Fake news is a buzzword of our time, but its impact can be significant. Not only can it threaten our democracy, our confidence in governance, or our trust in journalism, but it has also been reported to distort children’s view of the world.

In a digital world, we can no longer take everything we read, hear or see at face value – no matter how reliable we believe the source. Children are increasingly likely to encounter fake news; more young people than ever are using digital media as their main source of news, so they must be equipped with the skills to tell fact from fiction.

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While critical literacy skills are part of every stage of the national curriculum in England, a new report from the National Literacy Trust shows that children are not retaining what they’ve been taught. Some 20% of children aged between eight and 15 believe everything they read online is true, and 35% of UK teachers say pupils have cited fake news or false information found online as fact in their work.

Reading comprehension, a big part of the Key Stage 1 and 2 curriculums, is particularly important for preparing children to become critically literate. It helps children accurately understand and interpret information by making connections between what they read and what they already know, working out what is important, and spotting the difference between fact and fiction. Other curriculum areas help to build the foundation skills needed to develop strong critical literacy skills, such as reading a wide range of texts for different purposes, learning about inference, and identifying how language structures and presentation contribute to meaning.

In addition to building on the skills learned in primary school, these skills feature even more prominently in secondary school. At Key Stage 3, it is a requirement to teach pupils to read critically and at Key Stage 4, pupils are taught to understand and evaluate texts by seeking evidence to support a point of view, to distinguish between statements that are supported by evidence and those that are not, and to identify bias and misuse of evidence.

Despite this, the fact that children lack adequate critical literacy skills suggests that something is amiss. This issue is at the heart of a new commission launched by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy and the National Literacy Trust. The Commission into Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills will look at the impact fake news has on children and young people, and how the skills needed to identify it are being taught. The commission will make a series of recommendations to the government and the education sector in 2018 that will put critical literacy at the heart of the national curriculum.

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Children need to be able to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to real-life situations. With fake news such a big threat to children’s lives, as well as being such a topical issue, bringing it into the classroom will give teachers the opportunity to further develop their pupils’ critical literacy skills, and give children an opportunity to discuss any news stories that worry them in a safe environment.

The National Literacy Trust has created some free teaching resources to help primary and secondary teachers introduce fake news into their classrooms. One activity is to create a shared definition of fake news. Your pupils will probably have a varied understanding of the term based on their own personal experiences, so a shared definition will help them better identify and discuss it.

To create your shared definition:

Use the definition of fake news in the teaching resource to get you started

Ask pupils to share examples of the different types of fake news stories they’ve seen and heard, and bring some examples to class

Create a fake-news glossary to include words that may be unfamiliar to your students, such as biased, hoax, propaganda, intentionally

List different places where you can get news from, including newspapers, websites, social media channels, magazines, TV and radio programmes. As you say each out loud, ask your students to clap if they trust that news source, then create a trusted places display

To inform the commission, and ensure that the views of teachers and pupils are at its heart, we’ve launched three new surveys. Our teacher survey explores whether teachers think fake news is a problem in the classroom and asks how and where they believe critical literacy skills should be taught. Our pupil surveys – one for primary and one for secondary – aim to find out what children and young people think about fake news, and include a quiz to see whether pupils can tell the difference between some real and fake news stories. The surveys are open until 5 November.

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We need to work out what’s going wrong and how we can address it. Your views will help us ensure that all children have the skills they need to navigate the digital world.

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