Thousands of Bradford teenagers cut social media use in landmark IRL trial

For thousands of schoolchildren in Bradford, Monday morning began with an experiment almost unthinkable for a modern teenager: agreeing to put the phone down. Across 12 schools in and around the West Yorkshire city, pupils aged 12 to 15 have started capping their social media use at two hours a day for six weeks — part of a landmark scientific study that researchers believe is the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

The project is called the IRL trial — "In Real Life" — and it is run by researchers at Born in Bradford alongside the University of Cambridge. Its goal is strikingly simple to describe and surprisingly hard to answer: does spending less time on social media actually improve teenagers' mental health?

That question matters more than ever in Britain right now. The government has announced a planned ban on social media for under-16s, expected to be introduced next spring, and the debate around it has been heavy on assertion and light on evidence. Parents and teachers insist the apps are harming a generation; the platforms insist they connect young people; and the science, until now, has had surprisingly little to say about what actually happens when you take the apps away. The row over whether growing up today is genuinely harder — the subject of a recent mental health review — has only sharpened the argument.

A first-of-its-kind experiment

The trial is being described by those behind it as the world's first randomised controlled trial of social media restrictions among young people — the gold standard of scientific testing, applied to a question that has so far been studied mostly through surveys and correlation. A £1.2 million programme funded by the Wellcome Trust, it is led by the Bradford Institute for Health Research together with the University of Cambridge.

The scale is what makes it remarkable. Between 4,000 and 5,000 children are taking part, covering school years eight, nine and ten. For six weeks this autumn, half of them will have their access to ten selected social media apps restricted to two hours a day, with a 9pm curfew after which the apps stop working. The other half form a control group: they carry on using their phones as normal, but with their usage tracked so the researchers can compare the two groups honestly.

The ten apps covered are TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Threads, X, Kick and Twitch — a list that maps closely onto where British teenagers actually spend their time. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp are not restricted, a deliberate choice made after the researchers consulted the teenagers themselves during the study's design. As trial co-lead Dr Dan Lewer of the Bradford Centre for Health Data Science has noted, the young people involved did not want a total ban tested; they wanted to test a limit.

Crucially, the participants are randomised by year group rather than as individuals. In any given school, year eight might be restricted while year nine carries on as normal. The logic, explained by co-lead Professor Amy Orben of the University of Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, is about fairness and accuracy: if one child in a friendship group were cut off while everyone else stayed online after 9pm, the experiment would measure loneliness, not the effect of a limit.

How the two-hour cap actually works

The mechanics of the trial reflect how carefully it has been designed with teenagers rather than imposed on them. Participants install a bespoke research app on their phones that monitors their social media use. For those in the restricted group, the same app enforces the two-hour daily cap and the 9pm curfew.

Mobile phones stored in a lockable cage in a high school classroom Credit: Chainwit. / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The restrictions are not absolute. Pupils can override the limits at the press of a button — but sticking to them earns points, and points increase their chance of winning a £100 prize voucher at the end of the trial, on top of the £20 voucher every participant receives for taking part. It is a nudge, not a lock.

At the start and end of the six weeks, every participant fills in short questionnaires about how they are feeling, covering anxiety, sleep, body image and school life. That combination — self-reported feelings plus objective, app-tracked usage data rather than teenagers' notoriously unreliable estimates of their own screen time — is what the researchers believe will make the findings trustworthy.

"This will be the first trial of social media limitations among healthy teenagers in the world," Dr Lewer said when the study was announced. Orben added that, to the team's knowledge, there has never been a high-quality scientific study that has substantially reduced social media use among healthy under-18s and systematically examined what happens next.

Why Bradford

Bradford was not chosen at random. The city is home to Born in Bradford, one of the world's largest longitudinal studies of children's health, which has followed tens of thousands of local children since birth. That deep infrastructure — trusted relationships with schools, families and communities — is what makes a study of this size possible.

The trial's first phase, run earlier this year, was deliberately small: 200 students aged 12 to 15 were asked to limit their social media use to test whether the methods worked. It did, and the full study launched this autumn across the 12 schools, according to the University of Cambridge. Cambridge's Professor Orben is co-leading the work, and the trial's design reflects both institutions' strengths — Bradford's community research network and Cambridge's expertise in adolescent psychology and digital life.

The study also lands at a moment when public health services are under strain from rising demand for young people's mental health support. Elsewhere in England, NHS services have been reorganised to cope with the pressure — a reminder that the IRL trial is one part of a much wider effort to understand and support teenage wellbeing.

What the researchers want to know

The questions the team is asking are deliberately open-minded. Trial manager Dr John Pickavance told The Times the study is not starting from the assumption that less social media is automatically better: "We want to know if they are getting better sleep... or will they just replace it with other forms of screen time?"

That substitution question is central. Average daily screen time among 12- to 15-year-olds is around three hours a day, and nobody knows whether time freed from TikTok simply migrates to YouTube, television or gaming — and whether that trade leaves a teenager better or worse off. The questionnaires will track anxiety, sleep quality, time spent with friends and family, wellbeing, body image, social comparison, school absences and even bullying, while interviews will dig into the experiences of adolescents who already live with heightened anxiety.

Sleep is one of the outcomes the researchers are watching most closely, and the NHS publishes guidance on how much rest school-age children need — guidance that late-night scrolling routinely undermines. For teenagers who need help right now rather than in 2027, the NHS has also launched a dedicated website to make mental health support easier to find.

What the teenagers themselves say

Lois Oredein, a 12-year-old pupil at Appleton Academy in Wyke, agreed to have her social media restricted to two hours a day — though she admitted she was unconvinced it was the right call, saying it can be easier to socialise online than face to face.

Her classmate Hannah Osin-Ntimoah, also 12, pushed back against the adult consensus, arguing that young people learn from social media and stay in touch with friends — and that the apps are not the reason young people feel depressed.

Other participants are more optimistic. Dawson, 12, told the BBC he spends about two hours a day on social media and is looking forward to spending less time on his smartphone, saying he hoped it would make his relationships stronger. His father, Adam, hopes the trial will mean seeing more of his son downstairs in the evenings.

Those divided instincts — scepticism, hope, defensiveness — are exactly why the researchers say the evidence matters. As one of the study's advisers has put it, the honest answer to whether restricting social media helps or harms young people is that we do not know — and that is precisely what a trial like this is for.

The bigger policy question

The timing of the IRL trial is no accident. With the government preparing an under-16s social media ban for next spring, Britain is about to run a nationwide natural experiment of its own — and the IRL trial's results, expected in the middle of 2027, are intended to give ministers something they currently lack: hard evidence about which kinds of limits actually change young people's lives for the better.

The pressure on ministers is growing from several directions at once. Recent research on chatbots and teen safety has raised fresh concerns about the AI systems young people talk to every day, and the Online Safety Act has already put platforms on notice. A daily cap is not the same as a ban, and the researchers are careful not to overclaim. What the trial will provide is the first rigorous test of whether reducing — rather than removing — social media access moves the needle on the outcomes everyone claims to care about: sleep, anxiety, connection and wellbeing.

For the teenagers of Bradford, the next six weeks will be a small exercise in restraint. For the rest of the country, watching, it could be the beginning of an answer. Verity will follow the results as they emerge.