The UK government announced on 24 March 2026 that it will put 300 teenagers aged 13 to 17 into a six-week trial testing different approaches to restricting social media use at home. Families will be split into four groups, each testing a different intervention: a complete social media ban, a one-hour daily limit, a 9pm-to-7am curfew, and a control group with no changes. Researchers will track the impact on sleep, schoolwork and family life.
What the pilot will actually test
The trial, run by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is designed to answer the questions that families across the country have been wrestling with for years. Does a total ban work in practice? Is a time limit enough? Does cutting off social media at bedtime make a measurable difference?
Each group will test one of these four approaches. In the ban group, parents will be shown how to use parental controls to remove or block access to social media apps entirely. The time-limit group will cap the most popular platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, at one hour per day. The curfew group will block social media between 9pm and 7am. The final group will carry on as normal, providing a comparison.
Families will be interviewed at the start and end of the trial. Researchers want to understand not just whether the restrictions helped, but what the practical challenges were — how hard it was to set up controls, and whether teenagers found workarounds to bypass them.
A separate, larger scientific study is coming too
Running alongside the government pilot is a much larger independent study. Professor Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge and Dr Dan Lewer from the Born in Bradford programme are leading the IRL Trial (short for “In Real Life”), which will recruit around 4,000 pupils aged 12 to 15 from ten secondary schools in Bradford.
In that trial, a custom app installed on participants’ phones will cap social media use to roughly one hour per day and block it entirely overnight. Half the year groups will have the restrictions; the other half will use social media as normal. Researchers will track anxiety, sleep quality, body image, school absences and bullying. Results are expected by mid-summer 2027.
The IRL Trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust and is independent of the government, but its findings will feed directly into the policy debate. Professor Orben has noted that, to her knowledge, no high-quality scientific study has yet removed or substantially reduced social media use among healthy teenagers and systematically measured the consequences. This trial aims to fill that gap.
The consultation is still open — and your voice matters
Both the pilot and the IRL Trial sit alongside the UK government’s wider consultation on children’s digital wellbeing, which has already received nearly 30,000 responses from parents and children. The consultation closes on 26 May 2026, and the government has said it will respond in the summer.
The consultation asks about whether there should be a minimum age for social media, whether platforms should be required to switch off addictive features like infinite scrolling and autoplay, and how any new rules would work in practice. The government has said it will introduce new legislative powers that allow ministers to act quickly on the findings, rather than waiting years for fresh legislation.
What this means for you right now
The pilot results will not be available for several weeks, and the larger Bradford study will report next year. But there are things parents can do now.
If you have been considering a total ban, a time limit or a bedtime curfew for your teenager’s social media use, this pilot is essentially testing the same approaches you might try at home. The practical challenges the pilot families encounter — setting up controls, handling workarounds, managing the social pressure on teenagers who are offline when their friends are not — will be documented and published.
In the meantime, the most useful action is to respond to the consultation before 26 May. It takes around 15 minutes and there are dedicated versions for parents and for young people. Nearly 30,000 people have already responded, and the results will directly shape what the government does next.
The UK is no longer just debating whether to restrict children’s social media. It is testing it. The question now is what the evidence will show, and whether the government is prepared to act on it.
GOV.UK — Consultation on protecting children in a digital world
