Mother of murdered teen Brianna Ghey urges Starmer not to cave to Trump and press ahead with schools smartphone ban

Brianna, 16, was killed by Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe in a premeditated attack in Cheshire in 2023. A court found the killers acted on sadistic tendencies and transphobia after the pair were radicalised by extreme online content.

Esther Ghey, Brianna’s mother, has been heaping pressure on the government to ban smartphones in Britain schools – saying her own daughter “went down a really dark hole” online in her final years.

Speaking on Tonight with Andrew Marr, she urged the Prime Minister not to cave to potential pressure from US President Donald Trump and press ahead with a ban.

Andrew pointed out that Sir Keir may believe a smartphone ban is controversial and not worth the trouble if Donald Trump pressures him not to go after big media companies.

In a plea to Sir Keir, Ms Ghey said: “Think about the future. This small investment in our children will impact our children massively.

“On our campaign, at the moment it is said that schools already ban phones but we know from research from the Children’s Commissioner that only 11 percent of secondary schools are banning phones effectively where they either don’t allow phones on the premises or ask them not to lock they phones away.

"When children are showing other children child porn in school, teachers are being upskirted, male teachers are being filmed and put on to TikTok saying when your teacher’s a paedophile, honestly it’s having such devastating effect."

Ms Ghey has previously shared how her daughter Brianna began struggling with her mental health and developed an eating disorder and started to self-harm.

“It was only really after Brianna passed away that I found out the severity of what she was accessing online,” Ms Ghey told LBC.

It was on Twitter, now X, where she had access to forums that were encouraging her to restrict her eating and encouraging self-harm.

“As a parent I felt like I was really naïve to what Brianna was accessing.”

Esther Ghey is calling on the Government to provide funding to schools for pouches to lock phones in during the school day. Ms Ghey has previously said Brianna’s old school – Birchwood Community High school in Warrington – has already successfully banned phones and is urging others to follow suit.

During the three years Brianna was at Birchwood, there were 120 safeguarding logs and 116 behaviour logs around her phone use, Ms Ghey said.

Under the former Conservative government, schools were issued non-statutory guidance intending to stop the use of phones during the school day.

Ms Ghey has launched an open letter to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer calling for a statutory ban that would see pupils unable to access their phones for the entire school day, unless they are exempt for medical or accessibility reasons.

A survey by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found 90% of secondary schools and 99.8% of primary schools already have policies in place to stop the use of phones during the school day.

However, the survey found around 10% of secondary schools allowed pupils to use their phones at some point during the school day.

Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, both 15 at the time, lured Brianna to Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington where the 16-year-old was fatally stabbed 28 times with a hunting knife in February 2023.

Jenkinson was sentenced at Manchester Crown Court in December 2023 to a minimum sentence of 22 years in prison, and Ratcliffe to a minimum term of 20 years.