Why professionals are the key to building UK media literacy
Megan Rose, Parent Zone’s chief of staff, explores the crucial role “turn-to professionals” play in our work – including the launch of the flagship media literacy programme, Everyday Digital.
Parenting has never been tougher.
Digital has introduced challenges that, in many cases, we simply don’t have answers to.
Our work tries to help parents find a path through, so that they can raise children who will flourish in a connected world. We deliver programmes and products that blend our expertise in parenting with our knowledge of the digital environments children and families are engaging with.
We understand that tech is deeply interwoven into daily family life. Ofcom’s 2024 research states that 96% of children are online. In reality, it is virtually impossible to imagine a family home that doesn’t include technology.
Our task is a challenging one. We need to reach parents where they are with the information and the support they need, when they need it.
So how do we put that into practice?
Professionals bring enormous value
Working with turn-to professionals is an integral part of our practice.
This partnership model allows us to reach parents through the people they already go to for trusted information and support. Critically it means we’re meeting parents where they already are: their child's school, local library, health centre, or even supermarket.
Perhaps that sounds a little convoluted. Why not go directly to parents?
The answer is that this approach leverages relationships that parents already have. It takes support to communities we couldn’t otherwise reach and it recognises the enormous value of professionals who are already working hard to help families. It’s an approach we've refined and evidenced since 2004.
The success of the model is demonstrated best in our flagship media literacy programme, Everyday Digital.
Working directly in communities
The Everyday Digital programme is based on parenting research, media literacy best practice and behaviour change approaches. It helps parents integrate positive media literacy habits into their daily routines, benefiting both them and their children.
However, the programme works by providing training and resources to family-facing professionals – in order to deliver these media literacy interventions to parents. This includes face-to-face activities and presentations, and digital tools including video playlists and an embeddable media literacy content widget for websites.
Everyday Digital evolved from a government-funded service called Parent Zone Local – which supported parents directly in their communities with expert advice around digital life. Central to this were ‘Local Guides’ – dedicated community practitioners who provided this support and signposted parents to relevant information and resources.
Independent evaluation showed that 88% of parents who engaged with these professionals reported feeling more confident about managing their children’s digital lives. Based on this success, our funding was extended to enable us to evolve the model for greater scale.
A national network of practitioners
For Everyday Digital, we shifted focus to building capacity in local areas by empowering professionals through training, support and resources.
This approach enabled us to build a unique network of UK professionals – all with a shared need to support local parents with media literacy.
Many were concerned about the lack of useful and positive ways to engage parents in a rapidly-changing technological environment. For example, risks like scams and misleading adverts, as well as more challenging problems like deepfakes, AI Chatbots and financial exploitation.
Evidence shows that this works. An independent evaluation found that Everyday Digital not only boosted professionals’ own understanding and confidence around media literacy, but helped parents grasp key media literacy concepts and find further support for themselves and their children.
Building foundations of better media literacy
For us, this is just the beginning. We’ve built the foundations of an important network that we plan to grow and evolve.
We’ve been working hard on developing the next iteration of the programme, refining our suite of resources for parents and building a self guided training course for new professionals who want to use Everyday Digital in their work or as a way to enhance their own Media Literacy knowledge.
Click here to find out more about Everyday Digital
Want to know more? Email programmes@parentzone.org.uk.