By FHI 360’s Gwen Cummings and Patrick Fine
“If I were to summarize [the future] in one word, it would be change.”
-Alice Albright
Barely two months ago when I convened four leaders from the education sector for an informal discussion on the future of education, little did I know how prescient Alice Albright’s words would be. The panelists — Alice Albright, Rebecca Winthrop, Warren Simmons and John Gillies — have played influential roles shaping policy and practice internationally and in the United States. In keeping with this year’s theme of my podcast A Deeper Look , I asked this eclectic group of experts how they expect education to evolve during the 2020s. In the past 60 days, education systems around the world have been paralyzed without warning by the global response to COVID-19. Even as we now contemplate a post-pandemic world, insights from this discussion offer valuable perspectives.
The panelists agreed on several big trends driving changes and reform in education policy and practice. Among them were climate change, migration, children in emergencies, technology, cultivating 21st-century skills, girls’ education and challenges with education financing. Now we must add to this: education during a pandemic.
Keeping these globally impactful elements in mind, here are four trends we can expect to shape education development in the next decade:
1. Education systems will adapt to new needs and skills
Rebecca Winthrop spelled it out clearly when she said we need to redefine “where learning takes place, how it takes place and who is involved.” Pivotal to that, and central to all the trends that came out of this conversation, is ensuring that local actors are at the heart of creating solutions. With great variance in what 21st-century skills means for different areas, new approaches and models for organizing how learning occurs will bring transformative change to communities and education institutions everywhere.
2. The role of international organizations will change
The traditional project-based model, in which outsiders provide temporary assistance to define and solve problems, will fade away. Experienced and well-qualified local educators, professionals and local actors are taking the lead and will be selective in when and what kind of external support they require. As John Gillies put it, “Systems change is a form of social mobilization.” And, new voices are empowered to take initiative. This shift encourages multiple actors, not just educators or experts, to jointly fashion new processes that produce diverse results.
This implies a change in the role played by international organizations, which is likely to evolve more toward issues advocacy and thought partnership and away from service delivery.
3. Education finance must be restructured
The traditional education model is inherently expensive, and social sector funding is often first to be placed on the cutting block when public budgets come under pressure. This is likely to be even more important in a post-pandemic world than when our panelists considered the problem in February. We are seeing examples of countries breaking free of this model and utilizing cost-consciousness to drive education reforms. As Warren Simmons pointed out, this is an opportunity for big businesses that have traditionally partnered with large agencies to instead partner with local educators to bring about grassroots change that serves both community and parochial interests.
Still, businesses and private organizations cannot generate enough funding to replace government support. Mass education remains an inherently public responsibility, and organizations like the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) that work with governments to devise new solutions to the financing challenge, including customized hybrid financing and public financial management reforms, will play an important role in the 2020s.
4. New and unique solutions will be used to address specific problems
The topic of innovation came up again and again throughout the discussion and will undoubtedly be a critical factor in all of the trends outlined above. Right now, American children from preschool to college are convening via videoconference, if they are lucky, and studying with the aid of parents or on their own, if their schools are not as prepared. The promising news and current state is that new education solutions — many of them technology based — finance mechanisms, and partnerships are ubiquitous across the global landscape. What we must look out for in the coming decade is discerning between flashy designs and truly high-value solutions, a process that will inevitably involve experimentation and iteration.
There was consensus among these four leaders that the next decade will be fraught with daunting challenges and at the same time full of promising opportunities. With only 10 years left for the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the panelists concluded with a somber note of caution that in a world where social and technological change occurs at a dizzying pace, we are likely to be frustrated by the difficulty and slowness of mobilizing the political will, financing and actions needed to achieve SDG 4. This leaves us with a striking contradiction: Why in a world of rapid change do the reforms we seek in social delivery seem so slow and difficult to attain?
Photo Credit: Worldreader