Sophie Winkleman removed her children from private school when they were given iPads

Actress Sophie Winkleman has revealed she was so alarmed when her children's teachers brought in iPads that she twice took them out of school.

Ms Winkleman, best known for her role in comedy series Peep Show, said she objected to children being given iPads from the age of six and believes that the use of tech and addictive social media apps is affecting learning and making teenagers depressed.

The TV star has two daughters Maud, 9, and Isabella, 7, with her husband Lord Frederick Windsor, the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

Ms Winkleman, 42,  believes the use of screens and online learning is becoming "normalised" and spoke as parent group Us for Them launched a campaign for greater regulation of smartphones.

The Safe Screens campaign, backed by head teachers including Katharine Birbalsingh, the former social mobility tsar, MPs and behaviour experts, is calling for the Government to ban smartphones completely for under-16s and bring in "tobacco-style health warnings" on all smartphone packaging.

Winkleman said that she was "thrilled" at the launch of the campaign and told of her own children's experiences.

She told The Sunday Times that  pupils at schools attended by her children "were going to be given tablets, all of them from Year One [aged 5/6] to Year 6 [aged 10/11]... And this was announced in a proud - is this not exciting? - way and I immediately started looking for different schools. I have moved them twice now to get them out of tech-heavy schools."

Her daughters  both attended Thomas's Battersea, a prep school in south London that was also attended by cousins Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

Ms Winkleman said Thomas's, which introduced iPads for pupils, was happy and energetic but that it did not suit her daughters. She added that the internet was a "toxic wilderness" and some parents wrongly believed digital learning would turn their children into Silicon Valley billionaires.

"I do not know how many more facts and statistics we need for everyone to say, 'This can't happen any more.' The internet is a toxic wilderness we're letting children stumble through without protection," she told The Sunday Times. "I think many UK schools have swallowed the push for more digital learning partly because of pressure from parents, who think if their child is learning online at seven they will be the next Bill Gates. I lived in California and spent time with bigwigs in Silicon Valley and tellingly they did not let their children near screens."

Focus on reading books

Among the tech entrepreneurs who would not let their children stare at screens was Steve Jobs, the creator of the iPhone and the iPad, who banned his children from using either device. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, would not let his children get a mobile phone until they turned 14.

Ms Winkleman, who is filming Julian Fellowes’s TV drama Belgravia, added that she wanted her daughters to read books and "to focus and to learn to think deeply". The family set aside time to read books by authors including Enid Blyton, Adele Geras and Roald Dahl in the evening which she said were "the great joy of my childhood".

The actress added that when she went to City of London girls' school she had "a very bad time with a group of girls" and if social media and smartphones had existed her experience would have been even worse.

She said that in an ideal world she would set up a school for those aged five to 18 in London where screens would be banned other than for IT lessons.