Children Learn Digital Skills at Home, Not in School, European Study Finds

Across Europe, children are acquiring most of their digital skills outside the classroom, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Education that draws on survey data from Hungary, the Netherlands and four other European countries. The research, conducted by a team investigating digital literacy development within three European projects, found that families and community organizations have become the de facto providers of digital education, while formal schooling often delivers irregular or outdated digital instruction. The findings raise pressing questions about who is responsible for preparing children for a digital world that schools have been slow to adapt to.

The study’s most striking empirical finding is the near-total absence of perceived school-based instruction in foundational digital citizenship and online safety. Across all four student groups surveyed in Hungary and the Netherlands, every substantive response indicated that children had not encountered structured teaching on these topics at school, even though device access among the same students was close to universal. This mismatch between connectivity and curricular coverage suggests that the problem is not one of hardware or infrastructure but of institutional priorities. Children arrive at school already immersed in digital environments, yet the institutions responsible for cultivating their competences have largely left the interpretive and safety dimensions of that immersion to chance.

The survey evidence also reveals how early this informal learning begins. Parents reported that children form digital skills and habits before they ever enter formal schooling, which means that by the time teachers encounter students, patterns of use, expectations, and even risk exposure are already established. This developmental timing has consequences for policy design. Interventions that begin in primary school may arrive years after the most formative habits have taken shape, and the families who shaped those habits rarely receive guidance on how to fulfill the educational role they have effectively assumed.

The parent data from the DRONE project, which gathered responses from 135 participants across six European countries, quantifies this shift of responsibility. Families consistently identified themselves as the primary teachers of digital literacy, a role they occupy not by choice alone but because structured school programs are scarce and often implemented late. The researchers link this to a broader pattern in which formal education systems have changed far more slowly than the digital practices governing children’s everyday lives. The result is a widening gap between what children actually do with technology and what institutions formally teach about it.

This redistribution of educational labor is not neutral. The study emphasizes that community-based learning both mitigates and reproduces inequality. Families differ enormously in their own digital skills, confidence, and resources, and these differences mirror broader socio-economic and cultural stratifications. When a child’s digital education depends primarily on household circumstances, children from families with greater knowledge and capacity accumulate advantages that schools would at least theoretically be positioned to equalize. The authors argue that informal provision, left unexamined, can reinforce the very disparities that public education is meant to reduce.

The conceptual framework the researchers employ helps explain why this fragmentation has proven so persistent. Building on the ecological model of child development, they describe how digitalization has blurred the traditional boundaries between the micro-level settings of family and peer life, the meso-level connections among institutions, the exo-level structures of policy and platform design, and the macro-level cultural norms. New actors, particularly technology companies, now shape the conditions of children’s digital participation through regulation, infrastructure investment, and platform design, often without coordination with schools or community organizations. The learning ecosystem, in their terms, becomes broken when its components fail to integrate, producing fragmented and poorly coordinated arrangements that cannot sustain equitable learning outcomes.

To analyze this brokenness, the study combines three complementary lenses. The ecological model identifies where learning actually occurs, which the survey data show is overwhelmingly outside school. The rights-based framework, grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and its General Comment No. 25, establishes what children and the adults and institutions responsible for their welfare are entitled to and required to do. Multi-stakeholder governance, the third lens, addresses how distributed actors with overlapping authority can coordinate their responsibilities. The authors argue that each framework answers a distinct question, and that only together do they capture the full complexity of digital literacy as a policy domain.

The rights-based dimension deserves particular attention because it reframes the debate in political rather than purely pedagogical terms. The SAILS project, which contributed the legal research component of the study, examines the balance between children’s rights to protection and their rights to participation in digital environments. These two principles are frequently treated as opposing forces, with protection arguments favoring restriction and participation arguments favoring access. The study suggests instead that both must be understood as entitlements that public institutions have a duty to support, and that current arrangements, in which families shoulder the burden without systematic support, fail on both counts.

The three EU-funded projects underlying the analysis each illuminate a different layer of the problem. DRONE focuses on digital literacy and the combat of disinformation among vulnerable groups of adolescents, drawing attention to how misinformation risks fall disproportionately on young people already facing social, linguistic, or educational disadvantage. EFFEct, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, investigates how students, teachers, school leaders, and parents engage with digital technology for educational purposes, providing the comparative survey evidence from Hungary and the Netherlands. SAILS contributes the legal analysis of children’s digital rights. Together they allow the researchers to integrate levels of analysis that are usually studied in isolation.

The authors’ argument about governance follows directly from this integration. If digital literacy is produced by families, peers, community organizations, schools, regulators, and platform designers simultaneously, then no single actor can be held accountable for outcomes, and no single reform can fix the system. They call for coordinated multi-stakeholder governance, curricular reform that addresses the identified gap in digital citizenship and online safety instruction, empowerment of teachers who currently lack the training and mandate to deliver such instruction, and inclusive community-based approaches that explicitly recognize the central role families already play. The alternative, they imply, is a continued drift in which responsibility is distributed by default rather than by design.

Positioning digital literacy as a political question rather than a technical one is perhaps the study’s most consequential contribution. The distribution of educational responsibility among states, schools, families, communities, and technology companies is a matter of power and accountability, not merely curriculum. When public institutions fail to recognize and support the actors who currently perform core educational functions outside formal schooling, they effectively privatize a public good while leaving its provision to those least equipped to carry it consistently. The researchers argue that reconstructing broken learning ecosystems requires policy frameworks that acknowledge community-based learning as a fundamental component of children’s digital development, supported rather than displaced by formal education.

For practitioners, the findings suggest several immediate implications. Schools seeking to close the curricular gap identified in the survey data would need to move beyond purely technical instruction toward sustained teaching of digital citizenship and online safety, areas where students reported no perceived provision at all. Teacher education programs would need to prepare educators for this expanded role, since the study notes that current instruction is often irregular, outdated, or narrowly technical. Parent support initiatives would need to recognize that families are already the primary educators in this domain and provide them with accessible guidance rather than assuming the school will take over. Community organizations, libraries, and non-formal learning settings would need to be integrated into policy frameworks as legitimate educational actors rather than peripheral supplements.

The comparative dimension of the evidence also matters. Because the survey data come from two European countries with different educational traditions, and the parent data from six countries, the finding that families bear primary responsibility appears to be robust across contexts rather than an artifact of any single national system. This consistency strengthens the argument that the fragmentation of digital literacy education is a structural feature of contemporary education systems rather than a local failure, and that remedies must therefore operate at the level of governance and policy design rather than through isolated institutional fixes.

Ultimately, the study reframes a familiar anxiety about children and screens into a question about institutional design. The issue is not simply that children use technology extensively, but that the institutions charged with preparing them for digital life have not adapted to the reality that most of this preparation already happens elsewhere. Recognizing families and communities as the primary site of digital literacy development, and building governance structures that support them, the authors contend, is the necessary first step toward an education ecosystem capable of serving all children equitably in a digital society.

Subject of Research: Community-based digital literacy development among European school-aged children

Article Title: Community learning drives children’s digital literacy development: evidence for reconstructing broken education ecosystems

Article References: Horgas, J., Salamon, E., & Protopsaltis, A. (2026). Community learning drives children’s digital literacy development: evidence for reconstructing broken education ecosystems. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1845968. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1845968

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1845968

Keywords: digital literacy, children, community learning, schools, parents, digital rights, education policy, Europe, digital divide, teacher training, online safety, family engagement