Teach Primary Issue 18.6

www.teachwire.ne t | 23 I ’ll let you into a secret. As founding editor-in-chief of the UK’s first and only weekly newspaper for children, you might expect me to be a champion of giving young people the facts; and, of course, I am. But here’s the thing: 18 years after we launched First News , I’m seriously starting to wonder whether that’s enough. Because I’ll be honest – the sheer volume of information, unchecked and unfiltered, that children are now bombarded with on a daily basis is terrifying to me. Children are introduced to smartphones at an increasingly young age, exposed to powerful algorithms serving up content designed to grab users’ attention and encourage sharing. The line between what is fun and edgy, and what is harmful and dangerous is blurred. It’s a distinction that can be difficult even for adults to perceive, let alone primary-aged pupils, who are often still just as happy playing ‘dog families’ in the playground as they are logging into Minecraft or Roblox when they get home. As far back as 2018, the UK’s Commission on Fake News and Critical Literacy in Schools found that only two per cent of children and young people had the critical literacy skills they needed to judge whether a news story is real or false. A majority (60 per cent) of teachers surveyed believed fake news was having a harmful effect on children’s wellbeing by increasing anxiety, damaging self-esteem and skewing their world view. And from what our readers tell us, not to mention what we experience as media consumers ourselves, navigating this volatile landscape is only getting more challenging. When politicians are presenting TV shows and social media influencers are pushing policy agendas – how are children supposed to know which news source to trust? Literacy is rightly championed, along with numeracy, as a priority for our education system; but what about critical literacy? I believe that equipping children with the knowledge and skills needed to separate a trusted source from a dubious one, identifying bias and agendas, and triangulating data to create as accurate a picture as possible, should be woven into any curriculum designed to do more than simply enable pupils to jump through assessment hoops – and from as early an age as possible. The good news, which will come as no surprise to you at the chalkface, is that the skills required for critical literacy are already being developed in classrooms everywhere. Right from the first time they tackle a multiple-choice question with deliberately plausible wrong answers, through ‘guesstimating’ the solution before using a calculator and ‘thinking like a scientist/ historian/geographer’ – pupils are taught, over and over, to check their work . I wonder, though, whether this aspect of teaching should be made even more explicit; perhaps even somehow worked into accountability measures. If a school really is ‘good’, or even ‘outstanding’, shouldn’t its pupils leave with a healthy level of scepticism towards things they are being asked to accept and believe? I’m not suggesting there should be endless debate around every single name, date or mathematical concept presented for children to learn (although my most memorable lesson ever was when our brilliant Year 6 maths teacher cut a paper circle into segments, then rearranged them in a rough oblong, by way of proving Pythagoras’ theorem to us – so much more powerful than just committing the formulae to memory). But I would urge you, as consistently as possible, to encourage pupils to reinforce their learning independently, evidence their opinions and question their sources. Exactly what I expect, in fact, from every journalist writing for First News . Knowledge may well be power, and the transfer of it is absolutely the core business of schools; but I am convinced that being able to separate the truth from an attractive or convincing falsehood is a superpower to which all our young people should be entitled, too – are you with me? Nicky w .teachwire.net | 17 A letter to... It’s never too early to teach children to check their sources, says First News editor Nicky Cox MBE Each issueweaskacontributor to penanote theywould love to send All teachers Nicky Cox MBE is editor-in-chief of First News , a weekly newspaper for readers aged seven to 14. To find out more about the paper, and accompanying free resources, visit tinyurl.com/TSFirstNews VO I C E S “The sheer volume of information, unchecked and unfiltered, that children are now bombarded with on a daily basis is terrifying”