Why innovation becomes imperative in education

by Dirk Van Damme 
Head of the Skills Beyond School Division,  Directorate for Education and Skills

Since Harvard economists Goldin & Katz published their ground-breaking book The Race between Technology and Education (2008), education has come face-to-face with the challenges of a world continuously altered by technological innovation. Education is generally perceived to be a laggard social system, better equipped to transmit the heritage of the past than to prepare for the future. This perception is not entirely accurate; OECD/CERI work on Measuring innovation in education (2014) demonstrates that education is a system that is not change-averse.

From a historical perspective, education has adjusted to the needs and opportunities of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, for example by introducing natural sciences into the curriculum – although it took many years for that to happen. Will education have the luxury of time to confront the current wave of technological change and innovation? How will it react to the challenges of digitalization and artificial intelligence?

On 25-26 September some hundred education policy makers from national governments and international organisations and representatives from the emerging education industry gathered at the 3rd Global Education Industry Summit (GEIS) in Luxembourg to discuss these questions. Jointly organised by the OECD, the European Commission and Luxembourg, the GEIS aspired to be a platform for discussions on how education can embrace innovation and how the education industry can be involved in that endeavour. This year the focus of the event was on opening up education, with the title Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions. A background report with the same title provided the substantive materials to support the discussions: it suggests that schools need to  reach out  to regional economies and local communities to be part of innovation ecosystems in order to contribute with knowledge and learning opportunities, but also to get incentivised to become more innovative themselves.

One of the most visible outcomes of the discussions was that education policy makers and industrialists are not yet on the same page. While the latter forcefully argued for a sense of urgency and more drastic changes, the former made a case for piecemeal engineering of a very complicated system. Some participants concerned with the economics of education argued that innovation will become a systemic imperative, driven by the exploding cost of current models. Over time PISA scores remain rather flat, while the cost of education is increasing. “You can’t keep squeezing the model; you need to change the production function”. But education policy makers argued that education needs to be inclusive, taking into account not only the innovation pioneers but many other stakeholders as well.

Part of the discussion was about what we exactly mean with ‘innovation’. Spectacular changes at the frontier of scientific discovery and technological inventions attract of lot of attention. But in broader definitions, such as the one adopted by the OECD Innovation Strategy, innovation is not only about the latest state-of-the-art disruptive technologies, but also about the breadth of societal changes, including social innovation. Innovation is also about the knowledge and skills that make societies future-proof, including capacities and capabilities for using, integrating, accepting novel solutions to challenges.

Some representatives from innovative schools were invited to the Summit to share their views and experiences. Some of them convincingly argued for greater diversification, moving away from the standardization and uniformity that has characterised education’s solutions to the challenge of the 2nd Industrial Revolution and its demand for mass education. In the past standardisation was the easy answer to the increasing need  of access and equity, but the future will require education to implement systemic diversification to meet very different economic and social needs and to provide opportunities to very different talents.

On how schools should progress, education industry representatives applauded the call for schools to open up and become partners in innovation ecosystems in regional economies and societies. Networking and connecting schools with business and local communities will be essential drivers of innovation in education; opening up is the best strategy to address change and connect schools with what’s happening in the outside world.  Industry representatives recognised that this would involve more risk-taking by schools, but that’s what is expected from all social systems in a period of rapid transformation. The status-quo is not an option, and not risk-free either.

Opening up education to businesses was, however, an idea that provoked a rather strong reaction from the side of Education International, the representative of teacher unions, against the dangers of commodification and privatization of education. Employers can play a role in education, but education works for the greater public good and should not be submitted to the economic interests of for-profit actors. Others argued that innovation will never endanger the critically important role of teachers, quite  the contrary. Innovation-proof education systems will have to rely on a very strong, mature profession. But the teaching profession will have to move away from an industrial model to a professional model. We need to take a giant leap forward in the process of professionalization of teachers.

In the end there was an idea on which all participants agreed: the critical role of governments to steer innovation in education. Increasing school autonomy, decentralisation, complexity and technological disruption make the task of governing education systems more difficult, but also move the governance challenge to a higher level, that of leadership in a period of change. Democratic government is and will be the system through which change and innovation in education will happen. But this will only be possible by empowering schools and supporting those that promote innovation.

Links

Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions

3rd Global Education Industry Summit

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

Schools at the crossroads of innovation

by Dirk Van Damme

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In a not so distant past, it was seen as one of the defining features of schools that they isolated learners – and the learning process itself – from the surrounding environment. As so brilliantly described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his account of the modern machinery of discipline and power, schools must be secluded time/space settings, far away from the impurities of the contemporary world which would poison the minds and character of children. But also in a more enlightened and emancipatory sense, separating young learners from an often depressing environment was perceived to be the best way to guide them to higher levels of knowledge, skill and wisdom.

Schools and schooling have changed a lot in recent years, but they are still well-defined in terms of the time and space boundaries that separate them from their environment. Some modern progressive pedagogies have gradually opened up schooling by moving children out of the school and into the surrounding natural and social environments, introducing a new learning process based on realistic and relevant challenges. But in most cases, schools are still isolated spaces, defined by concrete walls and iron fences, where life is dictated by the rhythm of the school bell.

How different this mindset is from the realities of today‘s world! The separation of school time from the wider world, characterised by borderless networking and communication, may seem rather alienating to young people. Isolating schools from their environment does nothing to help the process of incremental change, nor the innovation of education and learning. No modern institution changes solely from within, but rather does so in reaction or interaction with an environment which continuously challenges its processes and outputs. In today’s world, these pressures challenges and demands towards schools seem to accumulate, be it in the form of employers asking for more relevant skills and offering workplace learning arrangements to move learners into the reality, or in the form of citizens and civil society claiming all kinds of changes in the curriculum in order to align education with what they perceive to be the common good.

These issues are further developed and expanded in a new OECD/CERI publication Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions, and will be discussed with education ministers, high-level policy makers and industry leaders in the upcoming Global Education Industry Summit, which takes place in Luxembourg on 25-26 September, hosted by the OECD, the European Commission and the Government of Luxembourg.

Too often the answer from the world of education is defensive and self-protective. It is time to radically rethink schooling in terms of openness and networking, or in other words, as nodes in wider ecosystems of innovation and learning. Schools are among the most important knowledge institutions of modern societies and they have such great potential to play a critical role in processes of knowledge production and dissemination, vital to innovation in the local and regional economy. Many accounts of innovation would agree that human capital plays a crucial role, but they tend to look first at the knowledge and skills of educated individuals, and not at the active engagement of schools as learning environments where innovation also occurs. Similarly, schools can – and should –play a very important role in building the social capital of local communities, by offering services that improve the well-being and social cohesion in local communities.

By developing an ecosystems view of schools and opening up schools to the surrounding economies and societies, many important stakeholders would feel empowered to support and contribute to them. Local employers, who already play a role in apprenticeships and workplace learning arrangements in vocational education, could easily expand their role towards other dimensions and sectors of the educational system. Opening up schools will generate a completely different governance system for education, one where vertical command-and-control steering and accountability is exchanged for more horizontal relationships and a networking system made up of various stakeholders. Such developments would strengthen the relevance of what is learnt in schools, and contribute to the social and emotional learning that is essential for fostering good citizenship and engaging human beings.

Innovative schools challenge the boundaries – in time, space, and also in curricula and learning processes – that tradition seems to impose on schools today. They often have different approaches to the learning process and especially how its pedagogical core is organised. It is true that deep learning sometimes requires concentration, silencing the noise from the surrounding environment. And a networking world can be a very noisy world. But the era when isolation and separation were necessary to define the learning environments for our children has passed. Schools are at a crossroads of innovation: they are becoming partners and actors in processes of innovation in the surrounding economy and society, and taking benefit of the world around them to innovate their own existence.

Links
Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions
3rd Global Education Industry Summit, Luxembourg, 25-26 September, 2017

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

Photo credit: The Global Education Industry Summit

What does a country average actually mean?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

The institutional framework of the international community was created in the period following the Second World War. The building blocks for international organisations, including the OECD, were and are the nation-states of the post-World War and post-colonial order. However, nation-states are not fixed entities, but historical constructions. Hence, they take many different forms and change as a consequence of socio-political transformations. Few states correspond to the ideal form of a nation – identified by a common history, language and religion – or state. In a complex and diverse world, national identities change and become less homogeneous. Today, many states are confronted with political pressures originating from regional aspirations for more autonomy. Sometimes such pressures lead to a separation of political entities and the creation of new states, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. No one can predict the future, but it would be illusory to expect that the current global order will not continue to evolve during the 21st century.

The international statistical system, one of the great achievements of international organisations, has mirrored the evolution of the nation-state. International statistics – and those related to education are no exception – were tuned towards comparing and benchmarking countries against each other. National averages thus became the dominant data. Most of the data points in Education at a Glance, for example, are national averages. However, the expansion and increased sophistication of data collection and data processing have allowed for the development of many more measures than just national averages. Indeed, averages without more detailed measures of how indicators are distributed across various subpopulations offer little added value when it comes to understanding the real world.
Through its “New Approaches to Economic Challenges” initiative, the OECD is working to highlight distributional measures in its statistical apparatus. In Education at a Glance, for example, our analyses increasingly focus on the distribution of education indicators by gender, age, socio-economic status and immigrant background around the national average.

So far, little effort has gone into exploring regional variations within countries. Technical shortfalls, such as the lack of regional data in existing data collections, but also political sensitivities, have hindered the analysis of regional variations. After a few years of hard work, a pilot project under the auspices of the INES Working Party has gathered a range of interesting regional data on some key education indicators. The most recent edition of Education Indicators in Focus (EDIF) explores subnational variations in educational attainment and labour market outcomes.

The chart above shows clearly the relevance of subnational variations. For one of the key measures of a country’s human capital, the tertiary attainment rate in the adult population, the subnational variation in some countries is almost as wide as between-country variations. This is true, obviously, for large countries, such as Canada, the Russian Federation and the United States, but also for Germany, Spain and Sweden. Smaller countries, such as Belgium, Ireland and Slovenia, show less variation, but differences are still significant.

In all countries, the capital region, which attracts a large share of the nation’s human capital for the government and the industries and services concentrated around it, has a larger population of tertiary-educated adults than most other regions. This observation in itself is relevant for education policy: the civil servants and advisors designing those policies often live in environments that bear no resemblance to other parts of the country.

A better understanding of the magnitude of subnational variations in education indicators prompts a range of policy-relevant questions. Huge disparities in human capital between regions call into question the validity of uniform nation-wide education and skills strategies. Regional variation calls for policies that are adapted to the regions’ specific contexts and realities. But nation-states might also have an interest in promoting educational inclusion in the country by taking the steps necessary to help regions at the bottom of the distribution move closer to the average. Significant regional variation might also signal the need for continuing involvement of the central state to ensure that regions have similar capacity and resources to support skills development.

From a statistical point of view, exploring subnational variations raises doubts about the meaningfulness of national averages in international statistics. It is necessary to understand what the country average is and the magnitude of the regional variation around it. After all, an average is just an average, a statistical construct, not a reality.

Links: 

Education Indicators in Focus No. 43 Subnational variations in educational attainment and labour market outcomes, by Markus Schwabe, Rachel Dinkes, Tom Snyder.
Chart source: OECD/NCES (2015), Education at a Glance Subnational Supplement, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/AnnualReports/oecd/.