Are we teaching for the digital future we want?
Published: 3 September 2025
Commentary, Story
Written by Professor David Lundie from the School of Social & Environmental Sustainability, this article highlights why schools must go beyond online safety to equip young people with the skills and values needed for digital citizenship.
Just as schools were preparing to break up for the summer, West Lothian Local Authority had to contend with a cyber attack that stole personal and sensitive files from schools and social work services. Now, as schools return, children in a Midlothian primary school 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 the school. Young people today are ‘postdigital’, they don’t “go online”, their online and offline worlds merge seamlessly. As such, many of the skills 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 impacts of data processing, for themselves and others, critically engage with information. A rights-respecting approach to teaching for digital citizenship should provide all young people with a minimum digital living standard, not only of device access but of the skills necessary to create, edit, communicate, publish and curate digital experiences that benefit themselves and society. Above all, young people need to understand that the information ecosystem we currently inhabit, with its disinformation, threats and inequalities, is not inevitable – it is the product of historical conditions, technical affordances, and choices which are contingent and can be changed.
For the past 3 years, a team at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford have been exploring the practices, challenges, and curriculum resources schools use to teach children to be good digital citizens. We have been amazed at enthusiastic teachers, early adopters, developing curricula for digital citizenship across a range of subject areas: mathematics provides some great opportunities to understand algorithms and statistical literacy; art and design provides opportunities to study emerging questions about intellectual property; RMPS can engage with the philosophy of computing and information, epistemic questions about the nature of truth in the online world; history provides opportunities to develop the 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 1-to-1 device deals are rendered useless in buildings with slow and unreliable WiFi. Differences between Local Authorities’ education technology preferences pose challenges for teachers who become used to one set of proprietary systems, and 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’s access to Microsoft Office in 2024. 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 saw plenty of examples of just the opposite. Teachers emailing central ‘whitelisting’ administrators to ask why trusted resources were no longer accessible, ‘digital champions’ who have been taken off timetable to help support digital pedagogy across the school being called upon for basic IT support, lessons beginning with a familiar 5-10 minute ritual of pupils logging on, waiting for WiFi, 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’ ASN inclusion differently to the way 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 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, co-ordinating 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 have declared 2025 to be the Year of Digital Citizenship Education. 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, toward becoming the builders of the more positive online future they shape for themselves.
This article first appeared in Tes magazine on 1 September 2025.
About the author: 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”.
First published: 3 September 2025