Executive Summary
Globalisation and rapid changes in technology are accelerating social, economic, and environmental challenges worldwide. Many of these changes are also opportunities for human advancement, but citizens must be equipped to handle them via a high quality and appropriately designed education. Current predictions around novel industries due to changes in technology and demands from a changing environment will certainly shift the skills required by future graduates. Curriculum can be refined and improved to prepare students for a world of challenges and opportunities. However, there can be a gap between the future needs and the time it takes to redesign and implement a curriculum.
Specifically, there are four dimensions of a time lag between future needs and current curriculum:
1. Recognition time lag occurs when the need for curriculum change in response to social and demographic changes (such as digitalisation or globalisation) is not quickly identified.
2. Decision-making time lag refers to the delay between when the need for a change is recognised and when an action plan for necessary changes is decided upon, including the time required for consensus-building on the need for change.
3. Implementation time lag occurs when new goals or procedures in a revised curriculum are not quickly or thoroughly adopted in classroom practice, affected by factors that inhibit or foster their implementation.
4. Impact time lag refers to the time elapsed from the action taken until its impact has become visible in students.
The OECD Learning Compass 2030 is a framework for education for the future. It is a globally shared vision for competencies that will help children and youth not only thrive but also shape their own future in holistic, inclusive, and sustainable ways. The OECD Learning Compass represents shared aspirations among countries/jurisdictions participating in Education 2030 towards education that is future-oriented, globally informed and locally contextualised, and centred on well-being at individual, societal, and environmental levels. The Learning Compass can serve as a tool for ensuring a future-oriented view during curriculum redesign and helping to close the recognition gap.
Decision-making time lag is a function of competing demands, articulating goals, and procedures and policies that drive curriculum reform. Countries have various timeframes during which they normally conduct a curriculum reform, but new challenges or societal demands may alter those timelines. In addition, governance structures and the need to build consensus can contribute to the decision to implement a change.
The implementation and impact of the curriculum reform similarly take considerable time. Administrators, schools, and teachers must appropriately plan to develop buy-in and a vision for the change. Teachers can be resistant to change, particularly when earlier reforms were not implemented well or there is no opportunity to learn the how, what, and why of the curriculum. Parents also may feel a loss of agency during a curriculum change especially if they are unclear of the intended goals and purpose. The impact of the curriculum can be difficult to examine given the multitude of changes occurring simultaneously. The full impact may not be realised for years, until students are able to experience the entirety of the curriculum.
The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 Policy Questionnaire on Curriculum Redesign (PQC) and Curriculum Content Mapping (CCM) have demonstrated unique examples and common strategies to minimise time lags. Some countries may identify societal goals that are translated to educational goals as a way to manage the curriculum redesign process and time gaps. Student profiles, or prototypes of students and their skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values to be achieved from learning at school can help articulate a vision which can be implemented via a curriculum redesign. Student profiles also can facilitate a smoother implementation of a curriculum when effectively incorporated in a curriculum and communicated to stakeholders.
Analyses suggest that there are common 21st century competencies that countries tend to embrace in their curricula to close time lags. For example, critical thinking and problem solving skills are mapped in over 60% of the curriculum on average across countries in the CCM. Critical-thinking skills tend to be found in all seven of the mapped learning areas (national language, mathematics, humanities, science, technologies/home economics, arts, and physical education [PE] health). The ability to think critically is valued and emphasised across countries and learning areas. These transferrable competencies embedded in curricula are more likely to be cognitive (e.g., critical thinking) than social or emotional skills (e.g., respect, trust) or compound concepts (e.g., agency, co-agency).
Countries also articulate a variety of planned curriculum changes. These include setting specific directions for reforms, changes to educational goals or instruction time, and subject or content renewal, among other changes. Anticipating reforms may imply the potential to shorten the decision-making time lag.
In addition to curriculum patterns and policy planning, countries have many lessons learned from their successes and challenges with curriculum redesign and implementation. These lessons can serve as models or words of caution for other countries seeking to conduct a curriculum redesign and include the following:
Do not underestimate teachers’ fear of the unknown and allow them space for mistakes.
Empower teachers, rather than diminishing their agency, when developing innovative curriculum through new educational technologies.
Acknowledge the need for incremental changes to the curriculum while maintaining aspirations for transformational change.
Avoid reform fatigue among stakeholders by designing synergies between curriculum change and other educational reforms.
Use structure and discipline when making changes to the digital curriculum, being aware of cyber security threats and personal data issues.
Effective planning and acknowledging key stakeholders in curriculum redesign – especially teachers and students – is key to an effective redesign process. A vision for students as active agents in their learning with the skills to work, live, and thrive in an ever-changing society can serve as a platform for such a process and ideally shorten lags in the redesign process.