Teens see social media, more than school, as the place to learn about race and faith

For most young people, learning about social and political issues doesn’t start with a textbook. It starts with a phone.

While debates intensify about whether to impose a social media ban on under-16s in the UK, it’s important to consider how social media can be a route for learning as well as potential harm.

Young people aged 14-15 are at a crucial stage in terms of their developing awareness of and engagement with political issues. Our research with more than 3,000 young people in year ten (ages 14 and 15) in schools across England found that 75% said they learned most about social and political issues online, including on social media.

This is far more than the 47% who (also) said they learned most about this at school. At the same time, though, only 21% said they were comfortable sharing their views on such issues online: 60% don’t share their views online.

Learning about race and faith equality doesn’t just mean learning about anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter, for example. It also refers to the ways that young people, including those from diasporic and global majority backgrounds, develop their identities and values as citizens of the UK and the world.

Young people in our study described various ways they used online spaces to engage around race and faith issues. These included looking things up on established news sources like the BBC, and using news alerts on their phone. Apps like Instagram and TikTok were useful to some for updates from their extended family abroad, or to get direct information. This could include information from Gaza, for instance, where outside journalists have not been allowed in.

Some were wary of getting information from apps such as TikTok and YouTube, because they were regarded as potentially spreading false information and stereotypes about particular migrant communities, or presenting extremes. This wariness led them to crosscheck what they had seen on social media with news journalism that verifies its sources.

Further analysis of the survey – to be published in our forthcoming book – showed that most were cautious about sharing their views on social issues online. Statistically speaking, girls were also less comfortable than boys, and young people with Black, African and Caribbean backgrounds were less comfortable than their white peers sharing their views online.

But social media could also act as a sounding board for critically reflecting on, and emotionally processing events. For instance, a south-Asian Muslim girl felt that hearing other people’s opinions on an experience of discrimination can allow one to have multiple perspectives on what happened.

Learning from social media

Arguably, the fact that young people are often sceptical about what they see online is a positive outcome of their secondary online and media literacy education. But our research suggests that young people go online because they can’t get the information they need at school. Young people in rural areas, as well as those with Black, African and Caribbean backgrounds, raised particular concerns about school as a place to discuss race and faith issues. Those in lower-income areas also showed lower expectations that such issues would be discussed at school.

Government policy has for many years made it hard for schools to teach about race and faith equality in particular. One reason for this is that exam pressure in years ten and eleven (aged 14-16) leads schools to consign direct teaching about equality issues to years seven to nine.

But more fundamentally, the content of the curriculum, including history, is heavily geared towards a white British and European worldview. Citizenship education has been neglected in favour of traditional academic subjects, and so equality issues are addressed in occasional Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) lessons.

More problematically, schools have had to walk a delicate line when it comes to talking about political issues. In recent years, schools have been warned that teaching white privilege as a fact in schools is unlawful, and that they must ensure they teach topics relating to Israel and Palestine neutrally.

We found education stakeholders including local authority advisers, teacher unions and community organisations are concerned about the lack of support for teachers to engage these and other issues accurately. This concern is something current policymaking, including the curriculum and assessment review, has not meaningfully addressed.

It’s not surprising, then, that only 38% of young people felt comfortable sharing their views at school. While this is a higher proportion than shared their views online, we would expect a much higher result from school if obstacles to sharing views there were removed. Such obstacles include concern about peer judgement, being disciplined, or because they felt they had to sideline their feelings, have a “thick skin” and focus on their studies to – paradoxically – get ready for “the real world”.

We need to carefully consider and balance young people’s rights both to protection and to information in school and online. Our recommendations call for much greater support for schools to negotiate race and faith issues, as taking away under-16s’ access to social media without greater school-based support could be more counterproductive than protective.

Karl Kitching works at University of Birmingham and has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust RPG-2022-063 for this research.

Aslı Kandemir works at the University of Birmingham. She receives funding from Birmingham City Council.

Shajedur Rahman works for the University of Birmingham and Milton Keynes College.