The Role of Algorithmic Literacy in Digital Wellbeing

Social media, search engines, and recommendation algorithms profoundly shape young people's online experiences. Enhancing wellbeing while minimising harms is essential.

Algorithmic literacy—the understanding of how algorithms influence content and the functional skills to navigate them—is a critical component of digital wellbeing. Yet, most young people lack awareness of how these systems work and their implications. Those with poor mental health are particularly vulnerable to unintentional exposure to harmful content like self-harm and suicide imagery.

Promoting algorithmic literacy equips young people to navigate the digital world safely and positively. Interviews with experts in Canada, Finland, and Australia revealed that digital competencies, including algorithmic literacy, are essential life skills for health, social, and economic empowerment.

Recommendations for Policy and Practice

1. UK Media Literacy Week: Launch a national programme within schools, libraries, and public spaces to enhance algorithmic literacy as part of broader media literacy efforts.
2. Curriculum Review: Update the UK curriculum to ensure comprehensive digital literacy education (including algorithmic literacy), focusing on resilience, active participation, and ethical issues in AI.
3. Teacher Training: Provide training and gamified resources to help teachers confidently deliver algorithmic literacy education.
4. Digital Literacy Qualification: Introduce a compulsory Key Stage 4 qualification covering functional skills and critical thinking about algorithms and AI.

Key Findings

• The UK lags behind countries like Finland, Canada, and Australia in media literacy, ranking 15th in the Media Literacy Index. A lack of compulsory digital literacy education after age 14 exacerbates this gap.
• Effective algorithmic literacy initiatives are interactive, creative, and gamified. Examples include Canada’s #ForYou card game and Australia’s Algorithm of Disrespect tool.
• National Media Literacy Weeks can effectively raise awareness and engage stakeholders, as seen in Canada’s annual programme.
• Digital, (social) media and algorithmic literacy should be a standalone subject in the UK curriculum and embedded across all subjects for cross-cutting benefits.
• Comprehensive teacher training and targeted programmes for vulnerable groups are essential to improving algorithmic literacy.
• Digital, (social) media and algorithmic literacy includes functional skills and critical thinking and should integrate mental health literacy. For example, teaching young people to avoid self-harm content must include why this is important for wellbeing. Finland’s ‘multiliteracy’ approach emphasises critical thinking and democratic participation. MediaSmarts, in Canada, highlight the importance of understanding algorithms' roles in privacy, media representation, consumer awareness, and community engagement.

Around 6 years ago whilst building a dry stone wall in bright spring sunshine on a peaceful hill in Aberdeenshire I had an epiphany of sorts; that the process of learning and practicing the craft was transformational. Finding balance and building strength into dry stone walls was helping me grow, conquer fears, find purpose and be well. Through handling millions of stones, all of them unique in shape, size, colour and composition I got to know hidden, perhaps forgotten parts of my soul and being. These stoic, solid, patient and beautiful teachers reminded me that life at its best is creative and playful. Other lessons were delivered every day at the wall (they still are!) and in the stoney fields I learnt the value of present awareness, the dichotomy of effort and ease, the wonder of deep time, listening and sensing, all hinting at something much greater than myself, something awesome and sublime.

It got me thinking; I had questions I wanted to answer and a new world of possibility to explore; Was dry stone walling really a dying or dark art as often a passerby would comment? Who shares this passion for the craft and with whom could I collaborate, innovate and celebrate it with? Who was resisting and challenging the degradation of the environment, of communities and of place by building beautiful, mortar free stone walls and features and how? I realised I had a strong case for applying for a Churchill Fellowship and in early 2020 I learnt with joy that I had been successful.

I finally undertook my travel in Japan and Korea over 5 weeks in Autumn 2023. It was a huge honour and a life changing experience to work with and learn in person from craftspeople and artists, now friends, who had inspired and motivated me from afar in the preceding years. My greatest takeaway or finding is that far from dying out, dry stone walling is a resurgent, healthy craft and artform that has a plethora of benefits to practitioners, the communities in which they operate and for the wider natural environment. Rather than gatekeeping, this growing community aims to share and broaden the skill among many and so nurture growth, respect and the possibility of building a better world together.

My recommendations?

1. Dry stone construction needs wider recognition, safeguarding and sustained support if it is to flourish and thrive once more. Generating opportunities for people to learn these skills and transmit them onwards is paramount.
2. Read my report to learn much more and get in touch with me - let's have a discussion.
3. Finally I encourage you to have a go at dry stone walling yourself as words are never a substitute for experience. We are here to help and you are very welcome!

2023 Churchill Fellowship report: ‘Powering Participation: Exploring how creative engagement can unlock domestic demand side response.’

The electricity system in Great Britain is changing rapidly and is on track to be nearly ‘net zero’ by 2030, meaning that the bulk of our energy system will not be contributing to climate change.

As the proportion of our electricity from renewable sources increases, so does the need for us to be more flexible about our energy demand, known as Demand Side Response (DSR) or more often simply ‘Flexibility’. For us to achieve that net zero target, we must in fact use the flexibility that lurks in all our homes and garages and better match domestic electricity demand to the available supply. There’s lots of ways this can be done, through smart tariffs, automation or price signals, but there’s one motivator which I think is often overlooked: by making it feel fun and important. We already have DSR programmes for homes in the UK, but recently the value attributed to ‘saving’ energy using DSR was reduced, making it less appealing for many people to bother shifting their demand around. In my view, viewing flexibility simply as a transaction is missing a real opportunity to involve citizens in their energy system and in the climate success story which is net zero power.

My fellowship focused on how different countries and markets encourage citizens to be more flexible with their electricity demand and respond to the needs of the system and I developed some clear recommendations based on my findings.

These recommendations illustrate how non-financial incentives can be hugely powerful if delivered in the right way. I travelled to countries that have similar electricity systems to our own (i.e. largely privatised and market driven with clear ambition for high levels of renewables): Sweden, the USA, Canada and through virtual research in Australia.

I have been really pleased with the level of interested in my findings since publishing my report. I wrote a linked-In article that summarised by research and findings, but the most effective promotion was in sending the finished report to my network and asking them to forward it on if they found it useful. A short while later, I was invited to speak to the GB gas and electricity market regulator, Ofgem, about my findings and how non-financial incentives could help increase domestic flexibility. The next few years are going to see enormous change in how GB citizens perceive, use and pay for power. Hopefully my Churchill Fellowship can play a small role in shaping that change for the better.

It’s been six years since I completed my Churchill Fellowship project. I travelled to Australia, Canada and the USA researching the impact of the prison environment on staff wellbeing. At the time, I was a Senior Prison Officer at HMP Belmarsh in London. I had seen first-hand the challenges frontline staff were facing in English jails – the ever-increasing violence, self-harm, disorder and suicide. And as incidents rose, staff morale dropped. I had hoped to find examples of innovative, creative support systems to protect prison staff from the residual effects of trauma. In that regard, my Fellowship was successful.

I came back from my travels inspired. I had interviewed elite crisis support teams in Texas, attended women’s leadership meetings in Melbourne and seen the breadth of specialist psychological interventions in Calgary. On my return, I made a list of recommendations to implement an effective wellbeing system for prison officers:

• Develop and increase staff training
• A new and revised psychological support program
• One to one annual mental health check-ups
• Professionalise the peer support system

But finding out the facts isn’t always enough to make people believe them. In 2021, after almost a decade in the job, I accepted that it was almost impossible to change the system from inside and resigned. I was not alone. Resignation rates of prison officers are alarmingly high and retention rates depressingly low. Analysis conducted by the Labour party found that prison and probation staff took over 700 years worth of mental health sick leave in just 12 months. The situation is dire.

Since leaving the Prison Service, I’ve written a book about my experiences inside English prisons. ‘Behind These Doors’ was selected as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and one of Waterstones Best Politics Books of 2023. I have gone on to write about prison reform for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The London Economic and iNews. My work has seen me arguing for better conditions on BBC 2 Politics Live, discussing life inside with former prisoners and speaking in the House of Lords. And last year, I was appointed Special Advisor to the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee’s current inquiry, ‘Prison Culture: Leadership, Governance and Staffing’.

I know exactly the recommendations I will make.