Teenagers should spend their summer holidays picking up litter, rather than playing on their smartphones, the education secretary has said.

Damian Hinds will today tell pupils to pick up plastic from beaches and parks, rather than sitting “alone, hunched” over their smartphones.

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Mr Hinds also suggests that teenagers should teach old-age pensioners how to send text messages, according to The Sunday Times.

He says that parents are worried that their children are now growing up in a world of “social media, deeply immersive gaming and the whole binge-watching TV thing”, The Sunday Times reports. Even listening to music is an antisocial experience, “now they have got headphones and they sit alone with shoulders hunched forwards”.  

Mr Hinds also speaks nostalgically of the jobs he held as a teenager, first washing up in a restaurant and later in a pub: “It was what would be called a zero-hours contract job now. Though of course there was no contract.”