The teenagers completed surveys and installed a special app on their phones to monitor their usage.
The software found, on average, participants used social media for five-and-a-half hours a day, much higher than the four hours they reported in surveys.
According to Dr John Pickavance, who is managing the trial, many of the pupils were unable to stick to the restrictions.
“About half of them had the app installed for the full duration, and of those, half of them successfully completed the targets that we’d set them.
“Although, interestingly, even those who didn’t stick to those targets, they were also successful at reducing the amount of social media they were using.”
The one-hour cap will now be scrapped for the main trial to improve participation levels.
Fourteen-year-old Star felt his two-hour restriction was just right.
“It definitely made me happy and feel better in myself. It gave me a lot of self-confidence,” he says.
But some families found the strict time limit impossible. Fifteen-year-old Oliver uses Snapchat and TikTok to communicate with friends.
“After school I went over it about two or three hours and then on weekends I went over it about four or five hours more,” he says.
Oliver’s mum Vicky says: “I thought it was important to see if our young people could actually stick to a bit of a limit. It didn’t work this time though unfortunately.
“I’m just as bad. I can sit there for hours lost on TikTok just scrolling away.”
