Is it time to revisit Gonski’s grail again?
One doesn’t need to look too far to see how deep we’re in this dark water.
A global pandemic, black swan economy, civic unrest, wide-scale industry disruption - and an uncertain future looms with no clear solutions in near sight.
So with no crystal ball for how we sail our way out of this Humanity 4.0 mess, it’s all we can do right now to hastily coordinate a collective recovery through deep breaths, decisive and collaborative global leadership, and a good dose of creativity and ‘out of the box’ thinking to plan how we best move forward and redesign our systems to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing, deeply unstable world.
In the midst of all this wicked volatility is education, which has to somehow go on despite, and which has been stretched to the edges in recent months with enforced crisis solutions to remote teaching and learning delivery for millions of students across the planet. Without pause and with no maps or measures, education has had to simply respond fast, while still shackled with the impossible mandate of equipping the next generation with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate a fraught world when they exit the education system …
Revisiting the Gonski Review
Perhaps then, this is the moment in time to again take heed of Australian businessman and philanthropist David Gonski’s 2017 Review and 2018 federal recommendations on how funding could be used to 'improve school performance and student outcomes' in Australia to meet the future needs of our economy, society and education system.
Those reviews have become known as simply 'Gonski', and 'Gonski 2.0', and have anchored themselves as a kind of holy grail for where education needs to go in this country if we are to step into the next tricky decades with confidence, competence and a skilled, relevant workforce ready to address the challenges of the 21st Century. At the time of review in 2018, Gonski 2.0 was based on 279 submissions from schools, teachers, parents, educational experts and stakeholders in education (states, sectors, unions, tertiary institutions) which represented the 9444 schools, 404,580 staff and 3,849,225 students within the Australian education sector at the time.
Following the review, three key priorities were identified for moving education forward in Australia:
Delivering one year's growth in learning for every student in every year.
Equipping every student to be a creative, connected and engaged learner in a rapidly changing world.
Cultivating an adaptive, innovative and continuously improving education system.
What the review also called for, perhaps presciently given the current climate of uncertainty and need for creative solutions to our global dilemmas, was for each student to be educated with the 'right mix of knowledge, skills and understandings of a world experiencing significant economic, social and technological change', and that each student would leave school as a 'creative, connected and engaged learner' with a 'growth mindset'.
These link to the OECD's The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030 project which aims to help education systems determine the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values students need to thrive in and shape their futures.In fact, the OECD project recognises that today’s students 'will need a broad range of skills, including cognitive and meta-cognitive skills’ (e.g. critical thinking, creative thinking, learning to learn and self-regulation); ‘social and emotional skills’ (including empathy, self-efficacy and collaboration); and ‘practical and physical skills’ (including the ability to utilize and synthesise new information and have competency in the use of 21st Century communication technology devices)' in order to effectively plan future pathways, and not just survive but thrive.
But the OECD and Gonski recommendations are far easier said than done.
Because in order to effectively equip students with the three key priorities outlined in Gonski 2.0, the entire education system needs to recalibrate to:
1. ensure that: educators are supported to teach to new 21st Century capabilities, assessments and intra-subject flexible curriculum learning frameworks;
2. individual learner progression tools are developed to measure capability development, pathway tracking and skills attainment;
3. and the redevelopment of ACARA capabilities need to come into line with current thinking about the role and delivery of education itself
ie: is it actually fit for purpose in its current construct?
For example, the report flagged that in the senior years, in spite of a need for 'a broader and different mix of skills … including stronger problem solving, communication, digital skills and creative thinking…', due to the constant changes in the global and local skilled workforce and jobs market, there is still a focus on ranking students for university entrance purely based on content knowledge, and not life, ‘soft’ and human skills.
Recalibrating the focus of schools: Is it time to scrap the ATAR?
This fundamentally shines a light on the elephant in the room - the tension between educating students for an ATAR, and educating for 21st century readiness.
This is supported by a recent NSW Review of secondary senior pathways slated to be presented to the country’s education ministers this week, and spearheaded by NSW Education Standards Authority Chair Professor Peter Shergold.
Professor Shergold has proposed scrapping the university entry rank altogether amid concerns from teachers that it encouraged students to pick subjects for their ATAR value.
In fact, in a recent webinar held by the Centre for Social Impact at the University of NSW, Professor Shergold also claimed that The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank is "distorting" the final years of school education and students' subject choices.
”In chairing that review, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the way ATAR is presently used in schools is distorting - profoundly distorting - the educational experience," he told the webinar.
"We are the only country I have found in the world which brings it down to a single number, and the difficulty is that this is distorting what is happening in the final years of education at schools, and is distorting choices."
Instead, he has called for the ATAR to be supplemented with a ‘learner profile’ or ‘education passport’, which would progressively capture information about lessons learned from school and outside school, including real-world skills attained in Vocational Education and Training placements, casual jobs or via cultural, interpersonal and broader learning.
"The person who is working shifts at McDonalds is learning a huge amount. The disadvantaged student who is learning to care for their parents is learning a huge amount. The Aboriginal person in a remote community who goes and does secret men's business is learning a huge amount."
Professor Shergold, who is also Chancellor of Western Sydney University, added that while pastoral care in schools was better than a decade ago, "the level of career guidance is much worse than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago".
The Professor’s comments come at a time when students will need more guidance than ever about making choices, planning post-school career and industry pathways, and both cultivating and demonstrating skills and capabilities that give them the best chance of future employment in a competitive, increasingly globalised, distributed workforce.
Future Amp is shipping solutions to integrate now
It is within this context, and with the emerging COVID-19-accelerated new understandings of what is possible for the next frontier of technology-enabled, autonomous and differentiated education delivery models, that our team at Future Amp are building and shipping digital career education solutions to meet the individual needs of today’s students in a 21st century world of work.
Our programs incorporate:
1. online flexible learning pathways to enable learner autonomy and individual student preference;
2. proprietary content from 100’s of industry mentors and companies to enable students anywhere to access and engage with the real world of work;
3. and industry-based, interactive learning with micro-credentials, progress badging and career portfolios aligned to best practice career education.
However, perhaps most importantly, Future Amp’s platform and digital solutions have also been co-designed by students from the outset.
In fact, our team, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on The Rights of the Child (Article 12) - “Children have the right to say what they think should happen when adults are making decisions that affect them and to have their opinions taken into account” - have consistently handed the reins to students to let them tell us what the world looks like from their vantage point, what problems they want to solve, and what tools, content and mentorship they need to learn to solve them.
No one of us knows what lies ahead. But if we can plan for the absolute certainty of uncertainty, let students co-design the experience of education going forward, and use schools and educators as a vehicle for preparing them to thrive in a rapidly changing future workforce, we might just get out of this darkness ok.
To learn more about Future Amp’s online career education modules and World of Work platform, reach out to our teach at hello@futureamp.co
Future Amp is backed by Amazon Web Services and currently part of the David Gonski AO-chaired Future Minds Accelerator.