Office of Communications (Ofcom) (return to blog) Blog

Today we’ve published our annual UK Children's Media Literacy Audit, which provides an overview of media literacy among children and young people and their parents and carers.

Key Findings include:

• Three in four children aged 5-15 use the internet at home, an increase since 2007 among 5-7s (63% vs. 50%), 8-11s (76% vs. 65%), and 12-15s (83% vs. 75%).
• A quarter of children aged 8-12 who use the internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. These sites have a minimum user age of 13. But 83 per cent of these children have their profile set so that it can only be seen by friends, and 4 per cent have a profile that can't be seen. Over eight in ten (83%) parents of these users are aware that their children visit social networking sites. Of these, 93% say they check what their child is doing. However one in six (17 per cent) parents of this group are not aware that their child visits social networking sites.
• Downloading or watching TV programmes or films on the internet has increased by 4 percentage points in the past year by children aged 8-15 who use the internet at home (from 17 per cent in 2008 to 21 per cent in 2009).
• At the same time, 44 per cent of 12-15s say they think that downloading shared copies of films and music for free should not be illegal, with 18 per cent saying they don't know and 38 per cent saying it should be illegal. Boys aged 12-15 are more likely to say it should not be illegal (48 per cent)
• Blogs or sites like Wikipedia where people can add or change information are visited by one in five (18 per cent) of 8-11s and half of 12-15s (48 per cent) who use the internet at home. Users of these sites aged 8-11 are much more likely than 12-15s to believe that the information on these types of sites is all or mostly true (70 per cent vs. 48 per cent) with boys aged 8-15 more likely than girls of this age to believe that all or most of the information is true (59 per cent vs. 46 per cent).
• Two in five users of social networking sites aged 8-11 and 12-15 also believe that all or most of the information on these sites is true (38 per cent and 40 per cent respectively).
• And one in four 12-15s (27 per cent) who use search engines think that search engines only return results from websites with truthful information.

The research involved interviews with 2131 children and young people aged 5-15 and their parents/carers in spring and autumn of 2009.

Later this year we’ll be publishing a report on UK Adults’ media literacy, closely followed by a report about the media literacy of Children and Adults in the UK’s devolved nations.