A new study led by Oxford researchers will investigate the barriers to developing digital skills faced by children in the care system. The research will combine current policy with interviews and survey data to understand “the systemic barriers and mechanisms influencing digital capital development” for care-experienced children.
The research is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by Dr Ekaterina Hertog of Wadham College, an Associate Professor of AI and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). The project’s Co-Investigator is Dr Victoria Nash, also of the OII.
The aim is to use the findings to make digital skills more accessible by influencing public policy and by helping to create a book supporting digital literacy. Nash told Cherwell: “We believe this is a really timely project because digital skills and access are increasingly important in order to participate in society.
“This begins at an early age as schools embrace an ever-wider range of digital tools… but continues to matter after school as different types of employment demand digital competencies, whilst interactions with the state (such as applying for a driver’s license or checking benefit eligibility) are increasingly ‘digital by default’.”
Nash highlighted that “care-experienced young people may lack the opportunity to practice [digital] skills at home and may also not enjoy the sorts of consistent guidance and oversight that government policies expect parents to step in and provide”.
In the UK, there are currently 107,000 children in various forms of care. Nash told Cherwell how the research could help to redress the imbalance in digital capital between them and their peers by making “recommendations as to how these [barriers] could be overcome, for example, by looking at adjustments to local authority provision”.
In a press release, the researchers critiqued the assumption of a stable, supportive family that underpinned the 2023 UK Online Safety Act. The Act was pitched by the UK Government in 2023 as making “the UK the safest place in the world to be online”. However, the researchers argue that “we know little about how children develop essential digital skills in the absence of long-term, stable family support”.
