Across the Commission’s research, a wide range of research, reports, articles and other resources have been shared and recommended to help inform discussions.
We are sharing these reading lists to make the evidence and ideas informing the Commission’s work accessible more widely.
Roundtable 1
The resources below informed the Commission’s first expert roundtable, which explored the role of current affairs education in schools, what journalism can teach us about navigating contested issues and how teachers can be supported to facilitate balanced discussion.
Instead, discussion explored how knowledge, curiosity, questioning and evaluating expertise reinforce one another, suggesting that critical thinking develops through sustained engagement with real-world issues rather than through isolated exercises.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport — Watch This Space: A New Strategic Direction for UK Media, published 23 June 2026
First News — TeachKit: Media & Information Literacy resources
Impress — Impress Standards Code, revised following the 2020–2022 Code Review
Internet Matters — Informed or Overwhelmed? Understanding the Impact of Online News on Children’s Wellbeing, published 14 October 2025
National Education Union — D. Kebede, Why is there always money for conflict, but not enough for childhood?
Ofcom — Additional Duties for Categorised Services, consultation on news publisher content, journalistic content and content of democratic importance
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — Understanding Young News Audiences at a Time of Rapid Change, March 2026
Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman, Demos — Inside the Mind of a 16-Year-Old, November 2025
Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times — Disinformation Is Not the Real Problem with Democracy, 11 March 2023
Roundtable 2
The resources below informed the Commission’s second expert roundtable, which explored what young people need to think critically about current affairs in an age increasingly shaped by AI, recommendation algorithms and rapidly changing technologies.
Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Penguin Classics edition
Jamie Bartlett — How to Talk to AI (and How Not To), Penguin, published 9 April 2026
The Economist — AI models’ values are very different from most people’s
Liwei Jiang et al. — Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond), NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper
Daniel Williams — University of Sussex profile, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge
UNESCO — Closing the Gap on Media and Information Literacy, 2025
UNESCO — Behind the Screens, November 2024
Ada Lovelace Institute / Nuffield Foundation — I love it, but I hate it
Yuval Noah Harari — AI bureaucrats, AI religions, and AI boyfriends…, Oxford Tanner Lecture on Human Values, 30 June 2026