Media literacy needs to be added to the National Curriculum

In a world where the truth is hard to find, let's give the next generation the tools to make up their own mind...

When was the last time you got caught out by fake news?

I run a course on this, so have plenty of examples: Disney World changing the drinking age in their parks, Taylor Swift flogging Le Creuset dishes. Some are more obvious than others AI and Deepfakes are making it a lot harder.

After the awful stabbings in Southport last year, Far Right activists weren’t the only ones spreading misinformation about the identity of the perpretrator. Just last week, Elon Musk (you know, the one who owns one of the world’s largest social networks?) launched an assault on Jess Phillips MP that was - at best - misleading, at worst, it was actively dangerous.

The impact of mis and dis information can be devastating: riots, disorder, threats to democracy, the spread of diseases thought lost in time thanks to vaccines.

It’s a good thing that Meta has removed Fact-Checkers then, right?

As adults we struggle to get to grips with the reality of some stories, but what about kids? The impact of misinformation on social media also has a very real impact in the classroom. I did some work with a client last year where we discovered the impact of kids parroting misinformation in the classroom impacted the mental health of teachers and fellow students.

Mark Roberts, director of research at Carrickfergus Grammar School in Northern Ireland wrote a great piece for TES in response to a question he had put to teachers on Twitter/X about their experiences of dealing with male students who had fallen under Andrew Tate’s influence. The response he received was overwhelming, he was inundated with stories from teachers left upset and deeply concerned.

Teachers feel ill-equipped to address the mis and disinformation in the classroom, parents feel unprepared to help their kids navigate social media landscapes they have no experience in - so what can we do?

When I interviewed teachers about this issue last year, there was a common theme: we need to add media literacy to the National Curriculum.

Schools need a whole-school approach and Professional Development support for teachers to be able to navigate these conversations.

Teachers need resources to equip our young people to ask some critical questions of all media they consume:

• What do I think about this?

• What is the motivation for this person / profile /news outlet / party / company telling me about this?

• What do they want me to do as a result? What do I want to do?

I feel very passionately about this and want to put this out there: if you’re an organisation or company also focused on this issue - please get in touch.

I have multiple motivations behind this passion: I have kids, I’m married to a teacher, most of my clients are education-focused, I spend too much time in crisis comms trying correct misinformation on behalf of my clients. A core value for me is fairness and mis and disinformation gets to the core of this. I also feel quite strongly that the Public Relations industry has some serious work to do in this area. For too long, (the ethical among us) have looked on with concern, but we are the people talking to the media and thought leaders, connecting audiences.

So, if you’re interested in working on this, get in touch. I’ve listed some resources that I’m aware of below in the meantime:

• There’s a handy summary of Mark Roberts’ advice on how to respond to boys inspired by Tate in the classroom here.

• The UN runs a Global Media and Information Literacy Week every October.

• The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

• MediaWise runs a Teen fact-checking community and hosts resources to ‘empower diverse communities with the skills to identify misinformation through engaging, innovative media literacy education.’

• FirstNews and Britannica are doing some interesting work in this area, including training for teachers