Plenary Session: Improving Education Systems
The “Future of Education” must be built on existing foundations and therefore involves improving those systems that have served us well. Continuous improvement has become a personal and societal expectation in all fields, including education. High expectations are a critical element of success for individuals, schools, communities, colleges, universities and countries. Improvement is associated with extending the benefits of education to all, but also with enhancing the performance of institutions and individual students. At every level we need to focus on areas for improvement, the use and consequences of national and international metrics to measure performance and benchmarks that influence aspirations. We shall also consider steps to reach and support all learners, including resourcing of education, and debate how new curricula and assessment strategies can enhance the relevance and impact of learning. Speakers
The Moderator Summary, Improving Education Systems Plenary Session
"The session on Improving Education was really fascinating. What we had was several really important case studies of how you can improve education systems and how they could be scaled up to be applied elsewhere."
Mr Mike Baker, education journalist, broadcaster and author, UK
"The session on Improving Education was really fascinating. What we had was several really important case studies of how you can improve education systems and how they could be scaled up to be applied elsewhere."
Mr Mike Baker, education journalist, broadcaster and author, UK
"The session on Improving Education was really fascinating. What we had was several really important case studies of how you can improve education systems and how they could be scaled up to be applied elsewhere."
Moderator: Mr Mike Baker, education journalist, broadcaster and author, UK
Executive Summary
I. Capacity Building
Dr Qian Tang
Development agencies must rethink their way of working if we are to improve national learning outcomes. Simply building schools, training teachers or distributing books do not guarantee that learning will take place as such projects do not result in wider policy reform. We need todevelop the capacity of all actors if we are serious about large-scale educational reform. Improving governmental capacity will ensure that education systems respond to the real needs of society.UNESCO has emphasized four levels at which capacity building should take place. The first is that of individual officers, particularly in government planning and management teams. The second isorganizational, where the challenge is to improve the effectiveness of working methods and to incentivize better teamwork. The third level is that of the public service: reform must have strong national leadership and adapt to the particular circumstances of administration. Finally, external assistance from bilateral and international agencies must be long-term and lead to a genuine transfer of skills, particularly in fragile states. These four factors must be integrated within a common capacity building strategy which uses local knowledge and is based on strong national ownership.
UNESCO supports countries in developing strong, holistic and balanced educational systems, and developing the capacities of all stakeholders is essential. We have devised the UNESCO Capacity Development for Education for All program (CapEFA) for this purpose, pooling funding from different donors to help countries improve the effectiveness of their educational systems. One example of the implementation of this scheme was Côte d’Ivoire, where the challenges included insufficient links between the labor market and the training availability, outdated curricula, and lack of quality data. The development strategy prepared in collaboration with UNESCO aimed to develop capacity in five areas: leadership; institutions; organization; quality and equity; and knowledge generation. Progress has been made. Capacity development is always linked to a set of rules, norms and practices, many of which are not under the control of the Ministry of Education. UNESCO’s approach is to involve all stakeholders and identifynew tools and mechanisms.
II. Upgrading Standards in Indonesia
Prof. Fasli Jalal
The teacher is the most important contributor to education outcomes. However, only about a million out of about 2.7 million Indonesian teachers fulfill the criteria. Furthermore, there are serious inequities in teacher distribution: 66% of schools in remote areas do not have enough teachers. There is also the challenge of absenteeism. About 19% of Indonesian teachers are absent from the classroom at any one time. Teachers are also disadvantaged in terms of remuneration.The government enacted a law in 2005 which specified that all teachers had to upgrade their qualifications to at least a four-year diploma. Secondly, they had to go through a professional certification process. Teachers assigned to remote areas are given a location incentive. The aim is to ensure continuous professional development through a performance reporting system with associated incentives and disincentives. About USD 5.5 billion will be paid in professional and location incentives by 2016.
Regarding impact, the salary for certified teachers has been doubled, and tripled in the case of teachers assigned to remote areas. Teacher absenteeism has declined to 15% from 20% in 2003. Induction programs are to be introduced from next year, and a scheme for linking salary increments to performance and promotion is being devised. One problem that still needs to be addressed is ensuring continuous professional development across 78,000 villages.
III. Improving Education in Vulnerable Small Island States
Prof. E. Nigel Harris
The University of the West Indies was established in 1948 as a college of the University of London, but became independent in 1962. The countries served are spread across one million square miles of the Caribbean Sea, are tiny and vary widely in terms of population, GDP and human development index. The largest is Jamaica with about 2.8 million inhabitants, but many of them have fewer than 200,000. The emphasis is on areas relevant to the Caribbean: tropical medicine, agriculture, crime and security, economics and finance, entrepreneurship, climate change, disaster management, renewable energy and culture. The student population grew to about 22,000 between 1948 and 2002. The campuses tend to replicate faculties and teach their own curricula without much communication among them. One of the issues we face is that the growth of the university took place mainly in the countries where the campuses are located, but there are populations scattered across the Caribbean that do not have access to the programs provided by the three campuses. There has been considerable demand for increased access, and we have responded with a series of five-year access plans, the latest of which emphasizes learning and teaching, growing graduate programs, and extending outreach. The challenges are financing in the face of budget reductions, increasing competition from universities outside and inside the region, and the risk of fragmentation.
The solution is to create a single virtual university space thatconsolidates and integrates the distributed technologies and learning resources, enabling students, researchers and academics to become part of one learning space and connect with other institutions around the world.
IV. Transformation, System Leadership and Assessment
Michael Stevenson
Improvement is not enough; transformation will drive education and economic development. Cisco has synthesized a body of ideas known as Education 3.0. The core idea is that the development of higher order capabilities for learners around the world should be at the center of system change; everything else – from pedagogy to metrics - must be aligned to support it. Curricula, teaching and learning, and assessment need to focus on building the skills required to solve complex problems while often working with international teams and manipulating discipline-based knowledge. Building design, culture and leadership arealso important factors. Two crucial enablers in this process are connectivity and continuous professional development. Having tested this approach, Cisco has learned that effective change must be holistic,with a new focus on the learner, and that it must adopt a systemic approach.The Global Education Leaders Program (GELP) is about testing ideas at scale for implementing change at the global and national level.The jurisdictions involved have identified several crucial propositions: the importance of leadership in supporting change; focusing not on technologies but on processes; and finding safe spaces for innovation. However, many of the approaches to issues depend on context: New York is looking at a split-screen approach, continuing improvement while growing disruptive innovations from within, while Finland amplifies radical innovations as they emerge, and Korea is diversifying the means of assessing skills. We are designing practical technology-based assessments for complex team problem solving and sociallearning in a digital environment, leading to a technical toolkit and apolicymaker’s manual.
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