Ms Alex Cooney:

Yes. Webwise has some really good materials for children. There are lots of good materials out there. We just need to highlight them more and push parents and children in those directions. There is a lot of really good information they can access but, unfortunately, they do not always access the best sources of information. It is also about helping children to make informed choices online, to understand what is real and what is fake and what is advertising and what that means, and to learn how to navigate through that and challenge what they see in order that they do not just accept everything at face value. This is where digital literacy comes in, and this is something we will have to teach children to do. I hope that answers the question.

Regarding the messaging in terms of what we need to do, it is really important that we also equip parents with the skills and knowledge. We often compare this to road safety, for example. We have had much campaigning on road safety in recent years. I ask the committee to think how socially unacceptable drink-driving is today and how we all wear seat belts. Obviously, there is legislation that supports these measures, but there have been acts of campaigning on these issues for a number of years. We need social norms around safe online use and we need to equip parents with simple empowering messaging. If we freak parents out, they are inclined to take away the technology, which is absolutely not what children want at all and will stop children coming to them and telling them of problems. If they think the technology will be taken away, they are less likely to share negative experiences.

It is a matter of equipping parents with the skills and knowledge they need to support their children in this regard. There is lots of evidence to suggest that practices such as co-use, that is, parents and children using technology together, are really positive. It is a matter of helping children to learn about things like self-regulation so we can address some of the addiction issues we are seeing in primary school as well as secondary school. We really need to support parents actively in this regard. We are calling for a national parents' awareness campaign, which we hope to kick-start ourselves. We are here to discuss relationships and sexuality education in school. School is an opportunity to offer this consistency. We know that not all children get consistent information at home - if indeed they are having conversations about some of these issues at all - so school offers that opportunity to have these issues consistently addressed.