by Stéphane Goldstein
This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Information Professional. Reproduced here with permission.
“Schools to wage war on ‘putrid’ fake news”: the recent headline in The Sunday Telegraph draws from an interview with the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson. Her views may herald the start of a welcome evolution in the approach to school teaching in England (Philipson’s brief does not extend to the devolved nations), with critical thinking more firmly embedded in different taught subjects for pupils as young as five. Phillipson’s remarks follow from the gross and heinous disinformation alongside the riots that shook multiple English localities in early August. To quote her, “it’s more important than ever that we give young people the knowledge and skills to be able to challenge what they see online”. She suggested for instance that English classes could be used to dissect newspaper reports; in computer lessons, students could be taught how to identify unreliable sources of information; and maths classes could include the analysis of statistics in context. It seems that at long last there is now a real prospect for media and information literacy (MIL) to be properly built into the future school curriculum.
Phillipson’s views follow from the Government’s announcement, in mid-July, of the launch of a major review of the curriculum. This is not a surprise: the Labour Party manifesto included a commitment to such a review; and more specifically, Labour’s pre-election mission statement on Breaking down the barriers to opportunity talked of allowing for a “broad education that enables children to thrive. Subjects like music, art, sport or drama, that build confidence and skills such as communication, critical thinking, problem solving and teamwork, must be available to all our children not just some”; note the all-important reference to critical thinking. This could mark a break with the philosophy underlying the previous review of the curriculum in 2013 piloted by the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove. Many experts have criticized this, notably for a perceived narrow approach to learning with a focus on memorisation and cramming for GCSEs and A Levels, and for fostering an “assessment monoculture of terminal exams”.
It is encouraging that the review was launched just a couple weeks into the life of the new Government, signalling a sense of urgency in addressing the complexity of the issue. The aims of the review include the development of “a curriculum that ensures children and young people leave compulsory education ready for life and ready for work, building the knowledge, skills and attributes young people need to thrive. This includes embedding digital, oracy and life skills in their learning”. Professor Becky Francis CBE has been appointed as chair of the review; she is a respected educationalist, currently CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation and previously the Director of UCL’s Institute of Education. She will be supported by an expert review group; at time of writing, its members have not yet been appointed, but clearly its composition will be crucial. The review will commence with a call for evidence, likely to be issued soon, and will look to publish an interim report early in 2025 setting out interim findings and confirming key areas for further work. A final report and recommendations are expected in Autumn 2025.
The review will provide a rare opportunity for getting MIL properly recognised as an integral and important part of the school curriculum. At present, MIL is not well catered in state schools in England. Many of them do not any MIL work with young people; this may feature in subjects such as media studies and citizenship, but it is addressed in a fragmented way which does not give it due prominence in young people’s education. Although MIL is not mentioned explicitly either in the review’s terms of reference or in Labour’s mission statement, Phillipson’s remarks about embedding critical thinking and analytical abilities in core subjects may suggest a ‘mainstreaming’ of concepts closely aligned with MIL.
How might we capitalise on this changing situation? The Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA) is poised to advocate for MIL; in June, a few weeks before the general election, MILA produced a briefing note for politicians and policymakers on why MIL education is important for young people. At the time, we did not know that the review of the curriculum would get off the ground so soon, but the issues raised in the note remain very pertinent and they can serve as a basis for interactions with key players over the coming weeks and months. Advocacy is best achieved if it is carried out jointly with other interested parties and MILA has already been in touch with organisations such as the Association for Citizenship Teaching, the Media Education Association, Parent Zone, Internet Matters and, of course, CILIP. Within the information professional community, CILIP’s Information Literacy Group and the School Libraries Group have an obvious interest, as does the School Libraries Association. The terms of reference of the review do not touch on school libraries, but there could be opportunities for these too to make a valuable contribution to the new curriculum, as outlined In a recent blog post by Sarah Pavey for the Information Literacy Group.
It remains to be seen whether the government will foster corresponding initiatives to address the MIL of adults, beyond the school system. As things stand, a notable current development of relevance to people of all ages is the elaboration of a media literacy strategy by Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator. Under the terms of the Online Safety Act 2023 (see in particular part 7, chapter 8 of the Act) and in addition to its increased regulatory powers towards social media platforms, Ofcom has been given enhanced responsibilities in heightening the public’s awareness and understanding of how to protect against online harms. The Act is vague about how Ofcom might go about this, but the regulator gave some preliminary indication about its approach when it published a draft strategy for consultation last April. The draft is articulated around three broad priority areas: developing the evidence base and evaluation methodologies for media literacy interventions; working with platforms to help ensure that they pay heed to media literacy; and engaging and working with stakeholders who have an interest in media literacy. 45 organisations responded to the consultation, including MILA. The final version of the strategy is expected no later than the end of 2024. Although it might be argued that developing public awareness and understanding is a broadly educational endeavour, school education is out of scope for the media literacy component of the Act.
These developments represent important steps in the right direction. They amplify the gradual and sometimes cautions UK public policy recognition of the importance of MIL over the past few years, with the Cairncross Review (2019), the Online Harms White Paper (2019), the Online Media Literacy Strategy (2021) and the long drawn-out legislative process leading to the Online Safety Act. But however welcome the direction of travel, we should remember that MIL is not a panacea. It was the recent riots and their associated disinformation that prompted the Secretary of State’s remarks quoted above – but MIL forms only part of the armoury against disinformation stemming from extremist and conspiracy theory discourse. There is a view, for instance, that combatting campaigns of extremist disinformation through interventions such as fact-checking will always have limits. Thus it’s much better, according to Dr Richard Fern, Lecturer in Media at Swansea University, to identify the silos and online communities that produce the disinformation, and then target the algorithms that create them. In his words, “we can then mediate and ameliorate the problem by reaching out to these groups, spending our energies introducing alternative views, new symbols and foundational myths, negating the effects of algorithm that led them to their silo”. Or, as put by Dr Paul Reilly, from the University of Glasgow, “we can’t blame social media on its own without looking at the root of these tensions in the first place. It is expedient for politicians to blame online platforms rather than acknowledge their role in producing a toxic political discourse in relation to asylum seekers and immigration”. The point is that deploying MIL to combat toxic disinformation is not separable from the huge and rather more political (and potentially contentious) task of addressing the causes of the doctrines and of the narratives that produce and feed on disinformation. That too is an educational challenge – and not just for young people, not just in schools.