Dr Josie Barnard, Associate Professor in Creative and Digital Practice, De Montfort University—written evidence (DCL0078)

House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee inquiry ‘Digital exclusion and the cost of living’

About De Montfort University

De Montfort University’s ‘empowering university’ strategy (2022-27) has as its vision: creating a community of participation, fairness and collective responsibility; transforming individual lives and championing a fair and sustainable society. We have a student community of approximately 27,000 students and over 200,000 alumni across 186 countries. DMU is the only British university to have been awarded Global Hub status for United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.

In REF2021, more than 60 per cent of research at DMU was judged as world leading or internationally excellent. Leicester is one of the first UK urban areas in which no single ethnic group holds a majority, making a commitment to engaging with the concerns of local communities central to our strategic aims to address power imbalances and inequalities and to enhance human well-being.

Executive Summary

Research led by Dr Barnard into how to enable ‘future-proofing’ (i.e. sustainable and resilient) digital upskilling demonstrates the need to a) support citizens’ development of digitally targeted creative flexibility and b) leverage ‘offline’ for online learning.

‘Online access is not the only factor in digital exclusion’, factors including ‘confidence in navigating the online sphere’ are ‘prerequisites to reaping the full benefits of the internet’.[1] Individuals’ levels of digital skills can go down as well as up.

Accepting the possibility that all citizens could become digitally excluded and thus prioritising investment that empowers individuals for long-term digital upskilling will benefit individuals and society.

To unlock value, we need an approach to digital exclusion by government and industry that responds robustly to the fact that access and basic training alone is not enough. We need that approach to embrace the fact that human responses such as lack of confidence and/or fear can be key.

Overall, Barnard’s findings support the need for approaches to digital engagement by government and industry that embrace broadened understandings of digital exclusion and invest in space for and initiatives that enable citizens to a) develop digitally targeted creative flexibility and b) embed offline in online learning.

About the author

Dr Josie Barnard SFHEA is Associate Professor in Creative and Digital Practice, School of Arts, Design and Humanities, De Montfort University, Leicester UK, where she is Subject Leader of Creative Writing.

Barnard’s research centres on the application of creativity to the challenge of bridging the digital divide. It is represented by outputs including her book, The Multimodal Writer,[2] and her BBC Radio 4 programme, Digital Future.[3] Her focus on the role of offline in enabling online learning is represented by her article ‘Cyber Nuts and Bolts: Effective Participatory Online Learning, Theory and Practice’.[4]

Scope of this submission

This submission presents ongoing research by Dr Barnard into the role of creativity and offline in enabling ‘future-proofing’ digital upskilling. The findings highlight the pressing need for investment invest in space for and initiatives that enable citizens to develop digitally targeted creative flexibility and embed offline in online learning.

Of the ‘Inquiry questions’ named in the call for evidence, the focus of this submission is: ‘What are the obstacles to greater digital inclusion? Where is policy intervention likely to have the greatest impact over the next 12 months and 5 years?’

The submission addresses the UN’s SDGs: (SDG 1) reduction of poverty, by improving digitally excluded citizens’ employment opportunities; (SDG 10) reduced inequalities, by providing digitally excluded citizens with future-proofing digital skills to engage more productively and enjoyably in life and society; (SDG 8) sustainable economic growth due to digitally excluded citizens’ improved digital skills in the workplace; (SDG 4) quality education that enables confident self-directed future learning in a changing digital landscape.

The submission recommends practical policy measures that seek to enable development of approaches to digital engagement that embrace creative solutions that can be scaled up.

Dr Barnard would welcome the opportunity to discuss this submission in greater detail and give oral evidence to the inquiry.

Summary of findings

The digital exclusion context makes clear the urgent need for approaches to digital engagement that embrace creative solutions.

Digital exclusion means exclusion from fulfilling employment, best value purchases, healthcare, and social and leisure opportunities. ‘[B]asic digital skills are not enough to create savvy citizens for the digital era,’ notes a 2020 House of Lords report on digital exclusion, instead, enabling ‘the skills and competencies to participate creatively’ should be of higher priority.[5] Digital exclusion can affect diverse citizens, including so-called ‘digital natives’. Only 41% of people in work in the UK have the full set of digital skills needed for work, notes the UK Essential Digital Skills for Work report – that is, 59% of people in work (the ‘hidden middle’) do not have the full set of digital skills needed for work; further, 8% do not have any of the essential workplace digital skills at all.[6] Evidence indicates that future workplace needs for creative use of digital skills to solve problems will grow.[7] [8] Digital capability is ‘not a permanent state’, if we are to have a ‘digital economy and society that everyone can participate in, a culture of life-long learning and confidence building is key’.[9] Digital upskilling should be viewed as an ongoing process which could be termed digital ‘always-skilling’.[10]

The start of Barnard’s academic programme of research into the role of creativity in enabling ‘future-proofing’ digital upskilling is marked by her 2013 evidence on Supporting the Creative Economy.[11] Later, addressing Parliament on the importance of digital for employability, MP Sharon Hodgson quoted one of Barnard’s central points:[12] ‘Students who are taught creative writing are taught creative thinking’. Barnard’s programme of research has centred on empirically testing how to teach such creative thinking.

Barnard developed a set of practical assignments, which focused on using learners’ inner resources to tackle digital challenges; this use of inner resources includes repurposing existing skills (or, reflective ‘remediation of practice’). She identified ‘in person’ support as key, and ‘affect’ (human senses, emotion) as a usable resource, deploying familiar ‘old’ technology (e.g. pencils) to build confidence. Her research provides an adaptable model of creativity that can be used to enable effective and lasting digital upskilling.[13]

Outputs by Barnard including her article ‘Cyber nuts and bolts: Effective Participatory Online Learning, Theory and Practice’ demonstrate that: offline contributes significant benefit to online learning; even so-called ‘digital natives’ may have confidence in their leisure-time use of digital but find it difficult to transfer those skills into a learning or work context. The scale of this latter challenge is indicated by a Learning and Work Institute report[14] which notes that the majority of young people (62%) are ‘confident that they have the basic digital skills that employers need. However, fewer than one in five (18%) young people are very confident they have the advanced digital skills that employers need’.

Human factors including fear can be significant inhibitors. Motivation to go online plus empowerment through creativity that is grounded in offline learning to enable ongoing effective and productive online engagement are, together, key.

Recommendations

The AHRC/DCMS report Boundless Creativity[15] highlights the importance as we build back after Covid of gaining understanding of creativity in the context of digital engagement. Government and funding bodies can support this aim by supporting:

Research that contributes to gaining a practical understanding of the role of creativity in effective and productive digital engagement;

Humanities subjects in Higher Education institutions as providers of future-proofing creative thinking skills.

The Government’s 2022 report ‘Reimagining where we live: cultural placemaking and the levelling up agenda’ explicitly calls on arts, culture and heritage organisations to deliver ‘cultural placemaking’,[16] providing communities with direct benefits and supporting ‘education, pride in place, health and wellbeing, and therefore support the Government deliver on the missions set out in its Levelling Up agenda’. Arts, culture and heritage organisations are ideally placed to become trusted cultural hubs delivering targeted digital creative flexibility to support future-proofing digital upskilling in the community. Government could:

Encourage and promote the emergence of welcoming, small-scale, low-cost, accessible, informal and easily recognisable digital community hubs that are selected as suitable for developing trust and creativity.

Affordable, reliable, long-term Internet access for such culture hubs will be important. The Government could:

Ensure widespread availability of infrastructure in the community to support internet usage, i.e. access to broadband, digital devices and support free of charge, to enable the digital participation of all.

Digital training and support frameworks often neglect the ‘hidden middle’ (i.e. the 59% of people in work who do not have the essential digital skills needed for work) and the need for ‘always skilling’. The Government could:

Provide guidelines for workplace digital training and support frameworks that broaden the definition of digital exclusion to embrace the ‘hidden middle’ and the need for ‘always skilling’.

March 2023

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