As schools were preparing to break up for the summer, West Lothian Council had to contend with a cyberattack that stole personal and sensitive files from schools and social work services. Then, just as schools returned from the holidays, children in a were subjected to malicious and inappropriate WhatsApp group messaging, prompting a police investigation.
Digital threats, it seems, are everywhere.
At the same time, however, it is clear that schools have much to gain from teaching the digital skills of the future. Love or hate it, we cannot cut the digital part out of children’s identities when they step inside school.
‘Post-digital’ worlds
Young people today are . Their online and offline worlds merge seamlessly. So many of the skills that young people need in order to live good lives online are the same skills, dispositions and capacities that they need in the analogue world: civility, clear boundaries and, above all, an understanding of how the world works and how change is made - what we might call democratic pedagogy, civics or global citizenship education.
Citizenship, then, is much more than just safety. As well as understanding the risks of digital use and cybersecurity, it is important that young people learn about the ethical impact of data processing and critically engaging with information. A approach to teaching for digital citizenship should provide all young people with a , not only relating to device access but also the skills necessary to create and share digital experiences that benefit themselves and society.
Above all, young people need to understand that the information ecosystem that we inhabit, with its disinformation, threats and inequalities, is not inevitable - it is the product of historical conditions and choices that can be changed.
For the past three years, a team at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford has been exploring the practices, challenges and curriculum resources that schools use to teach children to be good digital citizens.
We have been amazed by teachers who are developing curricula for digital citizenship across a range of subjects: maths provides great opportunities to understand algorithms and statistical literacy; art and design connects to emerging questions about intellectual property; religious, moral and philosophical studies opens up the philosophy of computing and information, as well as questions about the nature of truth in the online world; while history offers skills for evaluating contested narratives.
At the same time, we have also found teachers struggling with back-of-house infrastructure that makes the work of teaching for digital citizenship much harder. Teachers are seldom involved in decisions about tech purchases and settings that impact on their work. Tech provision can overlook basic practicalities - rooms designed to absorb natural light are not designed for the glare on screens, shiny one-to-one device deals are rendered useless in buildings with slow and unreliable wi-fi.
Differences in councils’ edtech
Differences between local authorities’ education technology preferences pose challenges for teachers who become used to one set of proprietary systems, then have to almost entirely retrain for a different set.
Expensive procurement deals with private providers that can change their contract terms can leave schools and local authorities locked into contracts with long-term costs, or lead to reductions in service, as we saw with Glow (Scotland’s national digital learning platform) and its access to Microsoft Office in 2024. Meanwhile, trusted web resources can disappear behind paywalls or disappear altogether.
While much of the rhetoric around educational technology speaks of its capacity to free up teachers’ time for meaningful classroom interaction, we see plenty of examples of the opposite: teachers emailing central “whitelisting” administrators to ask why trusted resources are no longer accessible; “digital champions” who have been taken off timetable to drive digital pedagogy across the school being called upon for basic IT support; lessons beginning with a familiar five- to 10-minute ritual of pupils logging on, waiting for wi-fi and retrieving forgotten passwords; teachers carrying bags of chargers around to enable forgetful pupils to charge their devices.
Working with teachers across the UK, our project has developed an aspirational framework for schools to take a few simple reflections leading to quick, low-resource actions that can deliver some quick wins on enhancing digital citizenship.
Firstly, an institutional ethos that incorporates data justice - what core values guide our digital decision making? How do these align with our school’s mission, ethos and values? What processes are in place for auditing the impacts of new technology assets on aspiration, equity, inclusion, rights and sustainability? Is anyone thinking through the ways that data systems that provide visualisations of student attainment, for example, encourage us to “see” additional support needs inclusion differently to how we talk about it in other contexts?
Then there’s an understanding of what digital citizenship can and should mean for your school, shared across stakeholders and the community - are there ways that parents could be involved? What other external partnerships are available? Do pupils understand the reasons for the digital rules that the school has? Do teachers? What does progression look like in digital citizenship? How can we show progressive trust in our young people online? Where does digital citizenship sit within the curriculum? It may be worth picking three curriculum areas to focus on, coordinating alignment across schemes of work, so that pupils are able to make the connections.
How is student voice incorporated into digital citizenship education? Do young people have access to the digital tools they need for their lives? Are they equipped with the skills and knowledge to make ethically informed, socially responsible decisions to advocate for and enact positive social change? Who has agency over the technologies that support the life of the school - who owns them, who controls them, who benefits? Are decisions taken in a way that balances resource cost, the affordances of the system and the wider impact on people and planet?
The Council of Europe has declared 2025 to be the . By thinking about digital as just one of many dimensions of preparing our young people to be responsible citizens, it is possible to move beyond the (necessary and important) baseline of staying safe online - towards becoming the builders of the more positive online future they shape for themselves.
David Lundie is a professor of education and the deputy head of the University of Glasgow’s school of social and environmental sustainability in Dumfries. He is the principal investigator on the UK ESRC-funded research project Teaching for Digital Citizenship: Data Justice in the Classroom and Beyond
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