A new report from the House of Lords provides interesting reading on the current state of media literacy in the UK.

Last week (25^th July 2025), the Communications and Digital Committee of the House of Lords (the UK’s upper house of parliament), released a fairly damning Report about the current state of media literacy. The press release was headed ‘failure to prioritise media literacy in the UK presents a risk to social cohesion and democracy’. For once, we have an official recognition of what some of us have been saying for some time: that the story of media literacy in the UK has been one of policy failure.

The Report is a substantial document, based on submissions and evidence from a range of key stakeholders, both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. In my view, it’s unduly preoccupied with questions about misinformation and online harm, at the expense of a broader understanding of the cultural dimensions of media literacy (on which, see my forthcoming book!). But this is a serious, strongly argued analysis that combines informed criticism with practical policy proposals; and it puts critical thinking front and centre. As policy documents go, it’s genuinely refreshing to read.

The Report begins by expressing concern that the UK is now ‘losing ground’ compared to other countries in media literacy provision – although quite how one might measure and compare ‘levels’ of media literacy is certainly open to debate. As the Report argues, government policy in this area has been incoherent and piecemeal, and lacking in longer-term vision. Schools should be central to ensuring media literacy; yet in shuffling responsibility off to the media regulator, the government has consistently ignored the role of formal education.

As a result, media literacy has been left to a disparate collection of charities and voluntary sector organisations – which, despite their good intentions, are for the most part only distantly connected to formal education, and can only ever reach a tiny minority of young people (or indeed adults). As I’ve documented here before, media and technology companies have not been slow to jump on the bandwagon, although their efforts might well be seen as little more than superficial public relations. As the Report concludes, much of what passes for media literacy provision is fragmented and lacking in continuity; there is no proper training for providers, and projects are left scrabbling for inadequate amounts of funding.

In order to understand the reasons for this failure, we need to track back to the beginning. It’s nearly thirty years since the term ‘media literacy’ first appeared on the agenda of communications policy in Britain; although we have a much longer history of media education, which can now be traced back almost one hundred years. The origins of this current interest date back to 1996, when the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (then the regulator for commercial broadcasting) produced a joint report entitled Violence and the Viewer. The report was a response to the murder of a London headteacher, Philip Lawrence, in the street outside his school. This was an event in which (as far as anybody could tell) the influence of media played no part whatsoever; and yet, in an all-too-familiar way, media became an easy scapegoat for much broader and more troubling concerns.

Violence and the Viewer was largely written by an IBA employee whose antipathy to media education was already well-known. It entirely ignored the role of Media Studies in UK schools and universities, and looked instead to the US for what it saw as a more palatable and less critical approach (and hence one more likely to appeal to media companies). It thereby imported the term ‘media literacy’ and the somewhat anodyne and functional definition that went with it: media literacy was ‘the ability to access, analyse and produce information for specific outcomes’ – a definition that was subsequently taken on by Ofcom, the newly converged media regulator, when ‘promoting media literacy’ became one of its legal obligations under the 2003 Communications Act.

I’ve lived through and written a good deal about this history (for example here and here), so I don’t want to re-tell it; but it’s worth emphasising that the refusal to engage with formal education was apparent right from the start. Responsibility for ‘promoting’ (as distinct from actually providing) media literacy was given, not to the Department (or Ministry) for Education, but to Ofcom. One could certainly make some criticisms of how well Ofcom has fulfilled that brief (and the Report has some sharp observations on this); but in some ways that’s beside the point. Media literacy should never have been a responsibility for the regulator in the first place.

The fundamental problem here was that the Department for Education was unwilling to engage with media literacy from the outset. This was the case under New Labour, whose energetic policies on literacy were driven by quite different imperatives (not to mention a highly functional view of literacy); and it was ever more the case under the Conservatives, who seemed intent on returning the curriculum to the nineteenth century. Today, the DfE routinely responds to enquiries on the matter by claiming that media literacy is already well provided in the school curriculum. As the House of Lords report implies, this is patently not the case. On the contrary, over the past 15 years, media education in schools has been steadily marginalised and undermined by government policy.

The Report argues very directly (as some of us have been doing since time immemorial) that ‘media literacy must now be embedded across the national curriculum, since schools are central to delivering media literacy education to children and young people’. There are some signs that the government’s forthcoming review of curriculum and assessment might begin to address this, although quite how far it will respond to this call remains to be seen.

I’m already repeating myself (nothing new there, some might say). So for the moment, I’m going to leave you with the short submission I made to the House of Lords Committee a few months ago. They wanted it to be succinct, which it definitely is – to the point of being quite blunt and bad tempered. But I guess being grumpy is now the prerogative of my current stage of life…

1. 1. For the most part, media literacy has been poorly and inconsistently defined. Commentators of all persuasions are often keen to blame the media for difficult social problems – of which political extremism, misogyny, child obesity and mental ill-health are merely the latest. In this context, media literacy appears to provide an easy, feel-good solution. Yet in the process, it often amounts to little more than a vacuous slogan. 

1. 2. Attempts to measure levels of media literacy – and to draw comparisons between countries – have largely been simplistic and misguided. The idea that media literacy can serve as a means of ‘inoculating’ media users against bad influences is one that media educators moved beyond many decades ago. Media literacy is not a prophylactic: it should be about in-depth critical thinking, not merely protection from harm. 

1. 3. Media literacy is an American term that arrived on the policy agenda approximately thirty years ago. As governments gradually retreated from centralised regulation of media, and as technology became ever more difficult to control, it seemed to offer a way of making individuals responsible for the problems that were arising from a more commercially dominated media system.

1. 4. However, there is a much longer history of media education in UK schools, dating back almost a century. Most other countries in the world have been heavily influenced by the UK approach, especially as formalised in the late 1980s by the British Film Institute. However, curriculum reforms over the past fifteen years have largely eradicated media education from UK schools. 

1. 5. This is partly a result of policy failure. Government reports have frequently expressed a generalised commitment to media literacy as fundamental to democratic citizenship. However, Ofcom, the communications regulator with responsibility for this area, has found it exceptionally difficult to work with the Department for Education, and has largely confined itself to working outside the formal education system. 

1. 6. Current provision for media literacy outside schools is patchy and inconsistent, and reaches only a tiny minority of the population. It is largely left to voluntary sector organisations, which have quite diverse motivations. Providers are rarely adequately trained and funding is uneven. Significant questions have also been raised about the involvement of commercial media and technology companies in this sector. 

1. 7. Yet when it comes to formal education, there is no coherent provision for media literacy. Some schools have optional GCSE and A-level courses in Media Studies, which typically include creative media production as well as critical analysis. This is very far from the ‘Mickey Mouse subject’ that is routinely ridiculed by ignorant comedians. However, student numbers here have fallen off during the past ten years. 

1. 8. Media education has always been a small part of English, although these elements were almost entirely removed from the curriculum in the 2015 reforms. Media education topics feature in other secondary school subjects, including Citizenship and Technology, but only as a small component. There is virtually no mention of media education in statutory documents relating to primary education. 

1. 9. Children today are learning about many significant aspects of the world principally through the media. They need to understand how these media make meaning, how they represent reality, and how they are produced and consumed. It is simply bizarre that the large majority of young people today will go through their entire school career with no opportunity to engage in formal study of media, or to produce their own media. 

1. 10. Nevertheless, over the past several decades, there have been many instances of good practice in media education. Current curriculum specifications in this area need to be amended to allow greater discretion for teachers in selecting texts for study: this would enable them to keep up with a rapidly changing field. There should also be greater scope for students to engage in creative media production.

1. 11. In principle, media literacy should be a dimension of many curriculum areas. However, it is inadequate to simply add it to existing ‘catch-all’ subjects like PSHE or Citizenship, where it is likely to be delivered by teachers without adequate training. Rather, media literacy should be a central focus for English: we need to modernise how we teach about culture and communication in ways that reflect changing realities.

1. 12. In order for this to happen, teachers require in-depth training and continuing professional development. They need support from subject specialists, not least at a regional level; and they need adequate resources, including publications and technology. Media education should be part of the National Curriculum; and it should be the responsibility of the Department for Education, not the media regulator.

1. 13. The media are absolutely central to so many areas of our social lives: to politics and the economy, to public knowledge and culture, and to our social and intimate relationships. To this extent, understanding the media is an indispensable requirement for participation in the modern world. Yet media literacy will be merely superficial if we do not have comprehensive, systematic and coherent media education for all.