Andreas Schleicher presents important data that should be considered for the Future of Education looking at digitalisation, labour markets and changes in the work force, inclusion, the need for creativity and other social and emotional skills and the importance of teachers in building the Future of Education.
Find out more about the OECD work in Education at https://www.oecd.org/education/
2. Many disconnects
Financial economy
Infinite growth imperative
Gross domestic product
The wealthy
Technology
Governance
Real economy
Finite resources of planet
Well-being of people
The poor
Social needs
Voicelessness of people
3. The future will continue to surprise us
Impact
Uncertainty
Climate change
Ageing
Data breaches
General Artificial Intelligence
Energy cuts
Internet disrupted
Economic shocks
Natural disasters
(cyber) war
Pandemics
The future will always surprise us
5. Figure 1.4
The rise of Big Tech
Annual revenue of top four companies from the Fortune 500 in 1960 vs “Big Four” tech companies, 2005-2020
Source: OECD(2019), An Introduction to Online Platforms and Their Role in the Digital Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1787/53e5f593-en; companies’ annual reports; and https://macrotrends.net
0
100
200
300
400
500
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Annual
revenue
(USD
billion)
Apple
Facebook
Amazon
Google
0
100
200
300
400
500
2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020
General Motors Exxon Mobil
Ford Motor General Electric
8. Tasks
without
use of ICT
Tasks with
use of ICT
Non routine tasks
Routine tasks
Non routine tasks
Routine tasks
Tasks
without
use of ICT
Tasks with
use of ICT
Two effects of digitalisation
9. Non routine tasks,
Low use of ICT
Non routine tasks,
High use of ICT
Routine tasks,
Low use of ICT
Routine tasks,
High use of ICT
Non routine tasks,
Low use of ICT
Non routine tasks,
High use of ICT
Routine tasks,
Low use of ICT
Routine tasks,
High use of ICT
(
Two effects of digitalisation
11. Many teenagers aspire to jobs that are at high risk of automation (PISA)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Australia
United
Kingdom
Ireland
New
Zealand
United
States
Finland
Norway
Canada
Singapore
Israel
Sweden
ECD
-
Sample
Average
Belgium
Denmark
Korea
Chile
Austria
Netherlands
Italy
Spain
Estonia
France
Czech
Republic
Poland
Slovenia
Cyprus
Greece
Germany
Japan
Lithuania
Slovak
Republic
Advantaged Disadvantaged
13. The wisdom of crowds
Number of pages in all wikis, 2001-2021
Figure 3.2
Source: Wikimedia (2021), Pages to Date, All Wikis, https://stats.wikimedia.org/
0
50
100
150
200
250
300 2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
Number
of
wikis
(Millions)
14. Digital navigation skills (PISA)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Singapore
38
Korea
39
B-S-J-Z
(China)
39
Hong
Kong
(China)
34
Chinese
Taipei
46
Macao
(China)
39
United
Kingdom
22
Japan
34
United
States
30
Canada
26
New
Zealand
30
Netherlands
22
Australia
26
Finland
20
Ireland
20
Israel
17
UAE
25
Slovenia
20
Russia
22
Poland
29
Brunei
Darussalam
26
Malta
18
Croatia
19
Estonia
24
Austria
22
Malaysia
27
Belarus
27
OECD
average
24
Germany
22
Belgium
27
Lithuania
22
Czech
Republic
27
Overall
average
22
France
28
Latvia
18
Turkey
36
Thailand
24
Qatar
23
Hungary
25
Portugal
26
Italy
25
Switzerland
23
Albania
11
Denmark
16
Luxembourg
28
Norway
16
Bulgaria
14
Indonesia
14
Spain¹
23
Chile
25
Sweden
18
Slovak
Republic
19
Philippines
19
Costa
Rica
21
Greece
18
Iceland
31
Serbia
18
Mexico
15
Brazil
15
Kazakhstan
20
Montenegro
14
Georgia
15
BiH
12
Panama
17
Uruguay
8
Peru
18
Colombia
22
Dominican
Republic
9
Baku
(Azerbaijan)
15
Kosovo
7
Morocco
6
Strictly focused navigation Actively explorative navigation No navigation Column2
%
Fig 3.7
Percentage
of
students
who
self
activated
the
multiple-source
by
clicking
hyperlink
Highly effective navigation
Actively explorative navigation
Limited navigation
No navigation
15. -75
-50
-25
0
25
Bogota Daegu Helsinki Houston Istanbul Manizales Moscow Ottawa Suzhou
mean scale difference (students and
parents)
mean scale difference (teachers)
15
Figure 4.3
15-year-olds report lower creativity than 10-year-olds
Age gaps in creativity
18. Resilience: Living in an
imbalanced world
Sustainability: Keeping
the world in balance
A balancing act
19. Education…
• Change in consumption
and lifestyle patterns
• Personal finance and
investment choices
• Employment choices
• Social influence
• Volunteering
• Community services
• Voting for candidates
• Financing parties
• Social activism
…shapes
political
commitments
…impacts on
local
communities
…influences
business
practices
…influences
others‘
behaviour
Education can shape individual behaviour that…
20. Global issues covered in the curriculum (PISA)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Climate change
and global
warming
Equality
between men
and women in
different parts of
the world
International
conflicts
Causes of
poverty
Migration
(movement of
people)
Hunger or
malnutrition in
different parts of
the world
Global health
(e.g. epidemics)
%
Principals who reported that there is a formal curriculum for the following topics:
21. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
"I think my behaviour can impact
people in other countries"
"I can do something about the
problems of the world"
"It is right to boycott companies that
are known to provide poor…
"When I see the poor conditions that
some people in the world live…
"I think of myself as a citizen of the
world"
"Looking after the global
environment is important to me"
Percentage of students who agreed or strongly agreed with the following statements:
Students’ agency regarding global issues (PISA, average)
Fig VI.5.1a
24. Student agency
Students learn and develop their agency in interactions with others e.g.
peers and friends, teachers, parents, siblings, others from any communities
they belong to etc. (co-agency), and also in dynamics of a group (collective
agency).
26. -0.05
-0.04
-0.03
-0.02
-0.01
0.00
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
Motivation to master
tasks
Self-efficacy Fear of failure Learning goals Value of school
Change
in
the
index Growth mindset and student attitudes
Change in the following indices when students disagreed or strongly disagreed that "your intelligence is
something about you that you can’t change very much“:
Fig III.14.5
All linear regression models account for
students' and schools' socio-economic profile
27. Participation in formal education continues to expand. International collaboration and
technological advances support more individualised learning. The structures and
processes of schooling remain.
Educational monopolies remain: Schools are
key actors in socialisation, qualification, care
and credentialing.
International collaboration and digital
technologies power more personalised
teaching and learning practices.
Distinct teacher corps remain, although with
new divisions of tasks and greater economies
of scale.
Goals and
functions
Organisation and
structures
The teaching
workforce
Governance and
geopolitics
Scenario 1: Schooling Extended
28. Traditional schooling systems break down as society becomes more directly involved
in educating its citizens. Learning takes place through more diverse, possibly
privatised and flexible arrangements, with digital technology a key driver.
Fragmentation of demand with self-reliant
“clients” looking for flexible services.
Schooling systems as players in a wider
(local, national, global) education market.
Diversification of structures: multiple
organisational forms available to individuals.
Diversity of instructional roles and teaching
status operating within and outside of schools.
Goals and
functions
Organisation and
structures
The teaching
workforce
Governance and
geopolitics
Scenario 2: Education digitised
29. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Progressive return of
students (e.g. by age
cohorts)
Classroom based
teaching and learning
in shifts
Hybrid model of
distance and
classroom based
teaching and learning
Return to normal
scheduling and
student attendance
Student and teacher
returns contingent
upon results of
antibody testing
Classroom teaching
conducted in schools’
outdoor spaces
Strategies beyond the pandemic
(Averages across 36 countries, May 2020)
Table 17
%
30. • Many online and distance learning and other innovative approaches such as AR, VR
and AI were created, adapted and expanded.
New learning experiences
Image sources: Electude
Classroom and Labster Labs’
virtual labs; Oxford University’s
LIFE project, a smartphone-
based virtual learning platform
31. Learning analytics
• Learning analytics helps educators
personalise learning
• in real time
• as a reflective tool
• Data come from sensors, learning
management systems and digital activities
of learners
• When should you shift to a new activity?
• Are you losing the attention of learners?
• How do you struture instruction time
(lecture, small group, discussion,
assessment, practice, etc.)?
• Which students do you talk to and support
the most?
32. Assessments and exams
New types of
assessments through
simulations and games
Adaptive assessments
Hands-on assessment in
vocational settings
Increasing reliability of
machine rating for essays
Predictive models may
disrupt the exam model
33. Schools remain, but diversity and experimentation have become the norm. Opening the
“school walls” connects schools to their communities, favouring ever-changing forms of
learning, civic engagement and social innovation.
Strong focus on local decisions; self-
organising units in diverse partnerships.
Schools as hubs function to organise multiple
configurations of local-global resources.
Flexible schooling arrangements permit greater
personalisation and community involvement.
Professional teachers as nodes of wider
networks of flexible expertise.
Goals and
functions
Organisation and
structures
The teaching
workforce
Governance and
geopolitics
Scenario 3: Schools as Learning Hubs
34. 34
Psychological well-being of 10-year-olds
I felt calm and relaxed
I felt cheerful and in good spirits
I felt active and vigorous
I woke up feeling fresh and rested
My daily life is filled with things that interest me
Percentage of 10-year-old students who reported feeling like this “most of the time” or “all of the time” (international
average)
Figure 3.2
0 20 40 60 80 100
10-year old boys 10-year old girls
35. 35
Psychological well-being of 15-year-olds
I felt calm and relaxed
I felt cheerful and in good spirits
I felt active and vigorous
I woke up feeling fresh and rested
My daily life is filled with things that interest me
Percentage of 15-year-old students who reported feeling like this “most of the time” or “all of the time” (international
average)
Figure 3.2
0 20 40 60 80 100
15-year old boys 15-year old girls
36. Students who are more stress resistant, optimistic and energetic
indicated higher current psychological well-being amongst 15-year-olds
0.00
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
Bogota Daegu Helsinki Houston Istanbul Manizales Moscow Ottawa Sintra Suzhou
Change
in
well-being
related
to
a
one
standard
deviation
increase
in
skills
Stress resistance Optimism Energy
Social and emotional skills most strongly associated with current psychological well-being, by city
36
Figure 3.8
38. Some students learn at high levels All students learn at high levels
Routine cognitive skills Complex ways of thinking and working
Curriculum, instruction and assessment
Student inclusion
Standardisation and compliance High-level professional knowledge workers
Role of teachers
‘Tayloristic’, industrial Flat, collegial, entrepreneurial
Work organisation
Primarily to authorities Primarily to peers and stakeholders
Accountability
The past The future
When fast gets really fast, being slow to adapt
can make education really slow
40. Find out more about our work at
www.oecd.org/education
Email: Andreas.Schleicher@OECD.org
Twitter: SchleicherOECD
Wechat: AndreasSchleicher
and remember:
Without data, you are just another person with an opinion
Thank you
Notas del editor
Education has fueled amazing progress, but it also leaves us with some fundamental disconnects. Think of the growing disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of our planet; between the financial economy and the real economy; between the wealthy and the poor; between the concept of our gross domestic product and the well-being of people; and between technology and social needs;
And, at the same time, we know that strategic investments in education can help reduce economic inequality in the long run. In fact, one of the most powerful features of education is that it can help tackle the sources of economic inequality, and not just tinker with its consequences.
At this moment, our eyes are still focused on the pandemic, which has massively disrupted education
Some believe that nothing in education will be like in the days before
Looking to the future, there are new sources of growth
Intangibles are key in today’s economy. An example of their power is the growth of a few tech companies compared to the declining revenue of the traditional companies that dominated the Fortune 500 decades ago
The great thing is that unlike tangible assets, knowledge can be used repeatedly and in multiple places at the same time, and that’s what explains the rapid growth of Big Tech companies in just a few years.
The way we live and work also shapes the future of education
The dynamics behind that are not difficult to understand
The kind of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate
And technology intensive tasks are a on the rise
You put the two things together and you see the future of work
All of this has consequences.
When you look at the career aspirations more closely, you also see that between 30 and 40 per cent of teenagers aspire to jobs that are at high risk of automation, particularly youths from poor families aim for jobs that are likely to disappear.
Knowledge also means power
The world is more connected. Before, people engaged with and learned from those near them. Now, people engage with and learn from people around the world, instantly.
For example, only an elite few produced traditional encyclopaedias or the mass media of the 20th century (newspapers, radio and TV), today’s social media and internet sites like Wikipedia are fed by the masses who generate the content.
As you can see here, the number of pages in all wikis grew from about 10 000 to over 250 million in just 20 years.
Are we equipping young people to deal with this kind of diversity and knowledge? What happens when they encounter each other, and different knowledge?
Being a digital native doesn’t mean you are digitally skilled.
Here you see the share of 15-year-olds who are highly effective navigators on the internet or at least capable to actively explore information. As you see there is no country in the Western world with at least half of the student population good at navigating the digital world.
Some students have limited navigation skills but often a majority did not even demonstrate basic navigation strategies.
So technology seems way ahead of student capacities.
Now I had already mentioned that students’ creativity and curiosity were lower among 15-year-olds than among 10-year-olds.
That’s not just reflected in student self-reports, also the ratings from parents and from teachers gave a similar picture, at least in most jurisdictions, although you can see in Suzhou that the drop reported by students is much larger than what parents say. And teachers don’t seem to observe a drop.
That drop in creativity could be a reflection of the fact that education systems often expect compliance from students, with the potential consequence of driving out curiosity and creativity as students grow older and stay longer in the education system.
And not surprisingly, let me conclude with a look at the environment
As you can see here, since 1970, our ecological footprint has consistently exceeded Earth’s biocapacity, which you see here marked by the dotted line. In 2021, we exceeded it by over 70%, which means that globally, we lived as if we had 1.7 planets available instead of just one. Rates of consumption vary by country: for example, the United States consumes as if it had five Earths available, France three and Colombia slightly over one. On average, OECD countries consume the equivalent of over three Earths.
Preparing for that will always be a balancing act.
A balancing act between fostering sustainability, keeping the world we know in balance, and resilience, living in a structurally imbalanced world.
Education is the key on both fronts, particularly when it comes to issues like climate change that oblige us to see the bigger picture, make better trade-offs between the present and the future, and between situational values – I will do whatever the current situation allows me to do – and sustainable values that help us align individual and collective well-being.
Most obviously, education provides people with the scientific knowledge and skills that underpin a green economy. And according to PISA, knowledge about the science of the environment was the single best predictor for the environmental attitudes and behaviour of young people.
But education can also shape individual behaviour that influences political commitments, whether that is financing parties or social activism
It can shape behaviour that impacts on local communities, think of volunteering or community services
It can shape individual behaviour that influences business practices, think about changes in consumption and lifestyle patterns, personal investment choices or employment choices.
And of course, our own behaviour will always influence the behaviour of others.
Look at this. At the surface, the sustainability agenda has made it into school curricula. Among OECD countries, close to 90% of school principals say they have a formal curriculum dealing with climate change and global warming, and that’s true also for issues like poverty or migration.
But things look different when you look at this through the lens of students. In our latest PISA survey, over three quarters of 15-year-olds said that the climate agenda is important and urgent to them, and that they think of themselves as world citizens.
But when we asked them do you feel you can do something about this or do you think what you do matters for people in other places, the bars got much shorter.
That’s the crux of education today, we make young people passive consumers of prefabricated knowledge, but we don’t do enough
to empower them to mobilise their cognitive, social and emotional resources.
Singaporean and Korean students excel when they had to explain how carbon-dioxide emissions affect global climate change. They have an amazing level of academic knowledge…
But just a minority of Singaporean and Korean 15-year-olds said they would choose certain products for ethical or environmental reasons even if they are a bit more expensive. That’s the disconnect between knowledge and behaviour.
A growth mindset is a good example of the kind of social and emotional skills that matter
You can see here that where education systems succeed with equipping young people with a growth mindset, they are much more likely to see better results in academic results too.
Niemand weiss, wie die Zukunft aussehen wird, aber ein Weg wie wir uns besser auf die Zukunft vorbereiten können liegt darin, uns auch verschiedene Zukunftsszenarien einzulassen.
Ein Szenario ist die Fortschreibung des Status Quo.
But what’s most interesting, just 22% of the OECD countries were aiming to return to the status quo. Over half of them looked to hybrid models as the new normal, where virtual and on-site learning environments are integrated.
Think about, something that was at best at the margins of education six months ago, has now become the new normal. At least in ambitions.
The most visible benefit has been greater personalisation. While you study math on a computer, the computer can now study you and then make your learning experience so much more granular, so much more adaptive and so much more interactive. The pandemic has brought a tiny niche out in the mainstream.
Learning analytics holds perhaps the greatest promise. Together with sensors and learning management systems, teachers can now get a real sense of how different students learn differently, where students get interested and where they get bored, where they advance and where they get stuck. And so teachers get a much better sense of how they can structure learning time and which students need what extra support. Again, an area the pandemic has greatly accelerated in some parts of the world.
We are also seeing big leaps in assessment and exams, whether you talk about assessments through simulations, hands-on assessment in vocational settings, or machine learning algorithms scoring essays. The time of multiple choice bubble sheets is over and learning and assessment are becoming fully integrated.
The WHO has an interesting metric to assess the psychological well-being of students which we used here for 10-year-olds. You can see a generally positive picture although you see consistently lower results for girls than for boys.
Psychological well-being dips in adolescence, the bars are generally shorter for 15-year-olds than for 10-year-olds, and that dip is particularly pronounced for girls.
The results show that students’ social and emotional skills are closely related to students’ psychological well-being after accounting for socio-economic status and gender. This is particularly the case for stress resistance, optimism and energy. So being optimistic is consistently related to both a higher level of life satisfaction and current psychological well-being, and you see this works across cities.
And this seems to matter too. Students who get along well with their teachers report higher social and emotional skills, particularly greater curiosity, optimism and achievement motivation. Curiosity and achievement motivation both indicate a love for learning and doing well at school. So it seems that students who get along well with their teachers are more engaged, want to do well in school and like learning more. To the extent that you can read a causal nature into this relationship, improving social and emotional skills could be a way to help students enjoy better social relations in school and vice versa.
And there is a lot more that the future will demand from tomorrow’s teachers.
When you could still assume that what you learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content was at the centre of education. Today, the dilemma for teachers is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate. Tomorrows teachers need to enable students to become lifelong learners, to manage complex ways of thinking and complex ways of working that computers cannot take over easily.
In the past when you only needed a small slice of well-educated people it was efficient for governments to invest a lot in a small elite to lead the country. But the social and economic cost of low educational performance has risen substantially and all young people now need to leave school with strong skills.
In the past, governments tended to tell their teachers exactly what to do and exactly how they want it done, with Tayloristic methods of administrative control and accountability to get the results they want. Today the challenge is to make teaching a profession of high-level knowledge workers.
But knowledge workers don’t like to work in schools organised as industrial workplaces, the future is flat, collegial and entrepreneurial, and people look outwards rather than upwards.
You can help governments navigate the risks and leveraging the opportunities.
What is the right balance between modernising and disruption.
How do we reconcile new goals with old structures
How do we support globally minded and locally rooted students and teachers
How do we foster innovation while recognising the socially highly conservative nature of education
How do we leverage potential with existing capacity
How do we reconfigure the spaces, the people, the time and the technologies to create powerful learning environments.
Again, this is not a government project, this is a whole of society project and I believe the philantrophic sector can make such a difference.