Schools

Close your eyes for a second and think of something that happened over the last 20 years and you would have never expected to occur. Be it the pandemic, smart phones or something else, the truth is that the future likes to surprise us.
Our world is in a perpetual state of change. There are always multiple versions of the future—some are assumptions, others hopes and fears. To prepare, we have to consider not only the changes that appear most probable, but also the ones that we aren’t expecting.
Inspired by the ground-breaking 2001 Schooling for Tomorrow scenarios, this book provides a set of scenarios on the future of schooling, showing not a single path into the future, but many. Using these scenarios can help us identify the opportunities and challenges that these futures could hold for schooling and education more broadly. We can then use those ideas to help us better prepare and act now.
Whether parents or students, teachers or educational leaders, researchers or policy makers, this book has been written for all those who want to think about futures that haven’t occurred to play their part in shaping the future that will.

This paper sets out ways to reform European education systems to ensure that they equip Europeans with a forward-looking set of key competences that prepares them for the workplace, but also helps to create a European identity. It argues that education and training—enhanced through mobility, transnational cooperation and structural reforms—are critical to boosting individual, economic and societal resilience; providing both basic and high-level skills and competences; reducing inequalities; promoting entrepreneurial mindsets; fostering inclusive, stable and democratic societies; and making a success of migration and globalisation. Furthermore, education should help to empower young people to engage with and shape the future of a Europe of democracy, solidarity and inclusion. The ultimate goal is to build a true European Education Area by 2025, which would, inter alia, improve students’ mobility, prepare the ground for the mutual recognition of diplomas and boost language learning.

The World Development Report 2018 (WDR 2018)—LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise—is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the timing is excellent: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to place their learning at the center. The 2018 WDR explores four main themes: 1) education’s promise; 2) the need to shine a light on learning; 3) how to make schools work for learners; and 4) how to make systems work for learning.

Every year, the World Bank's World Development Report takes on a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 Report, Learning to Realize Education's Promise, is the first ever devoted entirely to education. Now is an excellent time for it: education has long been critical for human welfare, but is even more so in a time of rapid economic change. The Report explores four main themes. First, education's promise: Education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies - both within and outside the education system. Second, the learning crisis: Despite gains in education access, recent learning assessments show that many young people around the world, especially from poor families, are leaving school unequipped with even the most foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. Third, promising interventions to improve learning: Research from areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, or school management have identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, that teachers are skilled as well as motivated, and that other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, learning at scale: Achieving learning throughout an education system will require more than just scaling up effective interventions. Change requires overcoming technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and being adaptive when implementing programs.

This report uses a rigorous imagining approach to develop an alternative way of organizing learning in Europe whereby the traditional school system no longer plays a significant role. This study shows that, on the basis of phenomena already present in Europe today, it is possible to invent a discontinuous model of how people learn and how what they learn is used in everyday life. At the core of this model is a carefully elaborated idea of learning spaces that encompass new ways of ensuring that people have the capacity to control, direct, share and deepen their knowledge throughout their lives. These multi-dimensional learning spaces are imagined as operating in a systemically different economic and social context. One where non-technocratic, non-hierarchical learning is central to the production of local well-being and community based identity. “School’s Over” is meant to challenge both the functional and organizational assumptions that currently dominate, often implicitly, the choices being made today.

In spring 2013 the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) called upon experts and practitioners to come up with visionary papers and imaginative scenarios on how Open Education in 2030 in Europe might look like in 2030, with a major focus on Open Educational Resources and Practices. Three calls for vision papers were launched, one in each of the areas Lifelong Learning, School Education and Higher Education. This publication presents all papers submitted to the School Education call. Each paper is different in form, focus, content and style, but all of them raise important issues when thinking about "opening up" education.