What could the social media ban mean for higher education?

For those attending this year’s party conferences, join HEPI for our 2026 Party Conference ringe events, at the Labour Party Conference on Monday 28 September in Liverpool and the Conservative Party Conference on Monday 5 October in Birmingham.

At both conferences, HEPI will host two events exploring some of the biggest issues facing higher education:

• Higher Education Question Time, bringing together sector leaders to answer your questions about the key challenges and opportunities for universities,
• Soft power in a hardening world: is the UK making the most of its global assets?, examining the UK’s international influence and the role of higher education within it.

All events take place outside the secure zones, so no conference pass is required. Register your interest now.

This blog was kindly authored by Becky Bradshaw, Interim Vice Chancellor & CEO of the University of Northampton.

Like us, I’m sure most institutions put a large portion of their marketing spend and resources into social media, both paid for and organic content. So after contemplating the benefits that would be brought by a ban on social media activity for under 16 year olds, my mind turned to working out how we are going to talk to our primary recruitment audience in the future, given they will have far less experience of the platforms we spend so much time – and money – curating.

However, while all our marketing teams are going to have to get creative – luckily they are good at that here at Northampton – as a Mother and a leader in an institution primarily educating and communicating with young people, I can very much see the positives and the opportunities that it might bring to engage in different ways.

Over the last several years (or 15 years to be exact), we have increased our focus on engaging with young people under the age of 16, albeit at that age we are focused on widening access and increasing exposure rather than recruitment. In something fairly unusual, our widening access team works with Key Stage 2 children upwards on everything from high-impact literacy projects to a Saturday Club for young teens who enjoy the arts.

And while of course, all these activities are focused on delivering aspiration and social impact to our local community and are driven by our mission to widen access to all higher education opportunities – I know that all our staff who work on those projects will happily explain to anyone the value of both in person and earlier engagement than we perhaps ordinarily think of as a sector.

Last month, we hosted 3,000 school children at our Waterside Campus for a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) event, and while it was not the most peaceful day for our staff and students (thanks to a lorry horn and some enthusiastic local pupils), so many of the young people and teachers that visited us will have thought about the prospects of higher education when perhaps they hadn’t before. At a time when the value of a degree is coming under increasing scrutiny, we must work harder as a sector to highlight the benefits, alongside setting out the other options for those under 16.

Back to our marketing teams: I’m sure, like many other industries across the country, they will all be working through the impact on our daily practices and how we will operate both now and in the next several years with a generation of children who grow up less familiar with social media than those we have been welcoming as students for the past twenty years.

And while I don’t think this will take us back to the years gone by of postmen and women up and down the country putting large numbers of prospectuses through letter boxes, I do think there will be a shift back to more in-person, targeted engagements. With so many more students studying closer to home, this may have been inevitable anyway. In Northamptonshire we already have a sharper focus on our local progression pathways, having further increased our ties with local further education colleges and schools.

It would be remiss of me not to also mention the rise and influence of AI to inform the choices of potential applicants. AI chat tools pull content from all sorts of places, including our social media feeds, and so whilst those under-16 may not be able to click to view sources, optimising our content for generative experience optimisation (GEO) will continue to be an increasingly important area of focus.

More importantly than all of the above, is that we may soon be welcoming a student body with very different experiences of social media which we hope will impact positively on their mental health. I think this remains the most substantial benefit that could come out of the ban and I’ll be interested to see both the impact of the ban on young people but also the reflections from our hard-working mental health and counselling team.

So, while the way the sector communicates with potential applicants might be about to shift, I’m pretty certain that for young people across the country this change will be for the better.