Set young free online ‘to save the country’

Former GCHQ boss says children must gain digital skills to keep UK ahead of its rivals

PARENTS should encourage their children to spend more time online to improve their cyber skills and “save the country”, the former head of GCHQ declares today.

Rather than allowing youngsters to “mooch around on the streets” during the holidays, it is the patriotic duty of families to encourage more screen time, according to Robert Hannigan.

Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, the former head of the Government’s electronic spy agency warns that Britain is struggling to keep pace with its digital rivals. Without giving children more time to embrace and master the virtual world, the UK will fall further behind, he says.

His call comes just days after the Children’s Commissioner argued that youngsters are already too attached to online devices.

But Mr Hannigan, who left GCHQ earlier this year, writes: “If you are spending a disproportionate amount of your holiday unsuccessfully attempting to separate your children from Wifi or their digital devices, do not despair.

“Your poor parenting may be helping them and saving the country.

“The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear.”

While parental misgivings are based on legitimate worries about online dangers, he writes that they are also driven by guilt and a lack of understanding. Anne Longfield, the Chil- dren’s Commissioner, warned parents recently to stop their children bingeing on the internet in the summer holidays.

She said at the weekend: “It’s something that every parent will talk about especially during school holidays; that children are in danger of seeing social media like sweeties, and their online time like junk food.

“None of us as parents would want our children to eat junk food all the time. For those same reasons we shouldn’t want our children to do the same with their online time.”

Mr Hannigan writes that parents fear an online world where they understand less than their children.

He says: “Parental guilt is also driven by a failure to appreciate that life online and ‘real’ life are not separate: they are all part of the same experience. Millennials understand this.

“Gaming and social media can be as sociable as mooching around the streets with a group of friends was once.”

His intervention comes amid intense debate about the effect of children spending large amounts of time online, or glued to phones and tablets, but also at a time when industry, the Government and the military have said they are desperately short of cyber skills.

Last year, for the first time children spent longer online than watching television, according to Ofcom. Those aged five to 15 are now spending an average of 15 hours a week on the internet.

There is currently no official government advice on screen time for children in the UK.

Amid the concerns that screen time harms mental health or social skills, even Silicon Valley gurus have in the past disclosed that they restrict what their own children do online.

Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple. and his right hand man, Jonathan Ive, had said they set strict limits in their own homes.

However, Mr Hannigan says: “We need young people to explore this digital world just as they explore the physical world.

“We worry about being over-protective of our children when they leave the house; we need to have the same debate about the balance of risk in the world of the internet.”

The UK is woefully short of engineers and computer scientists, he argues, and cyber skills will become ever more sought-after.

The country was ranked 15th in last year’s OECD tables for school pupils’ science abilities and 27th for maths.

To become engineers in the digital world, children must be allowed to play, break things and experiment, suggests Mr Hannigan.

“Arguably that is what children always did in their summer holidays. The

‘We need young people to explore this digital world just as they explore the physical world’

difference today is that they will want to explore, experiment and break things digitally.”

He continues: “Balance, of course, is good. But I do not recognise the moral concern about how the internet generation is turning out. Surveying the current chaos in the West, it is hard to argue that millennials might not make at least as good a stab at running things.”