Education reform: what trends can we expect in 2023?
What are likely to be among the big trends impacting education reform around the world in 2023 and beyond? What are some of the big changes needed in education?
We asked members of our team and expert advisory board to give their personal views on one major trend.
Here are what four of them had to say.
Professor Rose Luckin: Digital technologies, data and AI are impacting education at an increasing pace
Digital technologies can increase access to education as was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These technologies connect people to each other and to information that can be used to build knowledge and understanding. The interactions that occur through the connections provided by technology provide data that can be processed by AI algorithms to increase our understanding, for example about in what ways, with whom and how successfully learning is occurring.
The proliferation of technology, data and AI increases the need for attention to regulation and ethics. It also highlights the need to ensure that everyone has access, not just to technology, but also to the appropriate support to enable learning to occur.
These advances also bring new pressure for reform to the ways in which we measure the success of our education systems. For example, generative AI is now available at scale, and perfectly capable of writing a decent essay, and advanced machine learning can successfully pass exams.
We must therefore look for new ways to measure success that focus on evaluating our unique human intelligence: the intelligence that cannot be replicated by AI.
Professor Rose Luckin is Professor of Learner Centred Design at University College London (UCL) Knowledge Lab in London, and Director of EDUCATE, a hub for Educational Technology start-ups, researchers and educators.
Dr Kenan Barut: Expect growing demand for holistic solutions in Early Childhood Care and Education
Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) has always been a relatively neglected area in educational policies, systems, and programmes.
According to the Global Education Monitoring Report in 2021, only 2% of humanitarian funding goes towards providing quality ECCE services across the globe. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has also had major negative impacts on this key area, since many young children are now starting their basic education without any systematic learning experience.
With these in mind, the World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education in Tashkent in November 2022, in which more than 150 countries participated, could inspire future education reform projects from 2023 onwards. It was clearly acknowledged in the Tashkent Declaration, adopted on the last day of the event, that ECCE is an important enabler of learning, social equity, and sustainable development “where all children can have the opportunity to reach their full potential”.
Following this declaration, and many other recent calls for increased investment in early years education, there is expected to be growing demand for holistic educational solutions in this area in the coming years.
It is crucial to ensure that these solutions align essential components of the teaching and learning journey including curriculum, resources, professional development, and assessment.
Dr Kenan Barut is Director of Strategy, Cambridge Partnership for Education. He is our former Director for Education and English language teaching in the Middle East and North Africa.
Rt Hon Charles Clarke: We need to re-fashion the way in which systems assess and examine students
In the three years since January 2020, when the World Health Organisation identified the COVID-19 pandemic as an international public health emergency, education systems around the world have been identifying important reforms and better approaches to address the challenges.
These include the development of online teaching at all levels; the development of more digital assessment and a move towards longer-term assessment systems and away from “high-stake” examinations; the increased recognition of the need to engage parents in their children's education, and an acceptance that in-service teacher training, to build resilience in the face of challenges, needs to be of a much higher quality than it generally is now.
These are all important but the trend in which I have the greatest hope is the need to re-fashion the way in which systems assess and examine students. There are many arguments for this but for me the most important is the need to ensure that every individual child can develop to fulfil their own potential. Preference for high-quality and personal assessment is an essential tool to that end, which technology makes far more possible than was traditionally the case.
The consensus for change is getting wider with some important developments in 2022 which I hope will accelerate in 2023.
Rt Hon Charles Clarke is the former Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Education, UK. He has provided consultancy for Cambridge in the education reform sector for several years.
Clare Woodcraft: Philanthropy will catalyse new and unprecedented levels of innovation in education
Historically, education has been one of the largest sectoral recipients of philanthropic capital.
This applies to global philanthropic investment and the OECD describes education as a key area for giving in the period 2016-2019. But it also applies to regional giving: in the US, the Rockefeller Foundation estimates that in 2020 alone US-based donors gave more than $71 billion to education, which equals 15% of all giving. Even in emerging markets, the pattern is replicated. In the Gulf region, some 26% of philanthropic capital is committed to the education sector.
Much of this giving has been to fund educational assets or hardware but increasingly philanthropy is looking to create collaborative partnerships that unite multi-sector actors for more systemic change. In Brazil the Leman Foundation worked with government during the COVID-19 pandemic to promote digital curriculum development. In Malaysia the YTIL Foundation did the same.
Across the globe, foundations are acknowledging that their capital is risk capital and can be used for innovation, creating solutions that partners (i.e., governments and the private sector)
can help them scale.
This approach bodes well for improving the effectiveness of philanthropy as well as for catalysing new and unprecedented levels of innovation in education.
Clare Woodcraft is Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. She has over 25 years of experience working in the field of socio-economic development and philanthropy in emerging markets.
If you’re working to improve the quality of your country’s education system, then please contact us to find out how we can help you achieve your goals.
