Digital Understanding

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, this is another debate on digital led by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and yet another long list of speakers. Her leadership in this area is obvious. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker. There is plenty I want to say in response to his speech, but that will have to wait until next Thursday’s debate in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott.

As the past chair and now patron of the Good Things Foundation, there is also much I would like to say relating to the need to narrow the divide in digital skills and understanding between the majority and the more than 10 million Britons without the skills and confidence to take advantage of the digital world. These are most likely to be older, poorer and disabled: the most vulnerable in our society.

I also remind your Lordships of my interests in the register, in particular my work with TES. In the analogue world, this was the Times Educational Supplement, but in its digital incarnation it minimises the number of characters used and is simply TES. That work has hugely helped my understanding of the power of digital to help the recruitment, training and resourcing of teachers.

I have also co-founded a business, xRapid, which uses the ability of a smartphone to recognise patterns through its camera lens, attached to a microscope, to diagnose malaria and count asbestos fibres. These machines are then able to learn from each other and thereby keep increasing the accuracy of the diagnosis.

Of course, these exciting forms of artificial intelligence need fuelling and their precious fuel is data, so that is what I will focus my remarks upon. This House will shortly be considering the data protection Bill. As the noble Baroness said, it is vital that enough of us have sufficient digital understanding to properly scrutinise and improve that legislation. In doing so, we need to pay special attention to those least able to understand and advocate for themselves.

My attention therefore turns to children: there is no demographic that has a greater need for improved digital understanding. Most parents struggle to advise their children on online safety, but they are also highly concerned to know that their child’s personal data are safe. We currently have little time in the school curriculum, which the noble Lord has just described, to teach children about data. We need to fix that, so that children know what information, images and videos are collected that are personal to them, why, by whom and for what use. What plans does DCMS have to engage children on this agenda?

Will the Minister talk to the DfE about this, and include a warning about the national pupil database? The NPD routinely collects highly sensitive data about all the nation’s children and shares them across government departments, with academics and with private companies. There is little transparency as to why it collects what it does, it is a workload pressure on teachers and I hope that the Minister can help them quickly address concerns about this data collection.

Our digital future is uncertain. With transparency, inclusion and understanding, we can progress with consent and confidence.