The 2021 Futures of Education report is a white paper on the major themes that educational providers should be focussing on as we head into the second quarter of the 21st Century. What are they?

In the 1990s, the Delors report pointed to four broad global areas in which education needed to develop: learning to know, learning to learn, learning to be and learning to live together. Some thirty years later, after a number of changes to environmental, economic and geopolitical spheres, the focus has shifted to three broad areas about rebalancing our relationship with each other, the planet and technology.

The idea of rebalance is interesting, it implies a recalibration in the face of disruption that has become excessive in many ways.

The movement to increase our understanding of social and emotional learning is a response to rising anxiety, depression and isolation that has become exacerbated by social pressure and polarisation, mainly through online interactions and the gap between virtual and actual reality. We need to rebalance the way we see ourselves and others, to bring a more authentic, mindful and spiritual focus to intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. From an assessment perspective, this means designing learning experiences that allow students to develop their emotional quotient, and assessment protocols that take the emotional wellbeing of students into account rather than being mindless high stakes mass testing that drive students into a state of panic and anxiety.

Rebalancing our relationship with the planet is about seeking to inspire students to take on an ethical philosophical position that is respectful of the environment and is conscious of the footprint major financial and lifestyle decisions can create. A balanced relationship with the planet is also one where patterns of immigration and social interaction are understood as part of a globalised economy in which intercultural competences are developed. Assessing this means creating opportunities for students to develop their global citizenship, to show understanding of systems thinking that explain geo-economic interdependencies and to assess – as well as model – environmentally sustainable solution-finding to real world problems.

Rebalancing our relationship with technology involves continuing to work with powerful technologies to advance learning but also dialling back, re-equilibrating the way that we live with screens, seeking experiences that are human, face-to-face and interactive. As we seek guardrails for artificial intelligence, and understand the increasing and no doubt future importance of data protection, providing students with an education that prepares them for this will further empower them. Educating to live with diverse tools and resources is as much a question of mindset development and technical skill: creativity, criticality, understanding systems and processes conceptually and instilling an ethical dimension into our use of technology can be done through curated learning experiences such as projects and hypothetical scenarios that push students to use philosophical thinking to unpack dilemmas and find solutions that are pragmatic and ethical. In fact, a marvellous subject that does this is philosphy.

At the end of the day, it’s easy to get swept up in what look like technical solutions to technical problems: learning to live together requires conflict resolution, learning to respect the planet requires learning about the sustainable development goals and learning to thrive with new technologies means learning how to code. However, this is actually not only narrow but possibly misleading: to go to the root of the competences that are needed to flourish in such a world, the age-old constructs of critical thinking, creativity, and ethics are needed, for they will be applied in countless different scenarios, many of which do not exist at the present. The future will render redundant many technical skills, but not deep, transversal competences. Assessment systems that bring students’ deep thinking to the surface, that stimulate the growth of individual strengths and passions, that reward creativity, curiosity and resilience, will go further in creating future fitness than any concentration of technical training.

Assessment needs to be reformed, but not in a radically different and new way, more in such a manner that we rebalance it, to recognise, nurture and reward many of the extraordinary things that young people do already, that actually bring out competences for the future but have not been seen to do so in a traditional, academically top-heavy testing system. We need to rebalance our relationship with each other, the world and technology, and we need to rebalance assessment with the human story young people are telling us already, and have been for many years for so many of the answers to our questions are looking us in the face already.