What is blocking real change in education? | April 2021
What will it take to achieve real change in education? Does it take more than a pandemic?
What will it take to achieve real change in education? That was the question debated at our event on 21 April which explored the steps we should be taking after a year in which the world of education has been completely shaken up. The output of the day was a full research report which will be published here shortly.
The April event brought people who represent key elements of the ecosystem: Dr Alison Wood (Academic Director of Homerton Changemakers at the University of Cambridge), Mohit Midha (Co-founder of Mangahigh), Andreas Schleicher (Director for Education and Skills at the OECD), Jon Smith (CEO of Pobble) and Valerie Hannon (Board Director of Innovation Unit).
Six key themes that emerged from discussions at the event on 21 April 2021
Read the report
Read the executive summary (7 pages) or the full report (26 pages).
The current landscape
This fantastic drawing was captured by our resident Graphic Recorder Rebecca Osborne.
Andreas Schleicher spoke about the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 project which has identified three transformative competencies that students need in order to contribute to our world and shape a better future: creating new value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas, and taking responsibility. He said that technology was opening up great possibilities, for instance around the integration of learning and assessment, but that a challenge was that “education takes so much time to translate better ideas into better outcomes”.
Andreas Schleicher
Fireside chat on the current landscape
Andreas’ talk was followed by a fireside chat with Alison Wood, who said: “We need a social change… At the heart of this is an imaginative change about what education really does and what it’s for”.
“The whole point of SHAPE is to do a lot of listening, to have events where we don’t know the answer and we don’t have the view because it’s about a future that we’re not sure about,”
Dan Frost, SHAPE Education co-founder
Change and mindset
Valerie Hannon
Valerie Hannon praised the theme of the event, saying it was right first and foremost to ask what is blocking real change in education. Similarly, to Alison, she said any conversation about change needed to begin with “new, real conversations about the purpose of learning and education”.
Mohit Midha
Mohit Midha said technology was helping to create “pull rather than push” education, where students wanted to learn rather than having to. But he said there were blockers to real change, particularly around support and funding, leading to the risk of a two-tier system.
Fireside chat on change and mindset
Digital Pedagogy
Jon Smith
Jon Smith said that funding was a barrier to change, but also teacher time and pressure and lack of infrastructure in some areas.
