This summer (July 2025) Ruth Page, Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, will be speaking at our annual Secondary education conference about the skills young people need to navigate social media.
We recognise the growing concern about children and young people’s critical literacy skills in an increasingly digital age and the impact when they don’t have the complex skills needed to identify misinformation and analyse what they are reading.
Reconsidering the application of literacy skills in this context and supporting children and young people to be safe and thrive is something we are exploring in our Future of Literacy project – which is currently inviting teachers, parents and employers to share their views and concerns.
The Future of Literacy project is part of our response to the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review and the four key pillars we recommend for Curriculum and Assessment reform.
Social media has increasingly been questioned for its potential negative impact on children as they develop, but with a rise in young people turning to social media and influencers for mental health advice and information, we need to consider how we can equip and empower young people with the skills to critically evaluate what they are consuming and use social media in a way that doesn’t cause them harm.
Ahead of her keynote at our Secondary conference on 7 July, Ruth answered some questions on her perspective on critical literacy and its role in helping children and young people to better evaluate what they are scrolling through particularly in relation to influencer-led mental health content on social media.
What is critical literacy?
Critical literacy includes the ability to evaluate the ways in which texts may (mis) represent ideas and create social impact (UKLA, 2020).
Why does critical literacy matter for mental health?
Recent research reported that increased time spent on phones/social media is associated with negative outcomes for young people’s mental health and wellbeing, but that restricting daytime phone use in schools did not improve this (Goodyear et al., 2025)
Instead, we need a holistic response: one that includes helping young people develop critical literacy to evaluate the content they consume when they are online.
Social media influencers, whose posts gain millions of views, are key communicative figures in this context. They have begun to be used by the government to communicate about public health. However, influencer communication is largely under-regulated. Lay persons and professionals alike share content about mental health. It can be difficult to determine whether the content creator has appropriate credentials to offer mental health advice.
The ESRC-funded research, Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People has been evidencing how young people respond to this ‘noisy’ content. We found that while initiatives like TikTok’s Clinician Creator Network promote reliable health content, young people need critical literacy to combat misleading information that persists in many social media sites.
How can critical literacy help?
Asking simple questions based on critical literacy can help young people navigate content from influencers.
To assess the quality of source information, ask:
- Who is the influencer?
- Do they have professional qualifications that are regulated and that you can verify?
- Is the information that they share supported by reliable evidence?
- Are they trying to sell you something?
In our focus groups with 75 young people (age 16-18), we found they had many good strategies for checking online content (e.g. using reliable sites) but also would use less reliable material like using comments on posts, view counts and response videos to determine the quality of the information they were shown. A recent study by Ofcom (2022) similarly found that older children (age 12-17) overestimate their ability to identity misinformation.
To recognise the role of emotional appeal, ask:
- How do you feel consuming the content?
- What steps can you take to check the impact of those feelings?
The audio-visual qualities of social media content drive emotional response indirectly. But both positive and negative emotions influence our perception of ideas. Emotional priming makes it difficult to identify whether content is fake. Even if mental health information is accurate, it may impact the viewer’s emotions, leading to increased anxiety, distress and their willingness to seek help.
How can we teach critical literacy for mental health?
The young people in our research called for peer-led conversations embedded in the PSHE curriculum. They wanted critical literacy to go beyond a focus on online safety and include guidance on how to consume the content they view more critically.
There are good resources focused on misinformation, like those provided by Full Fact.
Our ESRC funded research is developing conversational teaching tools for critical literacy and mental health over the summer months. To find out more, come along to the National Literacy Trust Secondary Conference in Birmingham on 7 July and help us shape our resources.
Helpful contacts and information
For more information about the ESRC research, please contact Ruth Page via email r.e.page@bham.ac.uk.
Or check out our free resources for Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 as part of our Empower programme, which aims to equip pupils with the skills they need to navigate the online world.