EE Boosting Safety With Parents Evenings

As millions of families prepare for a return to school this week, new EE research finds parents, teachers and pupils are all expecting the effects of out-of-school screentime to spill into the classroom. Will this be negative or positive, most people expect this will be negative. EE has responded to this need hosting its own format "parents evenings"

What EE's parents evening sessions actually cover

The free in-store appointments are designed to feel like an old-fashioned parents evening, but for digital habits rather than homework. Rather than a generic chat about "screen time being bad", EE's trained colleagues are focusing on a handful of practical areas that come up again and again when families worry about smartphones and school.

1. Setting up parental controls, tailored to the child's age and the apps they actually use, rather than a blanket lock-down that gets switched off within a week.
2. Managing screen time realistically, including how to agree boundaries around homework, bedtime and family meals without it turning into a daily argument.
3. Understanding social media and messaging apps, so parents know roughly what their child is seeing and who they can talk to, even if they've never used the app themselves.
4. Spotting signs of cyberbullying, and having a plan for what to do next if it happens, both practically on the device and in terms of talking to the school.
5. Age-appropriate content and app permissions, covering everything from app store settings to in-game purchases and chat features that many parents don't realise are switched on by default.

It's a sensible response to something the research highlights clearly. Teachers, parents and pupils all expect what happens on a phone in the evening to follow a child into the classroom the next morning, whether that's tiredness from being up late scrolling, distraction, or fallout from something that happened in a group chat.

Why this is genuinely useful for parents, not just a marketing exercise

It would be easy to be cynical about a mobile network running "online safety" sessions in its own shops. But the format has a real practical advantage over most online safety advice, which is that it's one-to-one and free, rather than a generic article or a school assembly aimed at thirty children at once. A parent can walk in with their child's actual phone, in front of them, and ask specific questions. That matters because so much of the anxiety around kids and phones comes from not knowing what's actually possible to control.

With 36,000 hours of appointments available across September, there's a genuine effort here to make this accessible rather than a token gesture, and it lands at the right moment, right as term starts and new phones, group chats and social pressures reset for the year.

If you've read our piece on Whether your own phone habit is making your kids feel ignored, you'll know this isn't only about locking down a child's device. A lot of healthy phone habits start with what parents model at home, and sessions like these can be a useful nudge for the whole family, not just the under-16s.

It's also worth pairing this kind of in-person advice with the basics around age verification and content controls that we've covered before. Our guide on How age checks are making things safer for children online Is a good companion piece if you want to understand what's changing at a platform level, on top of whatever you set up on the device itself. And if the wider question of how growing up online is shaping kids' wellbeing is on your mind, our piece on How children are being impacted by the digital age digs into that in more detail.

A conversation worth having

Whatever network you're with, the return to school is as good a moment as any to sit down with your kids and actually talk about how they use their phones, rather than just setting a few restrictions and hoping for the best. Initiatives like this one from EE won't solve everything, but they're a welcome, practical step in the right direction.

We'd love to hear how you handle this in your own household. Do you set firm screen time rules, or take a lighter touch? Have parental controls actually worked for you, or been more hassle than they're worth? Drop your experiences and opinions in the comments, the more real-world advice parents share with each other, the better placed we all are heading into the new school year.