Ten years ago, when surveying refugee camps in countries where serious conflict was coming to an end, researchers asked some of the children there to name the one thing they were most looking forward to when war was finally over. The overwhelmingly popular answer, regardless of age or country, was a simple one: going to school. More recently, Pascal Plisson’s documentary On the Way to School recounts four treacherous journeys from home to classroom: a two-hour walk across the Kenyan savannah; four hours trekking over the Atlas mountains; 90 minutes by horse through the Patagonian plains; and three boys’ 4km journey from a West Bengal coastal village to town (the two younger pushing the eldest in his punctured wheelchair).
Read these surveys and watch these journeys and you sense the deep, visceral need children have to be at school. This is, of course, not only about learning. Schools are also places to socialise and be socialised; to hang out, eat, make friends, break up and make up with them again. For most children, at least until adolescence, schools represent security, reliability, attachment and happiness in the face of any uncertainties that surround their home lives, their identities and their futures.
In these global contexts, the RSA’s education mission — to close creativity gaps in learning — may seem a premature luxury. In situations where basic resources, improvement infrastructures, and teachers and teacher training are lacking, why should any system focus on empowering leaders, educators and learners to have great ideas and put them into action?
Our rationale is three-fold. First, as our report on international schools outlined, all debates and practices are becoming increasingly global in nature. In this context, if the ghosts of William Shipley and others returned to the 21st century, they would be surprised that our remit had remained so parochial for so long. Second, an approach to change that is built on teacher empowerment, values the broader outcomes of creativity, agency and well-being, and works deeply with civil society partners to support learning, could enable developing education systems to improve far more rapidly, possibly leapfrogging more mature models in the process. Third, the RSA’s emerging model of change and impact will strengthen if we develop a truly global creative community with a cause.
Our report Creative Public Leadership is a first, small step to a more global outlook. Written with the Innovation Unit for the 2016 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), we explored how school systems around the world could create the conditions for successful innovation that could in turn transform outcomes. This question arose from our shared belief that school systems that do not develop the innovative cultures, motivations and capacities of their leaders, educators and institutions are unlikely to see their efforts result in long-term, sustainable returns.
We have deliberately remained in a neutral space in the traditional versus progressive education debate. Some of the language adopted by those seeking radical changes to the ‘desirable outcomes’ of learning can be off-putting to those they need to convince. As one school principal told us:
“Every time I hear the phrase ‘21st-century skills’ I close my ears and reach for my periodic table, my handwriting ledger and even my Bible.”
The rhetoric of ‘education revolution’ can close down the most important discussions, confining debates to the converted rather than the sceptical, and reassuring the confidence rather than inspiring the constrained.
Our starting point built on some key assumptions, all contestable. First, that the ‘mandate the good, unleash greatness’ mantra of school reform needs challenging. The journey from poor to good cannot simply be mandated; and the journey from good to great cannot be ‘unleashed’ without creating the conditions in which the (implied) freedom can be exercised purposefully and with impact. Second, that it is wrong merely to await the tsunami of the technological revolution in its many, and unpredictable, forms; we need to be proactive in seeking to reshape the architecture of public investment in learning and encouraging the creation of ecosystems that are more open, inclusive and diverse. Third, in this context, institutions such as ‘the school’ can and should sustain a crucial role. Announcements of its death are premature and unwelcome. Finally, we need to find ways to emancipate the agency of learners, not just as consumers of technologies, but as makers, problem finders and solvers; entitled, invested players in their own right.
Read the Creative Public Leadership report (on Medium)
Our first question was whether an education innovation journey was necessary at all. Imagine you have just been appointed as the new minister for education (choose your country or region). Whatever is already in your in-tray, or whatever your own passions and prejudices, building a school system with the capacity for systemic innovation is unlikely to figure high on your list of priorities. So while you are not anti-innovation (who is?), you are likely to be aware of its potential risks, and ambivalent about the role of government in doing anything other than standing aside, partly to avoid implication in failure.
If by sticking within their current tramlines, education systems were succeeding against the rigid criteria they tend to set themselves, then the need for change would be minimal. The reality is more depressing. McKinsey’s review of 30 years of education-reform efforts around the world concluded that there had been “lots of energy, little light”. A trebling of spending in most OECD countries between 1970 and 2000 led to, at best, a stagnation in outcomes. In the global north, school improvement continues to struggle with multiple pressures: learner dissatisfaction, disengagement or stress, growing costs (often in contexts of reduced public investment), frustrated educators and continued accusations of mismatch to societies’ needs.
The predicament of less established education systems is even more concerning. A recent study from the US-based Brookings Institution shows that without a fundamental rethinking of current approaches, it will take another 100 years for children in developing countries to reach the levels achieved in developed countries. And, as the Open Society Institute argues, “overall progress has actually resulted in a measure of greater inequity”. In the 1960s, Basil Bernstein famously wrote that education could not compensate for society. While this is of course much-contested, it is clear that education’s ‘compensatory’ challenge grows as global wealth inequalities grow within and between countries.
While the mantras of reform have become ubiquitous across education systems the world over, the dominant models of change are not working. For more than two decades, governments have pursued classic neoliberal reforms — the ‘market constellation’ of competition, choice and high-stakes accountability — to improve results. Known as new public management (NPM) approach, pioneered in the UK, this is described as ‘steering, not rowing’, although the reality feels very different on the frontline. Even those aspects of the NPM orthodoxy that have improved outcomes are having diminishing returns. Existing systems are enormously wasteful of human capital and continue to invest in failing programmes.
The logic of the current reform model has one central flaw: it is, at heart, doubtful of the value of teacher professionalism, seeing it as a mask for producer capture by vested professional interests. It has created a form of ‘managerial professionalism’, driven by heavy scrutiny linked to rankable performance measures. Despite the language of decentralisation and autonomy, the measurement systems entailed in these reforms put teachers at the bottom of an accountability chain that reaches only up, towards various offices of principals, school boards, local or national ministers and inspectors. While systems do recognise the importance of teacher quality, overall they are far more sceptical about trusting teachers to improve their own quality.
These dominant orthodoxies are being exported. The ability to develop countries to successfully adopt the features of more westernised schooling paradigms is used as a criterion to receive aid. Yet, as Lance Pritchett explains in his book The Rebirth of Education,
“Copying the educational fads from rich countries is not going to work: pedagogical and educational problems of developed countries are entirely different than those of advanced countries.”
Moreover, the structures by which policy is made and handed down to schools in most jurisdictions disregard the fact that they are dealing with complex systems and tend towards simplistic solutions. The cognitive frames of policymakers seem to be misaligned with the complexity of actually transforming learning.
There are more fundamental reasons for this failure than any lack of innovation. This includes a shortage of resources and basic materials, huge class sizes and, above all, poorly trained and motivated teachers. However, if we are to improve global education performance and reduce inequality, let alone develop a wider set of outcomes, then serious, disciplined and radical innovation is required at all levels.
Of course, education systems across the globe are full of innovations. In Lebanon, new temporary schools have been built to serve refugee camps that aim to connect with the other assets in the community. In the US, Big Picture Learning connects students with real-world, personalised learning by creating and maintaining innovative, learning environments that ensure students spend at least two days a week working on personal projects or completing internships beyond the school gates. Beyond Tech, the Al Bairaq programme at Qatar University, trains and mentors secondary students in hands-on scientific activities to improve motivation in science and maths. In Nigeria and some Indian states, citizen-based assessment programmes are providing more reliable performance data and enabling high-quality community and parental engagement. Databases such as Edutopia and the WISE hub provide a myriad of education innovation exemplars.
In spite of this volume of activity, we identified five weaknesses in the way that innovation appears to be emerging. First innovations seem to be equity-light. Generally, any interventions that do not explicitly aim for equity normally do the opposite; they increase achievement gaps. Too many education innovators see issues of equity as an afterthought, to be considered during the replication process, rather than central to their efforts.
Second, they are teacher-light. Despite countless examples of teacher-led innovation, it is not surprising that in the era of high-stakes prescription and measurement the overall role of teachers in innovation processes appears limited and devalued. According to the OECD’s TALIS survey, three-quarters of teachers feel that they would receive no recognition for being more innovative. It is still rare to find the systematic involvement of teachers in education innovation. One important exception is British Columbia’s ‘network of inquiry’, which is predicated on professional learning approaches that are ‘sustained and curiosity-driven’.
Another is the ‘non-positional teacher leadership’ programme, which ran across 15 countries, and is currently being trialled in Palestine and Egypt. Ontario and Singapore have also developed system-wide approaches to enabling teacher-led innovation.
Third, too many innovations are evidence-light, failing to develop a disciplined understanding of their impact. Evaluations are too success- and advocacy-focused. Hypotheses about change have not been ‘good enough to be wrong’, so innovations have been doomed to appear successful. The more your pedagogies and practices break with existing conventions, the greater the need for a good understanding of the evidence base behind those conventions. While this is true across all innovations, those attempting to move beyond traditionally measured learning outcomes appear particularly prone to poor-quality relationships with evidence. They have a built-in disadvantage, in that systems have generally failed to reach a consensus about how to define and assess outcomes such as creativity, resilience and empathy.
Fourth, the system is replication-light. The assumption that innovation-scaling is linear and procedural, rather than iterative and relational, is particularly unhelpful in education, where human relationships are a cornerstone of practice and play a fundamental role in determining outcomes. The concept of ‘high-fidelity implementation’ might be both undesirable and unrealistic in our classrooms. Unless practitioners are put at the centre of the innovation process, and invested in as innovators in their own right, the cultural shifts required in scaling new approaches that rely on relationships and ethos just as much as processes and functions will fail to materialise.
Finally, innovation is generally transformation-light. There are pockets of educational innovation that are beginning to rattle dominant discourses about conventional models, but the stubborn roots of the 200-year-old schooling paradigm remain. The structures that dictate the systems, processes and intended outcomes of the formal schooling system remain remarkably resilient. In the domain of organised tax-funded education, systems of schooling are for the most part in improvement mode: they take for granted the implicit parameters and metrics that maintain the current model of schooling. The incremental and piecemeal is overpowering the game-changing and revolutionary.
The most radical education innovators are doing so in guerilla fashion, at the margins. The immense resources of states are still largely locked down into a model predicated on the values and assumptions of a previous age. Their work runs parallel with the systems run by states. Emerging economies have experienced the rapid emergence of a low-cost private school market. Omega in Ghana, APEC in the Philippines and Bridge International Academies across Africa are just a few examples in what is a sea of growing school chains seeking to fill the void left by what they perceive as ineffective public school systems. Levels of innovative practice within these are often exaggerated (and innovation in public schools under-appreciated), but as a growing part of the education fabric, new school providers have the potential for positive disruption.
The way in which public education leaders and institutions interact with these trends of change is fundamental to the ongoing challenge of equity within education systems. Leaving transformation to market forces carries significant risks. The task for jurisdictions should be to enable ecosystems of innovation involving a diverse range of players (including schools and practitioners) conditioned by the values of equity and democracy. While plenty of agencies within government have the title ‘innovation’ somewhere in their remit, they rarely venture beyond incremental improvement. With a few exceptions, for instance the NYC iZone, and the Creative Partnerships programme in England, there is a lack of curation of these efforts; this diminishes their collective potential and contributes to widening gaps in opportunity and achievement.
School systems should create intentional platforms for innovation that are long-term focused, equity-centred and teacher-powered. In doing this, leaders need to reinforce that profound learning and great teaching are ultimately predicated on the power of human relationships. We therefore need to aspire towards a humanising innovation, defined by Chappell as “an active process of change guided by compassion and reference to shared value”.
While the role of government remains crucial, we need to draw on resources from both within and beyond traditional public institutions to create the enabling conditions and cultures for innovation. The RSA’s creative public leadership approach is based on a conviction about the potential for education as humanity’s best hope; one that can both assemble and communicate a compelling case for change. We need leaders who understand that this is not a quest to converge on a single solution, who have the political savvy to create the legitimacy for radical change, and draw on international networks as a source of imaginative ideas rather than prefabricated policies. System leaders need to support schools to think more often, more deeply and more radically about their mission but schools need to take ultimate responsibility for their own ethos.
To test our thinking, we set out nine first steps to reorient the role public system leaders might play and offered five ‘journeys in progress’ drawn from work in South Korea, Australia, British Columbia, New Zealand and Nigeria. The RSA’s next steps are three-fold. First, we are talking to a small number of education system leaders around the world who might want to adapt our ‘half-formed’ ideas for their context. Second, we are investigating how specific global issues can inform and be informed by the approaches of the international school movement. Finally, we will turn our community of education changemakers into a global community, willing and able to develop, interrogate and share practices, and campaign for change.
