Preliminary findings on UK secondary educators' perceptions of XR in health education: benefits, barriers, and content creation

Extended Reality (XR) technologies have applications for teaching and learning across wide educational domains. In health education, XR has shown value through applications such as anatomy visualization, surgical simulation, and clinical skills development. However, these developments remain largely concentrated in higher education and professional training, with limited exploration in foundational education, despite adolescence being a critical period for shaping lifelong health behaviours. Here we begin to address this gap by investigating how UK secondary school educators perceive the potential of XR for health education. In collaboration with LifeLab, a research-based science and health literacy initiative at the University of Southampton, this study asked teachers of health-related subjects for their perception of the educational benefits of XR (focusing particularly on Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR)) and the current barriers to adoption across personal, technical, and institutional dimensions. At the time of publication the preliminary findings reported here are based on a sample size of 14, with data collection on-going. Preliminary findings show that while educators hold positive perceptions of XR’s value for Health Education, actual usage remains extremely limited. This reflects a ‘Usefulness–Usability Gap’ within the Technology Acceptance Model, in which the difficulty of sourcing or creating suitable XR contents, alongside some technical and institutional barriers, emerge as key obstacles to adoption.