In an era defined by “fake news”, public trust in institutions is increasingly under threat, along with our ability to discern fact from fiction. In the UK, 94 per cent of people say they have encountered misinformation online, while only 3 per cent have taken a media literacy course, to help them spot falsehoods and develop critical thinking.
In the European Media Literacy Index 2023, the UK ranked at number 13, below many of our neighbours. The country that topped the list was Finland – emerging as a global leader in countering “fake news”, including misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (misinformation that is spread with the intention to deceive). This small Nordic country is making strides to equip its citizens with the tools to navigate an increasingly complex information landscape. I set out to discover what Britain could learn from Finland’s success.
The Finns are ahead of the curve in large part due to their proximity to a country known for its disinformation campaigns. Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917, and is on the front lines of an intensifying online information war. Many of Russia’s campaigns – often amplified by far-right, nationalist and so-called “alternative” Finnish news outlets and social media accounts – aim to undermine the EU, stir controversy over immigration and shape the debate around Finland’s Nato membership. In response, Finland treats resistance to disinformation almost as a form of civil defence: an integral part of its broader security strategy.
In 2014, before the European Parliament election, the Finnish government launched anti-fake news initiatives aimed at politicians and journalists, and established the fact-checking and digital literacy service Faktabaari (“Fact Bar”), run by a volunteer staff of journalists and researchers. More recently, Finnish NGOs have begun to run programmes for vulnerable groups, such as senior citizens and newly-arrived immigrants, to help them recognise disinformation.
But perhaps most importantly, Finland has privileged early intervention, through focusing on its schools. Media education in Finland begins as early as primary school, with media and science literacy integrated into the curriculum. Students learn how to spot deception across subjects: in maths, they see how statistics can be manipulated; in art, they explore how images can convey misleading messages; in history, they study famous propaganda campaigns; and in Finnish, they examine the many ways in which words can be used to confuse or mislead. Training in scepticism and the development of critical thinking skills are not seen as purely academic matters, but as essential to daily life.
This is in sharp contrast to the UK’s approach, where access to science and media literacy varies across the country – and between individual schools – creating an uneven patchwork. England’s school curriculum includes only minimal training in scientific method and scepticism, while even the once mandatory media studies component within English has weakened in recent years. Scotland’s focus has largely been on digital literacy, rather than media literacy, with the “technologies” strand of its curriculum asking pupils to think critically about how technology shapes society.
Wales has taken a more holistic, integrated approach, based around three mandatory cross-curricular skills: literacy, numeracy and digital competence. Media literacy falls under “digital competence”, and is intended to be embedded across all subjects – although in practice it depends on how schools design their curricula. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, “English with media education” is a statutory part of the curriculum in Key Stage 3, when students are typically 11-14 years old. However, the depth and emphasis can vary by school and teacher, and beyond KS3 media literacy ceases to be compulsory.
Rather than treating media literacy as a civic defence priority, the UK has allowed it to evolve piecemeal. Yet the direction of travel is clear: training young people to spot misinformation and disinformation is crucial to the health of our societies. We could see it as form of psychological inoculation.
Sander van der Linden is a professor at Cambridge University and author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. He explains: “Debunking can reduce people’s reliance on misinformation but often fails to eliminate it. You can’t un-ring a bell. For that reason, I’ve spent most of my career focusing on the notion of prebunking, or psychological inoculation, which is all about helping people prevent encoding [or absorbing] misinformation in the first place.”
Prebunking works by exposing people to the techniques used to create misleading arguments before they encounter them in the wild. “Just as vaccines help the body build immunity to future infection, so too can the mind be inoculated. This is not about telling people what to believe, but rather empowering people to think critically, free from manipulation,” he explains.
So, how can the UK improve its teaching of critical thinking? The Finnish approach has been successful in part because of their flexible approach to education. The Finnish system values teacher autonomy and agency, which allows educators to respond creatively to real-world events. For instance, in response to the global climate crisis, Finnish educators have implemented phenomenon-based learning, where students engage in interdisciplinary projects that explore real-world instances of climate change. This approach allows students to investigate these phenomena through the perspective of science, social studies and literature, fostering a deeper and more nuanced understanding. This integrated approach is possible in Finland because there is less of a strict divide between the sciences and the humanities, which means that science can be integrated with ethics, media studies and civic education, enabling students to better link classroom knowledge to practical issues.
The Finnish system is also less orientated around exam performance. The first major national exam is the ylioppilastutkinto, or baccalaureate exam, typically taken at the end of upper secondary school, when students are around 18 or 19 years old. Assessment in earlier grades is mostly based on teacher evaluations.
In contrast, children in England take Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) starting in Year 6, when they are usually 10 or 11 years old. The OCR, one of the five main exam boards, conducted a review in 2024 which found that GCSE students in England spent more time than almost any other cohort in the world taking exams, roughly 31.5 hours. They recommended cutting back, saying, “A more relevant and enriched curriculum would give more space for deeper learning, better preparing our children for an incredibly complex world.”
It seems that children in the UK are spending too much time being taught how to memorise information and pass exams within subjects siloed from one another. This can leave them exposed to misinformation and fake news. Research has shown that young people in this country are increasingly influenced by social media platforms, while often struggling to assess the credibility of digital sources. A 2024 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified a rise in climate disinformation online, particularly on YouTube, and included the finding that nearly a third of UK teenagers believe that climate change and its effects are being “purposefully overexaggerated”. Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of AI is only going to increase the need for children and young people to sharpen their skills in spotting misinformation and disinformation.
It’s often assumed that England’s state schools need more funding to improve. But the Finnish education system is often regarded as one of the best in the world, despite relatively modest spending. Per-student government expenditure at the secondary level falls below the OECD average and below that of the UK. Even so, about 93 per cent of students graduate from secondary education, and roughly two-thirds go on to attend university. Finland also has one of the most equitable education systems in the world, with the smallest difference of any country between the highest and lowest performing students.
Would the UK be able to replicate the Finnish model of media literacy? I asked Dr Kari Kivinen, a Finnish educator with over 30 years’ experience working in teaching and management, and leader of the Faktabaari project. Kivinen has played a pivotal role in adapting the project’s fact-checking methodologies for educational purposes, and has edited various publications, including the Digital Information Literacy Guide (2022) and the AI Guide for Teachers (2025). Kivinen noted the importance of educational equality in Finland, as well as the high level of teacher training – with most teachers required to have a Master’s degree. He told me that the agency given to schools, with less focus on passing rigid exams, gave them more opportunity to focus on developing critical thinking skills. To really follow the Finnish model, he concluded, the UK educational system would need a complete overhaul.
But some measures, Kivinen reassured me, could be incorporated into our British systems. “There is a plan [in Finland] of who does what with digital education at every level, and how to build critical thinking and digital skills into the curriculum from the primary level. This is doable everywhere.” English schools could also do more to teach all students about journalistic skills and ethics. “We invite journalists into the schools and they teach students how they create their stories, how they verify information, what the ethical guidelines are for journalists, and so on,” he says. “When students understand that, they can think [for example] about how to evaluate information from anonymous sources.”
He advised that the UK take critical thinking skills seriously, as the information terrain is shifting rapidly. Even starting from the best position in the world, Finland is struggling to keep pace with the evolving technological landscape. “The need to update digital theory has been really rapid,” he tells me. “We have difficulties updating the professional development of the teachers with AI skills. A few days of training before school begins is not enough, so we are looking at how to address this now.”
Some progress is already being made in the UK. Van der Linden has been working on creating novel tools to expand media literacy skills, collaborating with academics, media institutions and the UK and US governments. His team at the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab also worked with Google to create educational videos addressing misinformation. “We’ve created novel games, animated videos, quizzes and other content that can be deployed in ad campaigns on social media, reaching hundreds of millions of people,” he says. “We’re now looking to implement these in schools.”
But such work by individuals isn’t enough. The government needs to step in, with new policy and proper funding. Van der Linden believes that social media providers should face stricter regulation, making use of the 2023 Online Safety Act, a UK law designed to protect users from harmful online content by requiring platforms to take action against illegal material and ensure user safety, particularly for children and vulnerable groups. “Independent regulators such as Ofcom need to step up and enforce the Act to the full extent by holding social media companies accountable,” he said.
Current OSA provisions focus primarily on illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material and terrorist propaganda. Van der Linden is one of many experts and lawmakers calling for broader provisions to address misinformation. There is also a push for the establishment of clearer guidelines and enforcement mechanisms to hold digital platforms accountable, especially during crises or events when misinformation leads to harm, or to public disorder.
Better legal protection for children and young people could help with the problem of online misinformation. But schooling is still key. Last year, the UK government announced a new approach to the English curriculum, with aims to include digital literacy, critical thinking and comprehensive media awareness, such as identifying extremist content and misinformation, in English and computing classes. The central questions now are how deeply this education will be embedded across the curriculum and whether it will become mandatory feature of schooling. A report by the House of Lords has raised the profile of this issue by proposing that media literacy, digital skills and safe online behaviour are integrated across a range of subjects, not confined to a few isolated areas. The recent curriculum and assessment review, led by Professor Becky Francis, CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, aims to provide recommendations on this basis. [Shortly after this article went to press, the government announced that – in response to Francis's recommendations – it planned to make citizenship classes, including a media literacy component, compulsory at primary school level.]
We are yet to see whether this growing momentum for change will bear real fruit. We need to review where media and science literacy can best be embedded, how teachers can be supported through professional training, and how schools might be held accountable for delivery. Proposals include issuing statutory guidance, creating a national media literacy framework similar to the one that exists for reading, and linking outcomes to Ofsted inspections. For now, the commitment is clear, but the details of implementation remain to be fully realised.
If Finland can teach us anything, it’s that media literacy shouldn’t just be a side topic, but treated as civic infrastructure. In the UK and US, misinformation is often aligned to deeper social fractures. It’s not that British or American people are less clever than our Finnish peers. It’s just that the scaffolding around how we process information – the cultural, educational and emotional tools – isn’t nearly as strong. Countries like the UK, facing rising public distrust and a fragmented media ecosystem, would do well to look beyond incremental curriculum reform and embrace a systemic rethinking of how media and digital literacy are taught. Ultimately, Finland’s example shows that equipping citizens with critical thinking and media literacy from an early age is not just an educational goal, but a cornerstone of a resilient, informed society.
I asked Van der Linden whether he believes we can meet the challenge of growing misinformation. He hesitates. “I think I’m optimistic in the sense that my experience with developing interventions and training people is that we can cultivate resilience. The real question though is whether we can scale it sufficiently with the right policy support across the population. Time will tell.”
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
