Screen time guidance for 5 to 11s still isn't out. Here's what to do while you wait

Not yet. On 8 June 2026 the government announced new guidance on screen use for children aged 5 to 16, launched a three-week call for evidence and said the guidance "will be published this autumn".

By late July a written answer in the Lords described it as guidance for parents of young people aged 5 to 18. In September the government's reply to the Education Committee repeated the new range and the deadline: "to be published in Autumn 2026".

As of 3 November 2026 it has not been published. We checked the GOV.UK search and the Department for Education's news feed on that day. The call for evidence page still shows no outcome.

Being a few weeks late isn't a scandal. But the gap matters: parents of under-5s have had plain advice since March, while the parents of primary-age children, who face the first tablet, the first games console and the first phone requests, have nothing official at all.

No, and the government has said so. The guidance "will avoid blanket rules, including on screen time, instead helping parents make informed decisions based on their child's age, needs and circumstances", according to its response to the Education Committee. It will also include "when it is appropriate for a child to start accessing a smartphone".

We think that's right, and it's worth saying why, because many parents expect a number and many headlines will call its absence a cop-out. When the UK's chief medical officers last reviewed the evidence they concluded it was "insufficiently conclusive to support UK CMO evidence-based guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use".

Nothing published since has produced a safe number of hours for a 7-year-old. Any figure you see, from 1 hour to 2, is somebody's rule of thumb, not a finding.

But no number shouldn't mean no guidance. Where the evidence is firmer, the new guidance should be blunt: screens out of the last half hour to hour before sleep, as the NHS already advises; phones out of bedrooms at night, as the chief medical officers suggested in 2019; and shared use over solo use.

If the autumn guidance arrives as a gentle list of "considerations" without those defaults, it will have missed the point.

Start with the few things the evidence does support, and with your own family's week, not a national number.

Our guides go further: screen time and reading on how screens and books can share a day, and reading to your child on keeping a bedtime story going as children get older.

1. Count school screen time first. Homework apps aren't optional, so add them up before you decide what else fits. Our guide to screen time and reading has questions to ask the class teacher about them.
2. Swap, don't add. A new screen activity should replace an old one (a cartoon, a scroll), not sit on top of everything else.
3. Protect the last hour. The NHS says to keep tablets and phones away for the 30 to 60 minutes before bed. A paper book is the easiest thing to put in that gap; our bedtime story calculator shows how long a story takes at each age.
4. Keep phones and tablets out of bedrooms overnight, the chief medical officers' plainest tip.
5. Share some of it. In the best evidence on young children's reading, an adult reading with the child did more for understanding than any digital extra did on its own. The same instinct, sitting alongside and talking about it, works for a video or a game.

Officially, nobody has said. Phones are now covered: guidance that schools should follow from 1 September 2026 says all schools should be "mobile phone-free environments by default". Tablets and laptops used in lessons are a different matter, and they are where the next argument is.

In October more than 150 clinicians wrote to the Education Secretary and the Health Secretary, according to the BBC, saying classroom devices are used without a full understanding of their long-term health effects: "As a country, we need to wake up to this now, and start rolling back screen use in schools before the damage compounds further."

The Department for Education replied that it was developing the 5 to 18 guidance and that technology can be a powerful tool when used well.

Our view: a parent can't make good decisions about the evening without knowing the day. Schools should tell families, in a sentence, roughly how much screen time a typical day involves. The new guidance, which the government says will cover home and school, is the obvious place to ask for that.

Rules stick better when children understand them. Here is the news at two reading levels, to read together.