Citizen Literacy Project

Project overview

The UK’s various education systems do not currently provide a formalised benchmark statement for teaching the subject of AI, so provision can be disparate and diverse. This leads to issues with the quality of such education and training. It also does not address specific safety concerns around children’s use of AI. There is, in particular, concern around the lack of information and training provided to parents, making it more difficult for them to protect their children from an emerging landscape of AI-based threats.

This project aimed to be a first step in addressing some of these issues. The concept that we consider foundational to this discussion as a whole is that of AI literacy, which we take care to define in the project output. The project aimed to help to address the lack of AI literacy in the UK by examining the current levels of AI literacy amongst the general public. It was, thus, a preliminary scoping study upon which further research can be built. We consider the building of AI literacy amongst the general public to be critical to using AI safely and robustly in everyday life.

We undertook this investigation by conducting a first a survey and then semi-structured interviews to find out, amongst other things: where people get their information regarding AI from; what they currently understand about AI; the concerns that they have about AI; how they approach AI ethics, as well as several other issues related to AI literacy.

By finding out the gaps present in the public’s knowledge, as well as listening to their concerns, we aimed to then provide a resource database on the FRACTAI website that would be updated and showcase relevant and tailored information for different groups of people.

We found quite early on that this would be rather insufficient. This realisation led to a further output, one to produce free training courses, hosted on our website, for parents and children. These courses are designed to help parents introduce their children to AI safely and with confidence. These courses are currently under development.

Survey participation

The demographics of the respondents are as follows:

• 27 women + 38 men.

• 40/65 educated to masters level or above.

• 5 young adults, 33 parents.

• 33 were optimistic about AI; 11 have not considered it and very few (4/65) had considered the harms, regulatory aspects, unreliable information basis or human reliance on AI.

• Most (48/60) respondents describe themselves as employed in a ‘technical’ capacity, followed by managerial and professional occupations.

• The respondents were situated globally with 30 respondents situated in the UK. This survey may therefore predominantly reflect the views of a UK audience.

27 women to 38 men is a reasonably good gender balance for a survey. Understandably, we only got 5 respondents that were in the ‘young adult’ age range. This sub-group was too small to draw conclusions from, but preliminary analysis showed it followed similar patterns to the overall data set.

Twelve participants were then invited to semi-structured interview workshops to allow them to expand upon their answers to the survey. These respondents were selected based on the quality and extent of their answers to the initial survey. Unfortunately, only two of these respondents were able to participate; some did not respond to our request, others were unable to participate in the suggested time slots. Our initial intention was to run three workshops, each with four participants. This would have provided respondents with the opportunity to discuss with one another. Resources given to us by SPRITE+ were directed to this end, such as using the time of an administrative assistant to coordinate both sending e-mail invitations and subsequent scheduling, although the numbers we ended up with did not match what we had hoped for.

A learning point for the future is that we underestimated the effort required to coordinate these meetings. This meant that we did not employ the resources given to us by SPRITE+ as efficiently as possible. For example, we decided to concentrate on a limited number of respondents for the follow-on interviews, owing to the quality of their initial responses, but we could not secure the numbers we had hoped for. Were we to run this project again, we would remedy this mistake by inviting a far broader range of participants.

Workshop sessions

Two workshop sessions were run, one for each participant. While we had hoped to run one session with both participants, scheduling conflicts made this infeasible. Both sessions were approximately an hour long. The question rubric consisted of a small number of fixed questions directly relevant to the research proposal. Respondents were then free to elaborate upon their initial answers as they saw fit, and improvised follow-on questions were asked when appropriate.

The data gained from these workshop sessions were highly valuable, owing to their quality and extent. They helped us to elaborate on a number of core themes for then research paper - such as diverse community involvement and parental participation - and to understand better how participants were thinking.

The information shared in these sessions has informed our direction of travel moving forward, as elaborated upon in the journal paper. As we begin to work directly with children in the autumn, the advice and perspectives from these workshops sessions - such as around how to engage different communities effectively - will inform how we approach our later research.

Outcomes & outputs

This project was disseminated to London South Bank University and presented at the Early Careers Event (the video of this seminar can be found here). The draft empirical paper is currently being edited and readied for submission for publication in the next couple of months.

The UN is interested in co-applying for further grant funding so that this project can be expanded within schools. The UN has completed research activity in a similar field and is holding pilots in 3 schools. Further funding would enable us to collaborate and reach more schools with an AI curriculum designed and led by children.

In September 2026 we will co-design AI curriculums and materials with several different pupil groups in the South West Schools Trust and the Cabot Trust, which is based in Bristol. This will also provide focus group feedback on existing resources such as the webpage. The output will be published in the new year.

FRACTAI have taken the survey output and posted a resource webpage on their website (see below) as well as interfacing with universities such as the University of Bristol and the University of Portsmouth around designing new courses and resources. Through the stem ambassador scheme we will now aim to work with schools to develop an AI curriculum. We will be feeding back to DfE on their new modules around AI. This will also be fed into CEN and ISO where appropriate.