Apps, appointments, panic and people

Note from the author

When I sat down to write the following commentary in February 2020 COVID-19 had not yet taken hold across UK, as it had done in China and other areas of East Asia. However, by April 2020 the UK looked very different. Individual lives, communities and day-to-day patterns have undergone unimaginable change as the threat and impact of COVID-19 became increasingly real. Every day, every news report, every social media post and every Government announcement shifted our expectations and normalities, and for many increased our fears. Supporting vulnerable people who are offline or limited users of the internet, is the shared mission of the Online Centres Network and Good Things Foundation for whom I work. At this time, we find ourselves having to move incredibly fast and adjust to new ways of working, away from face-to-face digital inclusion and social support. This change is unprecedented, and I was cautious about publishing my view of the need for digital inclusion before the pandemic, rather than the reality we are now experiencing. However, I think the message is more potent than ever. At a time of global crisis vulnerable people face multiple barriers, people need to be given hope, digital skills and access is essential. Investing in communities is one powerful way which we can come through this period stronger and more resilient than we were before. This commentary is an affirmation of what should continue, with adaptation, focused funding and greater public and political visibility. The support of digital skills and literacy for all has never been more critical.

Commentary

Inside the church hall away from the January downpour, more than twenty people are sitting around a horseshoe of foldable tables, their attention focused on the tutor and the whiteboard covered in a pen-drawn patchwork of app icons. Around the tables sit women, and a smaller number of men, from the different communities that make up the richly diverse borough of Newham in East London all here for Skills Enterprise’s Monday morning digital skills session.

Interspersed between the people who have come to learn are volunteers, students from a local university, laptops, notepads, cups of tea and coffee, cables, mobile phones and Malathy.

Malathy or Mala, who rescued me from the train station in the pouring rain and drove me to Skills Enterprise, leads this incredible social enterprise with an energy and focus that seems only to be present in people who live for their neighbourhood and are their local community. Between opening the front door and reaching the main hall, all of about five metres, Mala is approached by numerous people. Each person she immediately calms, triages their need, reviews the paperwork they clutch in their hand, and reassures them that she will be there with them - at the job centre, in their appointments with health, welfare and housing services and then, through Skills Enterprise, there to provide ongoing support once their crisis is resolved.

In about ten minutes at Skills Enterprise you understand the critical need for holistic local support that embeds digital literacy. Without it, the woman who cannot read the letter from her housing service is unlikely to be able to progress to managing Universal Credit1 independently. Her needs are multiple. The stress and desperation she feels is overwhelming. Without it, the 64-year-old widow who needs and wants to work, will continue to struggle with jobs she is unable to keep. Jobs that mean she has panic attacks on the underground when travelling to work. Interactions with job coaches that leave both her and her coach unable to move forward, as she is too anxious to communicate what she can do and needs. She struggles to write this down, and without the support of Mala and others at Skills Enterprise has nowhere to go, no one to help her, and little opportunity to more than be reactive and survive as best she can.

As much as we keep talking about this thing of digital, of digital skills and even digital inclusion as a separate dimension, the reality is that it is not, and never will be separate again. The panic felt by people who have to do something online because there is no longer any option, is part of our shared failing in not designing for inclusion, and not bringing everyone with us on the journey. Something we need to collectively address.

I work for Good Things Foundation, a digital social inclusion charity that believes in a world where everyone should benefit from digital. This year (2018/19), we've reached over 440,077 people worldwide2. We partner with an international network of local community organisations in the UK and Australia, through Good Things Foundation Australia, such as Skills Enterprise. These organisations are the most effective means to engage people who have multiple reasons to view going digital as one problem amongst many. Particularly, as the digital transformation of services continues to drive forward at an unprecedented pace without upfront recognition of peoples’ basic needs and aspirations.

These community organisations are with people on a journey that often starts with crisis but continues beyond this. This is a journey that focuses on developing a willingness to engage with support, where other service interactions have failed. That connects people to the value of digital, where fear, lack of access and digital skills have been barriers. That helps people to love learning, where past experiences have left a scar. That creates enjoyment from being with others, where trusting people has been hard. And people progress. This may be to a point of personal achievement, which is tangible or measurable to the outside world, such as getting a job, saving money, saving time or gaining an accreditation for your studies. But what is of equal importance, what is sustainable and future proof, are the lasting behaviour changes that occur such as valuing yourself, feeling connected, being able to do more than cope, and believing in your own ability and goals.

What we see happening is more than the impact on one individual, there is a greater social power and resource that is generated through this journey. This means that many people go on to help others to do what they have done, and to overcome the fears they once shared. Telling the story of this journey is critical to revealing a series of truths about people’s development of digital literacy. Truth 1: Learning to use one digital programme competently or developing skills around a certain digital interface at a specific time, does not mean that people are equipped to cope with the changing and digitally driven world of work and life. Truth 2: the pace of digital development is extreme and its effect heightened by changes in personal circumstances. Truth 3: Unforeseen events like health crisis’s, relationship breakdowns, economic down turns intensify vulnerabilities around digital use that were not visible before. Truth 4: The impact of such events means that individual confidence can be shaken, and people can ‘drop off’ from being active and productive users of digital resources. Truth 5: Increased motivation to reengage with digital and develop skills happens when the personal impact of not doing so becomes apparent. Truth 6: Effective support that overcomes motivational barriers may as often be from a peer as from a professional.

Therefore if we are to support people, to bring everyone with us, we need to focus on development of more than digital skills. We need to fund approaches that enable us to develop positive behaviours, so we can all make the most of digital innovation, as we have written about here in our work with Accenture. But this takes time. Over the course of five years of research with people and the organisations who support them, we created a theory of change for digital social inclusion. This narrative explains the journey and captures common themes that arose through the individual Routes to Inclusion stories that helped to build it. The purpose being to demystify and challenge the idea of a quick fix - being digitally literate requires a lifelong commitment to adaptation, adoption and change.

What we can see on the horizon are positive moves in the UK policy landscape, shifting to formally acknowledge the need for digital literacy. From 2020, alongside the existing legal entitlements to English and maths, the UK Government will introduce an entitlement to fully funded digital qualifications. Adults with no or low digital skills will have the opportunity to undertake improved digital qualifications based on new national standards setting out the digital skills people need to get on in life and work. The entitlement is therefore designed as a safety net to help those adults who are at risk of being left behind by an increasingly digital world.

Whilst the entitlement is to be welcomed, further commitment is needed in terms of a joined-up Government and cross sector approach to investment in digital inclusion, for which there is mounting evidence. We and others have argued long term investment in digital inclusion (not just skills) will bring about great economic benefits both for individuals, where in the UK the average citizen could save £744 by being online3, and for society. Research carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) on behalf of Good Things Foundation has shown that investment in a 100% digitally included UK population by 2028, would equate to £313m saved in employment benefits, £1.1bn from cost savings in online transactions during shopping, £141m NHS savings from increased use of digital services, and £487m in government savings from digital efficiency and increased use of online services4. Therefore, for every £1 invested the benefit would be £15 with a net present value of £21.9 billion5.

However, being online is not an end in itself. The picture of online behaviour and benefit is evolving and increasingly complicated. One demonstration of this is the prominent policy focus in the UK on preventing online harms, culminating in the Online Harms White Paper (April 2019) which called for a new statutory duty of care to make companies take more responsibility for the safety of their users and tackle harm. Online harms describe a range of risks for internet users related to data privacy, fake news and disinformation, which are particularly acute for vulnerable people with low data literacy. So why has this come about? In the UK as elsewhere in 2020, there is no longer a clear digital divide between those who are thriving online and those who are not. A change that we’ve demonstrated and tracked over a number of years through our Digital Nation Infographic. This has helped us understand people in a less binary way - only not as offline or online - and as we and others have identified, the importance of a growing spectrum of people who sit between these positions. People who may be described as being limited users (Good Things Foundation and Yates, 2017), who are online but are much more constrained in their adoption and use of digital than it might first appear. What this represents is a much less explored and spoken about dimension, that underpins the incredibly large digital skills gap borne out by national data, where over 11.9 million of us in the UK still lack Essential Digital Skills (Lloyds Consumer Digital Index 2019). What should we read from this data? Well something isn’t working. There is a strong undercurrent of unrest, where not everyone feels motivated to go with the digital movement and do more (French et al., 2019). It feels like time we treat these big numbers from a human perspective and focus on why we aren’t changing.

What can we do in response and how can we learn from, and work with, others around the world? In 2018 Good Things Foundation published our campaign Bridging the Digital Divide led by a commitment to six key principles which we set out in our Blueprint for a 100% Digitally Included Nation. These were as follows:

1. To set out a bold ambition: to agree a goal of a 100% digitally included nation.
2. To drive motivation: promote the benefits of the internet.
3. To build skills: provide free essential digital skills support for everyone who needs it
4. To lead from the front: employers taking responsibility for their own employees.
5. To make it affordable: ensure no-one is denied access to the digital world because of their personal income.
6. To make digital a social priority: bring social inclusion and digital inclusion together

What’s important about the Blueprint and campaign is that we have built it upon international learnings, which reinforce the relationship between digital and social exclusion across countries, where we share many policy challenges across borders. The Blueprint is therefore there to help address challenges we see around the world. We have learnt this first-hand in Australia where digital exclusion follows the same socio-economic contours, with some variations e.g. Indigenous digital exclusion has no parallel in the UK, and regional digital exclusion is more pronounced due to the geography of Australia. Half the world away from the challenges faced in the UK the same social change solution still applies, local + digital + scale.

Mala knows how to change behaviour. As the session on internet safety and use of apps draws to a close, I manage to pass over my meagre contribution to the group - a tin of shortbread. A couple of ladies thank me, and I look back to the table where Mala is sitting with the woman who was in such distress. She is holding her hand. The woman is calm and is talking about coming back next week. Mala has given her hope. I ask for a photo of them both as I don’t think I can capture what she has been able to do.

Mala asks me to write about it.

Image Guide

(all Images by Alice Mathers, Author)