Answering a high-stakes policy question
When the government questioned whether under-16s should be banned from social media, it needed an answer built on evidence, not assumption. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – whose functions have since been distributed across the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Cabinet Office – commissioned research to build a robust, representative evidence base on children’s social media use, wellbeing and attitudes towards potential restrictions.
But the aim was not simply to survey opinion. It was to understand the nuance behind it – the trade-offs families navigate every day, the concerns young people carry that adults rarely hear, and what different forms of intervention might actually look like in practice.
The research had to be genuinely representative across age, geography, socioeconomic background, disability and ethnicity. And as those who would be most impacted by the policy, children and young people needed to be given a meaningful voice – not just as research subjects but as contributors to how the research was designed and how the evidence was interpreted.
It also needed to understand the views of multiple audiences, including parents, children and young people (CYP), as well as teachers and youth practitioners, bringing their often divergent perspectives together in productive tension.
Combining scale, rigour and lived experience
To answer a question this complex, Savanta needed both scale and depth — and, crucially, to keep the voices of young people at the heart of the conversation.
Savanta led a consortium that brought together two complementary strengths: the research infrastructure and analytical capability to deliver national research at scale, and the youth-sector relationships needed to make the engagement genuinely inclusive and youth-led. Consortium partners UK Youth and Volunteering Matters, who together power the #iWill Movement, enhanced that second capability, along with a network of local delivery partners and community organisations that proved critical to reaching underrepresented groups.
Eight Youth Collaborators, aged 14 to 25 and recruited through the #iWill Movement, were embedded in the research from the outset. They contributed to the design of research materials, co-facilitated the deliberative events, and participated directly in the analysis and interpretation of findings. The research was shaped by their judgement at every stage.
The quantitative strand reached more than 55,000 responses across five survey sources. A nationally representative panel survey of more than 9,000 children and young people aged 10 to 21 formed the primary CYP evidence base, alongside a representative survey of 5,000 parents of children aged 0 to 21 and a representative survey of more than 2,000 teachers and youth practitioners. A parallel public consultation attracted over 39,000 parent responses and 5,000 CYP responses, enabling direct comparison between representative and self-selecting samples.
The qualitative strand brought the research to life through seven in-person deliberative ‘Hack’ events held across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each brought together 20 to 80 young people aged 11 to 17, co-facilitated by Savanta researchers and Youth Collaborators working alongside local youth workers.
The Hack format was active and solutions-focused. It moved participants from initial reactions to informed positions. Participants were not simply asked what they thought; they were challenged to develop and argue for proposals.
No simple consensus — but clear direction
The research did not produce a neat consensus, and making sense of that was the central analytical challenge. On the headline question of a blanket under-16 ban, 76% of panel parents were in favour, while only 29% of panel CYP supported it. But when parents were asked to rank policy options against each other, a more nuanced picture emerged: feature-level restrictions ranked as the preferred intervention, followed by time-based controls, with a blanket ban coming third.
The qualitative evidence added important depth. Young people rejected an outright ban not because they were satisfied with the status quo – they were not – but because they believed it would not work in practice, and saw it as unjust to remove a space that had become central to their social lives. Their consistent demand was for platform-level change: restricting harmful algorithmic features such as infinite scroll, hiding public like counts, and developing age-segmented versions of existing platforms. AI also emerged as a major unprompted theme across the Hack events, with mandatory labelling of AI-generated content the single most widely proposed practical measure.
Across all audiences, support for feature-level controls and time-based limits was broader and more consistent than support for a blanket ban. Female and disabled CYP were significantly more likely to report anxiety and negative experiences of social media – a finding that was consistent across both survey sources.
The case for listening before legislating
Policy questions of this complexity rarely yield simple answers. The value of research like this lies not in forcing evidence into a neat conclusion – but in understanding what lies beneath it.
In this project, the evidence pointed clearly to what young people and families find harmful, what they value, and which kinds of intervention they believe could work in practice. That is the role of a robust evidence base: not to make the decision, but to make sure the decision is informed by the people it will affect.
And the research also demonstrated something else. Given the right conditions and support, young people are capable of engaging substantively with difficult policy questions. They are not simply the subject of this debate. They have a voice in it – and a great deal to contribute.
Read the full report to explore the findings from this research, designed and delivered by a Savanta-led consortium in partnership with UK Youth, Volunteering Matters and the #iWill Movement, and published by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Want to understand how robust research can help you navigate complex questions and make better-informed decisions? Get in touch with the team.