Meeting of the Parliament 23 January 2019
The Scottish Government has discussions with a range of interested parties about the issues around social media. It is important that we focus our work in personal and social education on equipping young people with resilience and the capacity to make judgments around the handling and use of social media, to ensure that they are suitably equipped and protected when dealing with some of the potential challenges that come with it.
Personal and social education is implicit in the ethos of education. I want to make sure that the good practice that I see in schools to encourage the nurturing of good relationships is deployed not only in the context of school activity, but enables young people to think about their contribution to the world of social media and the impact that their actions can have if they are not appropriately set.
We are taking actions that are designed to ensure that in an ever-changing world—which is changing at a faster pace than any of us have seen before—young people are equipped with the essential attributes of resilience to enable them to manage those challenges. Some of that will come from personal and social education and some from the wider impact of curriculum for excellence, which is focused entirely on the objective of ensuring that young people are equipped for modern life and supported in meeting its challenges, some of which may present themselves through social media.