that you are collecting or trying to fill the gaps in order to understand the impact of digital devices and digital content on children's brain development and physical development? And maybe if we start with you, Tabitha, and you can introduce yourself and answer the question. There's a lot of members to get through so if we can keep our answers quite short, because we have a lot of questions to get through.
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