13
Examination of witnesses
Matthew Johnson and Martina Chapman.
Q34 The Chair: Thank you. We will now begin our second evidence session. I am pleased to welcome a second panel of witnesses, who are again joining us remotely. One of our witnesses has not managed to join us yet, but Martina Chapman is with us. Martina, my name is Baroness Barbara Keeley. I am the chair of the committee. Could I start by asking you to introduce yourself?
Martina Chapman: Thank you very much, Baroness Keeley, and to the committee for the invitation to speak here today. I am the national co-ordinator for Media Literacy Ireland.
The Chair: Thank you. Our first question will come from Lord Storey, who has just had some very good news transmitted to him via mobile phone.
Q35 Lord Storey: Hello, Martina. I am looking for an overview of your independent chairing of the disinformation sector of media literacy. When I say “overview”, perhaps I mean some thoughts about what you think you have really done well, what you have achieved, lessons to be learned and the areas that you have really struggled with.
Martina Chapman: I will start off with an overview of what Media Literacy Ireland is and the work that we deliver. Media Literacy Ireland is an independent informal alliance of organisations and individuals working together, mainly on a voluntary basis, to promote media literacy across Ireland. It is facilitated and funded by Coimisiún na Meán, which is the Irish media regulator, and it is an unincorporated body with over 350 members. Those members are drawn from many sectors, including the media, communications, academia, online platforms, libraries, the informal education sector and civil society as well.
Our vision is for people in Ireland to be empowered with the skills and the confidence to be able to access and critically evaluate content and services across all platforms, understand and question how media and digital technology operate, identify and manage risks, and then participate in the public sphere in a responsible, ethical and effective way.
The work of Media Literacy Ireland is varied and that reflects the complex range of topics that are covered by media literacy and the broad range of stakeholders involved in these areas. Over the last seven or eight years, we have established ourselves as the go-to body for media literacy in Ireland. We have created a successful communications and project delivery infrastructure that involves an awful lot of stakeholders and a lot of sectors across Ireland.
Our work has been acknowledged in a number of national frameworks and strategies and the multi-stakeholder approach that we use reflects international best practice. The way we operate is we act as an enabler for media literacy stakeholders in Ireland and our aim is to create a platform for facilitating dialogue, the exchange of ideas and encouraging the development of sustainable media literacy projects. There are four main aspects to this. The first is connecting. As I said, we are the acknowledged first port of support and advice for media literacy stakeholders, both national and international. We act as a go-between a lot of the time and we broker partnerships and collaborations. In recent times we have been able to help unlock high-value grants and funding for cross-border projects.
The second area that we work in is innovation. Here we try to inspire and facilitate the development of new media literacy projects, programmes and interventions and, as part of this, we are trying to encourage evaluation and sustainability. Last year, we were working with EDMO Ireland at one of the EDMO hubs across Europe. That resulted in training over 100 community leaders to develop Be Media Smart training in their own communities.
This year, our focus is on developing sector-specific training for professional networks to increase the media literacy training capabilities of those trusted intermediaries. That is to try to facilitate the delivery of media literacy messages within existing communities and networks. The core idea here is to get media literacy messages to where people already are. This includes actively working with the library sector, the adult education sector and the independent radio sector. Under this banner of innovation, we also run an annual awards programme. The Media Literacy Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and share best practice as well.
The third area that we focus on is communicating. As I said previously, we foster discussion and debate around all aspects of media literacy in Ireland. It includes digital literacy, and media and information literacy—whatever way you want to describe it. We regard media literacy as an umbrella concept. We also try to identify emerging issues and gaps in provision and then look for opportunities for collaboration to fill those gaps. We have a newsletter and our website, but we also participate in regular briefings and public and professional-level talks, presentations and interviews.
The fourth and last area that we work in kind of happened accidentally. This is around promoting, and it is where we use the strength, the reach and the expertise of MLI members to collectively highlight media literacy issues and then signpost to sources of support. Sometimes that is through multi-stakeholder public awareness campaigns.
You wanted me to mention some of the things that I think we have managed to do well. One of those is the Be Media Smart campaign. This a national campaign that encouraged people to stop, think and check that the information that they were getting was accurate and reliable, from whatever source. This campaign was supported free of charge by a wide range of Media Literacy Ireland members and the campaign had a very simple call to action. It was “Go to bemediasmart.ie for help and support”.
As I said, this message was carried for free across all TV channels, all radio channels, online and many news publications here. In 2023, which was the last time we ran the campaign, independent research showed that unprompted awareness of the campaign message peaked at 23%. Just for context, similar campaigns would be considered to be doing very well if they peaked somewhere between 13% and 17%, so it is a very good result.
This initiative was noted as best practice and the concept has been adopted in six other European countries. That is great, but raising awareness of an issue is one thing; actually helping people to take that step to make change in their lives or to develop skills is another. This is why we are now moving to work with trusted third-party intermediaries to develop a system whereby media literacy learning is normalised and becomes part of everyday conversations.
Q36 Lord Storey: Where do national and local government fit into this? Do they pick up best practice and talk about bringing it as a universal action or is it just left to various bodies, organisations and individuals to pick up? Is there a sense that the work you are doing gives an opportunity for government to make policies on it?
Martina Chapman: Media literacy policy is a very tricky area. As is the case in many other countries, there is no single government-led national media literacy strategy or policy in Ireland. Aspects of media literacy are anchored in very different policy areas. That makes it tricky for Governments to identify policy owners for media literacy as a whole, or to create a single overarching policy or strategy. One of the disadvantages of this is it results in short-term and perhaps disjointed planning and funding, or a piecemeal approach to the effective delivery and evaluation of media literacy interventions.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, which was the predecessor of Coimisiún na Meán, the media regulator, published a media literacy policy in 2016. That policy was designed to highlight a wide range of skills and competencies that were involved in being media literate. It provided a road map to help a whole range of organisations understand what media literacy meant and identify what role they might be able to play in the promotion of media literacy. That was the 2016 policy, and I think the commission and the current regulator will probably update that policy soon.
The importance of media literacy, digital media literacy or media and information literacy—whatever you want to call it—has been recognised in a number of other national frameworks and strategies, as has the work of Media Literacy Ireland. They include the Digital Ireland Framework, the Adult Literacy for Life Strategy and the National Public Library Strategy as well.
Q37 The Chair: We are about to be joined by Matthew Johnson, so I will just handle that for a moment. Is Matthew Johnson able to join us now? Hello, Matthew.
Matthew Johnson: Yes. Hello and apologies for joining late.
The Chair: We started with our other witness, Martina Chapman. Can you just introduce yourself for the panel?
Matthew Johnson: I am the director of education for MediaSmarts, which is Canada’s centre for digital media literacy.
The Chair: Thank you. Our next question will come from Lord Holmes. Is it possible for you to roll a little bit of what we have already heard into the question, so that we get Matthew to tell us an overview as well as answer the question you were going to ask him?
Q38 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Certainly. Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon to both of you. Thank you for taking the time to join the committee.
How does your organisation fit within the wider media literacy landscape in your country? Can you give some backdrop to that, Matthew? Is there a single media literacy national strategy or policy? If so, what benefits or challenges does that bring? We will start with Matthew on the broader high-level piece first, please.
Matthew Johnson: Absolutely. Our organisation is a non-profit and a registered charity. We were established in 1996 with a mission of serving as a convenor and clearing house for media literacy education across the country. In the time since then, we have become more involved in original research and developing original programming to provide to people in Canada, primarily teachers and parents but other audiences as well.
Our role continues to be as an independent charitable organisation. We do not have core funding or any formal relationships in an ongoing way with government. We have one ongoing relationship with our regulator of broadcasting, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which has a permanent observer on our board. Beyond that, we do not have any formal relationship. It is up to individual ministries of education, school boards, school districts, individual schools and individual teachers as to what extent they want to use our resources and draw on the programmes that we offer.
Similarly, we rely on individual government ministries or agencies and in many cases other granting bodies and corporations to fund our various operations. I have lost a little bit of the second part of your question while I was answering that. Do you mind repeating it?
Q39 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Not a problem. Is there a single national strategy or policy for media literacy in your country?
Matthew Johnson: There is not. One reason for this is that in Canada education is a responsibility of the provinces and territories. Each province and territory is responsible for its own curriculum for how education is delivered. Some of them have media literacy plans; others do not. At the federal level, we have been advocating for a federal digital media literacy strategy for more than a decade, because it has been increasingly clear that this cannot remain exclusively part of the school system. In many cases, it needs to begin before people are in formal education.
Also, we need to continue developing skills once we leave the formal education system. We know that in most cases today’s adults are not equipped with the skills they need for the modern information ecosystem, and that information ecosystem continues to change, so lifelong learning will be necessary. Even if we do manage to provide digital media literacy education to everyone in the formal education system, they will continue to need to learn as they age.
Q40 Lord Holmes of Richmond: On that point, being so significant, what do you see in short are some of the blockers and barriers that have stopped this being taken up at the federal level?
Matthew Johnson: A big part of it is that it tends to fall between the responsibilities of different ministries. Again, because I think our federal Government are, rightly, wary of stepping on the toes of the provinces and territories, and because this has traditionally been seen as part of formal education, there has been a reluctance to take it up as a single topic. We have seen from different government ministries and government agencies strategies and programmes to promote different aspects of digital media literacy.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner, for instance, has led programmes to promote privacy education both in and out of schools. The Department of Canadian Heritage has promoted efforts to build skills for verifying information and recognising misinformation. Other ministries have promoted and funded programmes aimed at addressing online hate, but digital media literacy writ large crosses all these topics and many more besides. To have a strategy on it needs a kind of leadership coming from the very top that we have not seen because I do not think it has been seen yet as enough of a priority on the national level.
Q41 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Thank you. Martina, you described in your initial evidence a fragmented pitch when it comes to responsibility. Who specifically would you say is responsible for media literacy strategy and policy in Ireland? Also, I am interested in which stakeholders you work with in this area and how that work is co-ordinated.
Martina Chapman: On the ownership piece, as it is in a lot of other countries, there is no single government department or statutory organisation in charge of media literacy policy or strategy, but there are some organisations, such as the media regulator, which have a statutory responsibility in this area. You will see in a lot of countries that, increasingly, media regulators are taking on a leadership role in the promotion of media literacy, not least because of responsibilities placed on them by new legislation but also because media literacy is recognised as a regulatory lever that can help to counter a whole range of media-related issues.
In Ireland, Coimisiún na Meán provides that leadership role in line with its statutory duties, as did the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland previously. However, also in line with international best practice, there is an acknowledgement here that no single organisation or even sector can successfully deliver media literacy to every citizen, and that the promotion of media literacy is anchored in a multi-stakeholder approach. I think that is most clearly demonstrated by Coimisiún na Meán’s funding and facilitation of MLI, which in essence is a multi-stakeholder organisation.
We have over 350 members from a broad range of sectors. There is academia, the online safety sector, the informal education and training sectors, the community and voluntary sector and the film education sector. There are news publications and public service media, commercial media, community media, as well as some of the digital platforms.
Media Literacy Ireland is slightly unusual in that it is governed by a voluntary steering group, and on that steering group there are representatives of a number of those key sectors. It operates independently of the Government and there are no government or ministry representatives sitting on the steering group. We develop an annual plan each year and then members are called on to support whatever aspects of the work plan that most closely align with their own interests or experience, or availability of resources.
Q42 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Thank you very much. Briefly, Matthew, could you say a couple of sentences on your stakeholder landscape, who you work with and how that work is co-ordinated?
Matthew Johnson: I am sorry. I did not quite catch the end of that.
Lord Holmes of Richmond: Which stakeholders do you work with and how is that work co-ordinated?
Matthew Johnson: We work with a wide range of stakeholders. We work with ministries of education across the country and government ministries at the federal and provincial level, wherever we have the opportunity. We also work with corporations that are involved in media and that have philanthropic corporate arms. That includes a number of Canadian broadcasters and telecommunications companies and a number of internet companies. Generally, this is co-ordinated by our executive and our executive committee. We do it to try to ensure stable funding for the organisation over time because, as I mentioned, we have no source of permanent core funding. It is also done to ensure that we are providing our expertise where it is needed, particularly in the development of curricula and programming, and it is done to ensure the consistent integrity and independence of our programme and research.
Lord Holmes of Richmond: Thank you very much indeed, Matthew and Martina.
Q43 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Welcome, both of you. I will start with Martina Chapman, because my question is around education, and I know you have said that you work with the informal education sector. Is media literacy integrated into formal education and, if so, how and how well does this work?
Martina Chapman: In Ireland, media literacy is integrated into formal education in a limited way. In primary school, elements of media literacy such as, for example, online safety, are incorporated into the social, personal and health education curriculum, which is also known as SPHE. It is also in civic, social and political education during the junior cycle of secondary school and then SPHE in the senior cycle of secondary school.
At secondary level, there is an optional short course in digital media literacy, but access depends on the availability of teachers to teach it, so not all students will have the opportunity to undertake this course.
Q44 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: That is interesting. Does that mean teachers are not necessarily trained in it to begin with before they start going into the schools? Do you think that is a problem and something that you can advise on perhaps or encourage to change?
Martina Chapman: On the digital media literacy short course, yes. That is part of a programme of short courses and not every school will have teachers who are trained in delivering those courses. It is very much dependent on availability.
What also plays into this is the teacher’s own knowledge and confidence in this area. I think it was mentioned by one of the other speakers earlier that some of these topics can be challenging and it requires a lot of confidence from the teacher’s point of view.
These topics also change. This is one of the issues when trying to integrate media literacy topics into a curriculum. The topics change very quickly, the social norms change very quickly and the technology changes quickly. Legislation never changes quickly, but sometimes legislation changes and it takes a lot longer to reflect those changes in a curriculum and then get the teachers trained up as well.
One of the things that the Department of Education does here that is useful is it supports a unit that provides training for teachers. It also supports an organisation called Webwise, which provides very bespoke resources for teachers, students and parents that are linked to the curriculum. It is taking those media literacy messages, and it is a very agile way of doing it. As it is not part of the curriculum, it can create the resources in response to demand and link them to the curriculum. That makes it easier for teachers to see how this can slot in as part of their teaching programme.
Q45 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: That is very interesting. Our earlier witnesses were saying that media literacy needs to be part of every subject, and I think that is similar to what you are saying. Adults are much harder to reach perhaps, and I know you work with lots of voluntary groups. How much help or support do you get from the digital platforms? Many of them have their European headquarters in Dublin; is that useful or not to you?
Martina Chapman: Platforms promote media literacy in different ways and different platforms take very different approaches to it. Some platforms are members of MLI and some are not. As with all members of Media Literacy Ireland, they decide what they bring to the table. There is a clear difference between some of the platforms. Some of them are very active in this area, but it would also be useful to have access to the information or data to show how effective their interventions are.
In addition, in Ireland, platforms have some new obligations under legislation. Particularly under the new Irish Online Safety Code, platforms regulated in Ireland are required to submit media literacy plans annually for assessment by the regulator. I know the EMIF was mentioned earlier and Google is a significant funder of that fund. That is going back maybe three or four years. There is more funding available for media literacy now, but back then there was not and its contribution to that was a significant contribution to the funding of media literacy interventions across Europe.
Q46 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Thank you very much, Ms Chapman. I will now move to Matthew Johnson. I know you have a different set-up, and it is obviously very different with your government structure, the provinces and the federal. Could you explain whether media literacy is integrated into formal education? If so, how and at what age does it start?
Matthew Johnson: Absolutely. I could give you 13 different answers for that but, by and large, it is. Starting in the late 1980s, it began to be integrated into the formal curriculum in Ontario, and the other provinces and territories followed suit. By the end of the 20th century, every province and territory had integrated media literacy, as it then was, into the formal curriculum in some way.
In many cases there was, in the period after that, a delay in integrating digital literacy and recognising the ways that the two connect. We are now, only in the last few years, starting to see what we term digital media literacy being integrated. In some cases, because of the way curriculum gets updated, we have had provinces that had not integrated at all going on to become national or even world leaders. Ontario, for instance, which is the largest province in Canada, had not updated its English language curriculum since 2006—that is where media literacy is primarily found in the Ontario curriculum. As you can imagine, it made little or no reference to digital media. We were involved in the updating of it over the last few years and it is now, in our minds, a world leader. Among other things, it is the only formal curriculum we know of that specifically includes privacy.
In most provinces, it starts early and goes to the end of the formal curriculum, so there is at least some degree of media literacy instruction at kindergarten, at the beginning of formal education, and certainly in every one it occurs all the way to the end of the secondary programme. Where it is found varies. It is most often found in the language and health curriculum, but it is also dispersed. Similarly to what we just heard described, a big part of what we do, because we are a national organisation, is to identify where digital media literacy is found in the curriculum of each province and territory, whether it is named explicitly or whether there are parts of a curriculum that connect to media and digital technology.
For instance, if a curriculum mentions bullying but not necessarily cyberbullying, we can identify that this is a form of bullying that is very common today. Then we connect it to our resources. It makes it easier for teachers who want to teach digital media literacy but do not necessarily yet know where it fits into the curriculum, or if they are in a province or territory where it is not strongly represented yet. It makes it easier for them to identify where they can teach it and, of course, we provide resources for doing so.
Q47 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: That is very helpful. My last quick question to you, Mr Johnson is: how do you reach the wider population, especially adults? That is something that we are wrestling with here on this committee. Do you have any ideas?
Matthew Johnson: It is definitely a bigger challenge because, of course, when you are operating through the formal education system you have a captive audience. We have done a number of public awareness campaigns over the last few years. Starting in 2019, we began our Break the Fake campaign, which is teaching basic lateral reading skills to all audiences but with a particular focus on adults. We did this in part through a public service campaign where we brought back the North American House Hippo, which was a public service campaign—I believe a version of it also ran in the United Kingdom. It began in the 1990s and so it was very fondly remembered by many Canadians. That allowed us to multiply the message, because as well as it being shown in formal channels—it is paid or in-kind advertising—it was very widely shared on social media. We have made more use of that in the time since then.
We also partner wherever possible with other organisations to reach specific audiences. In particular, for instance, we partnered with the YWCA in Canada to deliver and develop our DigitalSmarts programmes, which are aimed at adults with limited digital skills. It helped us to develop the programme, to do the research that informed the programme and to deliver the programme to the people that it already knew needed those skills.
Those are the two main approaches that we have found to be valuable: devoting resources to reaching as many people as possible and trying to make our resources as shareable as possible, and then partnering with organisations that have the ability to more directly reach specific audiences than we do.
The Chair: I hope we are still okay for time, because we had to start a little bit later. Our final question is from Lord Dunlop.
Q48 Lord Dunlop: Good afternoon to both of you. Canada and Ireland rank highly on media literacy indices and you both mentioned the reach of some of your campaigns. I will start by asking: what effect do you think media literacy campaigns and initiatives have had in your respective countries? A problem we have been wrestling with is how we measure their effectiveness over time. In the last panel, the witnesses said how hard that is, but perhaps you can give us some pointers to what we should be looking at. Matthew, perhaps you could start off.
Matthew Johnson: Absolutely, and this is something we are in the process of doing right now. We are about to publish some research that looked at the effectiveness of our most recent Break the Fake campaign. It is not that difficult necessarily to evaluate specific campaigns, although of course it can be difficult to evaluate their continued effectiveness over time.
We know from research that has been done that almost all digital media literacy interventions have a decay effect. It is important to, if possible, make sure that funding is allocated in the future to measure the continued impact of these, and because the decay effect is already well established, to, in essence, provide boosters.
No campaign will solve all our problems in a single delivery, nor ever, but it will not have a permanent impact in a single delivery. We know that a lot of the impact comes from simply nudging people to think about accuracy and promoting social norms around being critical of the media that we consume and being careful in sharing it. Therefore, it is about ensuring that these campaigns are repeated and updated to meet new concerns. For instance, we just updated ours to talk specifically about deepfakes and other AI issues.
To measure the broader impact is very difficult. It is very difficult for us because, again, there is a lack of leadership at the federal level. We do not have even the baseline that is available in many other countries about how skilled either youth or adults are at various aspects of digital media literacy. We do not have a clear idea of what is taught in classes beyond what is in the curriculum. We do not have even a clear idea of what teacher candidates are learning in teacher training programmes.
It is about making sure that this ground data is available and doing regular sampling after that. It is then about following up quantitative data with qualitative work on what might be responsible for changes to identify whether improvements or a worsening of digital media literacy skills can be tied to specific programmes or are tied to broader social norms, and whether it is a change in supply or a change in demand.
The other thing that is important when we do this is to conceptualise digital media literacy in a broad and holistic way. Almost all the research that we know of looks very narrowly at specific aspects of digital media literacy, but we have a great deal of evidence that the different aspects of digital media literacy connect to one another. The intellectual and emotional or affective elements relate to one another, but there are also the different topics, the interpersonal aspects, the social aspects, the cognitive aspects, and even things like advertising and stereotyping that we associate primarily with what you might call traditional media literacy. All these connect to issues such as verifying information, cyberbullying and online hate.
In our research on sexting, we found that the strongest determinative of whether someone shared a sext without consent was whether they held traditional gender stereotypes. In some ways, our resources on gender stereotyping may be more effective than those that specifically address sexting. It is vital when we are getting this data, when we are measuring digital media literacy skills, that we conceptualise it in this broad and holistic way.
Q49 Lord Dunlop: As a quick follow-up on that, where does the leadership for collection of data and evaluation come? Is that a role for government, in your view?
Matthew Johnson: Absolutely. We consider that to be a key part of the digital media literacy strategy that we have been advocating for for some time, as I mentioned. Particularly in our context, because of the way that responsibility is devolved between the different provinces, to get a sense of how media literate Canadians are we need to have leadership from the federal Government.
Q50 Lord Dunlop: Martina, would you like to give us an Irish perspective on all this?
Martina Chapman: Yes. I would echo a lot of what Matthew has said. One of the biggest issues we have is that there is no universal unit of measurement for media literacy, which makes tracking progress across the population, as Leo said earlier, practically impossible. It is important to understand that media literacy is not something that is acquired in the same way that the skill of reading is acquired. It is multidimensional and it is also a matter of degree.
The media literacy needs of individuals and of different demographic groups vary considerably, but media literacy of some type is needed across a person’s lifetime. That can involve challenging strongly held beliefs or changing behaviour. Both of those are difficult. People form beliefs and behave in particular ways for very complex reasons, and developing the skills and the knowledge alone to interrogate information, for example, or being able to critically evaluate a piece of content may not be enough to guarantee informed decision-making around the same piece of content.
It is notoriously difficult to measure the impact of media literacy initiatives, and that is especially true in the short term. Interestingly, Ofcom probably has one of the best methods of trying to track change over time for some aspects of media literacy, but even that is not a fully comprehensive measurement of media literacy at a national level. It is interesting that there is widespread agreement that media literacy has important social dimensions. Maybe we should also be looking at measuring media literacy with democratic participation and citizenship or the knowledge economy and competitiveness and lifelong learning and personal fulfilment as well.
Q51 Lord Dunlop: I am conscious we are slightly pressed for time. I will ask you, against that background, to give us your wisdom on what lessons the UK can learn from your success stories. I am conscious that each community and culture is different, but from your bank of success stories and initiatives, what do you think we should be looking to replicate in the UK? What works effectively? Matthew, do you want to start on that?
Matthew Johnson: The one thing we can point to that Canada has done well is the integration of digital media literacy into curriculum, particularly throughout the school programme—that it begins very early in almost every province or territory where it occurs. Also, it is integrated in two different ways. In most provinces and territories, there is one subject that is the home of digital media literacy, which ensures that it is somebody’s problem, but it is also dispersed throughout the curriculum. There will be one subject that primarily has digital media literacy as part of its focus, but also all the others recognise that just as media are part of all our lives, it needs to be integrated into the different curriculum.
The other aspect is that, to a large extent, digital media literacy has been adopted as a Canadian value. It is something that many Canadians are conscious of and feel proud of. I think that it may be a consequence of having such a larger cultural neighbour that we may have developed this in opposition, in a way. Nevertheless, it is something that many Canadians feel pride in, and it allows us to appeal to that value in times when digital media literacy may be under attack or where we need to advocate for it.
Martina Chapman: I have five points I would like to leave you with. The first is around national co-ordination. The effective rollout of media literacy initiatives, especially nationally, will require effective co-ordination. I know the absence of clear policy owners can be problematic and result in a piecemeal approach to delivering media literacy, but I think there are other ways of looking at a national co-ordination piece. There are a lot of stakeholders out there who have a very clear role and an interest and an appetite to participate, and finding a way to engage with them is important.
The second point is around insights and evidence. It is critical that researchers and media literacy practitioners have access to a comprehensive body of evidence that they can use to create effective interventions as well as monitoring and maybe advising on how projects need to evolve or be refined in the future.
The third point is around having some kind of national delivery infrastructure. That does not mean it has to be the same across the nation or in the UK across the nations, but countering media literacy-related issues will require a reliable, well-resourced, cross-sector infrastructure that can facilitate the delivery of messages and practical support in a tailored way to a diverse set of people over an extended period. What we are talking about here is using the existing community of interest, geographic community and learning networks that are already in place and trusted third-party intermediaries to meet people where they are and to do it over an extended period, because change like this does not happen overnight. Fourthly, and connected to that, is viewing media literacy as lifelong learning: adopting that cradle-to-grave approach to make sure that all citizens have the opportunity to develop the skills that they need at that point in time when they need them.
Finally, it is having a secure and fair model to fund initiatives as well. We talk about evaluation and we talk about funding, but all too often, funding is done on a six, nine, 12, maybe even an 18-month rolling basis. That is not long enough. We need to be looking at this in a much longer term.
Lord Dunlop: Thank you very much for that. I think you have laid out a very clear agenda for us to consider in our further meetings. Thank you very much indeed.
The Chair: From all the committee, thank you for answering our questions today. I am very glad we were able to overcome a little difficulty and have both of you answer all the questions. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
