1. education

Politics and policy: is
transformation beyond
politics?
Discussion paper for Learning Lab 3 at
the GELP/MIET/OECD Building Future
Learning Systems event, Durban, SA
April 2015
Global Education Leaders Partnership (GELP)
supported by Innovation Unit and Ellen Koshland Family
Fund
GELP would like to acknowledge Valerie Hannon and Al Bertani who, with support from
Amelia Peterson, are leading this work on behalf of the Partnership.
“so much reform: so little change”
(Charles M Payne, 2008)
“The coming decades will see an era of the most radical changes in
education since the appearance of national education systems. And the
source of these changes will not be in the educational system itself, but
rather it will be driven primarily by industries: digital technologies,
healthcare and finance” (GEFF 2014)
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Introduction
Across the globe and across multiple
sectors, system transformation efforts are
underway in areas such as energy, health
and transport where societies seek to
respond to the emerging challenges and
opportunities of life in the 21st century. In the
domain of learning, established public
systems of schooling and higher education
are for the most part in improvement mode:
that is, they take for granted the implicit
goals, parameters and metrics which arose
through the industrial model of education.
And within this paradigm they are struggling
to adjust to the multiple pressures which
assail them; learner and user dissatisfaction
or disengagement; growing costs (often in
contexts of reducing public investment);
frustrated workers; little (or often negative)
impact on inequity; mismatch to societies’
needs. Meanwhile, a burgeoning edtech
industry envisages wholesale disruption
through the explosion of cheaper, more
powerful (and mobile) learning technologies
placed directly in the hands of consumers,
creating horizontal rather than vertical
learning structures (through learning
networks) and with the potential to subject
schools to the process of ‘disintermediation’
which has characterized other industries and
services such as travel and financial
services. Within the publicly funded
education sector, there are pockets of
extraordinary innovators, striving both to
harness the new technologies and create
new models. But they are doing so for the
most part in tenuous fashion, at the margins;
at the tip, as it were of a massive iceberg
which has frozen into it the values and
assumptions (and the overwhelming majority
2
of resources) of an education system fit for
an age which has passed. Many indicators
could be cited to evidence the scale of the
challenge ahead. To take but one, around
employment: an Oxford University study
(2014) suggests that 43% of jobs in the US
will be done by robots within the next 20
years. Another study indicates that 50% of
all jobs will be freelance by 2020. Where is
the recognition that, even if these evidencebased predictions are off by 50%, education
systems are considering the implications?
There are growing numbers of voices calling
for transformation: activist scholars, writers,
reflective teachers, disengaged,
disappointed, disengaged learners. But there
is virtually no reference to this profound
debate in the public discourse of politics or
policy making. The Global Education
Leaders’ Partnership is unique, in that it has
engaged and developed knowledge with
responsible system leaders deeply
implicated in the existing system. Frequently
they have a high public profile and
accompanying levels of accountability. GELP
has been predicated on a set of key –
sometimes implicit - assumptions:

That it is wrong merely to await the
tsunami of the technology revolution in
its many, and unpredictable, forms;
rather an intentional effort should be
made to reshape the architecture of
public investment in learning and its
outcomes;

That such an effort should be directed
towards elevating the best values of
public education: democratizing,
enabling opportunity and diminishing
inequity. The creation, in short, of a
better world;

That in such a context institutions such
as ‘the school’ can and should be
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transformed to fulfil vital community
functions. Announcements of its death
are not just premature but unwelcome;

That the role of teacher should and
would not be erased; but rather would
be re-imagined in a context where
learning would be pervasive, lifelong,
symbiotic with work/employment and
central to well-being;

That ways need to be found to
emancipate and enable the agency of
learners, not just as consumers of
technologies, but as makers, problem
finders/solvers; and entitled, invested
players in their own right; and

That public servants – leaders and
teachers alike – have the creative
potential to participate and shape this
new learning world; but only if they
align and empower learners and
communities in new ways, and
embrace the creation of learning ecosystems (of both providers and users)
which are more open, inclusive and
diverse, with new learning patterns.
In short: that this field should not be vacated
for the onward irresistible march of
technophiles, privatization and the market.
Any or all of these assumptions may prove in
time to be wrong. But they are the
foundations which have motivated system
leaders within GELP from across the world
to devote discretionary time and energy to
making them a reality. Doing so, has forced
a reassessment of what it means to be a
proactive leader of a transformational
movement, as opposed to a competent
leader addressing improvement. But the
changemaker-wolf needs still to inhabit the
bureaucrat-sheep’s clothing.
3
In its first book Redesigning Education:
shaping learning systems around the globe
(GELP/Innovation Unit 2013), the GELP
community explored what this shift actually
meant; and the degree to which it entailed a
new view of system leadership for the 21st
century. A range of skills and qualities of
system leaders were identified for the
specific challenges now being faced. These
included: systems-oriented, inclusive, design
thinkers, entrepreneurial, strategic, and
‘grounded’. We recognized that powerful
new pedagogical practices needed enabling
conditions in which to emerge and – even
more vitally – to diffuse and spread. And the
full impact of new players and the
permeation of imaginative and rich uses of
technology also require favourable system
conditions: openness, access to investment,
low barriers to entry.
What GELP has failed thus far seriously to
engage with is the extent to which the
system leaders operating such enabling
conditions are themselves constrained within
political frames. Both in democracies and
other political systems, political power
determines the speed and direction for
change – or stasis. None of this can be
determined by professional system
leadership alone. For good or ill,
transformation in education is highly
dependent on political leadership, and
continued support and investment. The
political context is critical – in the broadest
sense, including: the mobilization of
stakeholders; the use of power to catalyze
action; the allocation of scarce resources;
and quasi-political entities such as the media
and the unions’ lobbies. The paradox is that
‘school reform’ has been such a ubiquitous
mantra for politicians across developed
systems – whilst they preside over
perpetuation of the C19th schooling
paradigm: a compulsory, age-specific,
professional teacher-directed, school-based
exercise aimed at the mastery of school
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subjects which splinter knowledge and which
are grouped around a central core of basic
literacy – a model established in the years
1870-1900.
What therefore is the current state of
knowledge about the political conditions and
policy environments that might most
effectively support system transformations?
What might be learned from other sectors?
What has research to offer to illuminate the
features of the policy environments which
are most conducive to education system
transformation efforts, but which for the most
part currently defeat them?
Political Discourse
and its limitations
Let us start with the paradox that Charles
Payne identified and which is central to the
efforts of GELP. Reform and improvement
are not the same as innovation and
transformation. The fact that almost all
political discourse is trapped in the realm of
the former springs from a variety of reasons.
First amongst these is surely the fact that
one will not move to question assumptions
about the way that schooling is structured
without recognizing that the old objectives for
education are no longer adequate. The ‘iron
triangle’ of access, quality and efficiency
have been a taken-for-granted feature. But
what is ‘quality’? A powerful influence on
politicians today has been the introduction of
global benchmarking, principally through the
prominence of PISA, in which 60 countries
now take part. As Breakspear (2014) shows,
scores on the PISA tests of 15-year-olds are
now taken as simple proxies for the overall
quality of education systems. Politicians
anxiously await the triennial results; claim
credit for ‘successes’ and promise more
4
reform to catch up with the leaders. The
tests in question of course are based on a
narrow set of indicators, failing entirely to
capture or relate to the broader purposes of
learning. The emphasis implicit in the PISA
conception is a human capital theory of
economic growth: skilled, literate workers
with higher cognitive abilities are needed to
ensure economic competitiveness. The
primacy of this rhetoric entails that
alternative visions – humanist, democratic,
environmentally sustainable – are little
articulated and under-developed. UNESCO
sought to influence the discourse with its
1996 report Learning: the Treasure Within. It
has had little impact in political terms, though
it has consistently resonated in academic
circles and, in this 20th anniversary of its
publication, a renewed debate is arising
about educational purpose (cf European
Journal of Education, Jan 2015). This
process is encouraged by the
reconsideration of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs). Without a
guiding vision of the broader societal goals
for learning, which politicians can articulate
convincingly, the existing taken-for-granted
frame of schooling remains unchallenged.
There is some evidence that OECD may be
moving in this direction through the planned
incorporation of tests of wider skillsets (for
example, of collaborative problem-solving),
but progress is slow.
And in such a framework, naturally the
questions policy makers ask, the problems
they focus on, and the evidence they look for
are not the best kinds of questions, problemdefinitions and evidence to create serious
improvement, let alone transformation.
Researchers such as Pritchett (2013) show
that in most developing countries policy
design and implementation still focus
primarily on inputs rather than outputs. In the
U.S., and elsewhere, they have for some
time been focused on outputs (albeit limited
ones – “college and career ready”), but the
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structures by which policy is made and
handed down to schools in most jurisdictions
disregard the fact that they are dealing with
complex systems. Accordingly, they focus
on simplistic solutions: class sizes, school
funding; school autonomy; school choice;
market forces; high stakes testing; defined
curricula. And the hegemony of the existing
global benchmarking (supported by reports
which purport to demonstrate the ‘lessons’
from successful countries (Mckinsey et al))
drives policy isomorphism: that is, in a state
of uncertainty, to mimic what is perceived to
be the policy direction of the majority (Meyer
2010; Sauder & Espeland 2009). Available
research suggests that, for all the above
reasons and more, there is a weak
relationship between policy and deep
change in schools (Mehta, 2013).
Fundamentally, the culture and cognitive
frames of policy makers seem to be
misaligned with the needs of education
(Cohen 2011; Hallett 2010; Payne 2008).
What is the current
influence of other
players in policy?
Three other groups are classically seen as
influential in determining the room to
manouevre which politicians have in the
education space. They are: the unions, the
media and ‘public opinion’. There are some
grounds for suggesting that the nature of
their influence has shifted in recent years. In
addition, we must factor in the actual or
potential influence of employers/business;
and of think-tanks, philanthropy, and
lobbyists (of which, potentially, GELP is
one).
5
Trade Unions
Whilst generalizations are problematic, there
have been upheavals in the role of the
unions in the developed systems. The OECD
reports (OECD, 2015) that in a 2013 survey
of unions in 24 countries, half of respondents
felt only partially engaged in existing
consultative structures. Sweden and Alberta
unions appear to be particularly wellconsulted about policy development; and
OECD points to ‘high-performing’ countries
where unions are strong. However, studies
of ‘low-performing’ countries also indicate
strong teacher unions. In the UK and the US,
their policy influence is diminished,
particularly as education debates
increasingly take place on a global stage.
The global federation of teachers’ unions –
Education International – may have the
potential to change that. However, perhaps
because they are representing members in
such a diverse range of jurisdictions, they
appear currently to be sticking to traditional
union concerns in the issues they highlight work load, hours, teacher pay.
Nevertheless there is some evidence that
some governments are seeking to redraw
the relationship as one of partnership; and
that in this collaboration, progress can be
made towards a new professional identity.
Examples include:

New Zealand (in helping to re-design
teaching standards, and active
involvement in hosting the 2014
Summit on the Teaching Profession);

British Columbia (BC Teacher
Federation’s active support of the
government curriculum redesign
efforts, even despite an ongoing
industrial dispute);
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
The NEA in the US which has stated it
will become more mission-based. In
2014 it published Teacher Unions:
Strong Organizations Rising to the
Challenge of C21st Teaching and
Learning (NEA, 2014) indicating a
desire to move beyond the
controversial issue of teacher
evaluation. ‘Ideological policy divisions’
are cited as a key blocker to
improvement;

Finland, where with a membership of
more than 95% of teachers, the unions
promote an image of ‘new unionism’
devoted to the creation of a strong
profession.
The emphasis on ‘professionalism’ as a key
goal may be a valuable asset in elevating the
debate to focus on the fundamental
objective: deep, powerful learning for young
people. However, at the same time, some
connotations of ‘professionalism’ may cut
across some of the dimensions of C21st
learning which are so key: – open, learnerdirected, real-world focused. Whilst the
potential may be there to assume a more
proactive role in shaping policy, this is some
distance from becoming leaders of
pedagogical transformation (see Stevenson
2012).
Media
There is little doubt that coverage of
education by media of all types contributes
to the locked-in cycle of debating,
developing, and evaluating thin and/or ‘one
shot’ policies (usually focused on inputs)
because these are the ones that appear to
be conducive to public debate.
However, education as a topic has grown in
interest to the media – it is debatable
whether this is as a result of, or a cause of,
increased public interest in it. New media are
6
undoubtedly contributing to this. Recently
(DW, 2015), for example, in Germany a
tweet from a 17 year old student that
questioned the focus of school learning
exploded into a Twitter debate that ultimately
drew response from the National Minister.
The tweet read: "I am almost 18 and have no
idea about taxes, rent or insurance. But, I
can analyze a poem. In 4 languages."). After
15,000 retweets and much discussion online,
the Minister’s response was: "I think it's very
positive Naina has initiated this debate."
(What comes next?)
It may be that where the demand side –
students – become more vocal and activist,
media become more engaged. This appears
to be the case in Chile for example, where
there is a deep and growing interest in
education, after a period of mass student
rallies demanding change (‘The Chilean
Winter’ of 2011-13). A Faculty of Education
member at a prominent university noted:
“We used to have to buy
journalists lunch to encourage
them to write about education. But
now, they call us up and say:
‘What do you have for us?’”
“Chilean society is obsessed with
education, but also deeply divided
about how to go about it.”
(Hammerness 2014).
As education has risen up the issue agenda,
it has featured more in national press – but
these outlets are even more likely to promote
debate of policy as an all-or-nothing matter,
focusing on those issues that seem
universalisable, when the real road to both
improvement and transformation might look
very different in different places. The
conclusions of researchers is that media
treatment of ‘reform’ policies in recent years
has:
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
Lowered teacher morale, since they are
often cast as ‘the problem’ (Goldstein
2011);

Poorly reflected nuance in research –
since focus tends to be on single
studies which are over-interpreted,
rather than looking at trends in
research findings (Henig 2009); and

Weakened policy design, since policy
needs to be designed with an eye to
‘spin’ (Lingard & Rawolle 2004).
Employers and Business
The critical stance of employers and
business towards education may offer some
hope of useful alliances for the
transformational agenda. It has been
classically the case that educationists have
been hostile or suspicious of employers’
critiques, and their demands for outcomes of
education systems to meet their need for
‘employability’. These were interpreted as
requiring education to produce stratified
workforces whose ‘employability’ amounted
to compliance; mere ‘basic skills’ not critical
capacity.
Now however, with the profound shifts which
have taken place in the workplace,
revolutionary technological changes,
globalization and quite new skill
requirements, leading employers’ voices are
amongst the most articulate societal
expressions of demands for a very different
set of learning outcomes. This is captured by
Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of
People Operations for Google (NYTimes,
Feb 2014):
“Beware. Your degree is not a
proxy for your ability to do any
job. The world only cares about
— and pays off on — what you
can do with what you know
7
(and it doesn’t care how you
learned it). And in an age when
innovation is increasingly a
group endeavor, it also cares
about a lot of soft skills —
leadership, humility,
collaboration, adaptability and
loving to learn and re-learn.
This will be true no matter
where you go to work.”
As the new landscape of high levels of
automation of previous ‘jobs’ – including in
the professions - becomes apparent,
(Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2015) and new
employment patterns emerge (Pistono,
2015) it may be that the pressures from
organizations in this space will become
amongst the most powerful and persuasive
advocates for deep change. Moreover,
‘education’ will become less and less the
monopoly of designated providers. Any
organization, (e.g. a business incubator, a
consulting firm, a research lab) can become
an education provider if educational
solutions support its core activity and
increases its chance to succeed. An
organization can build a business model
where the knowledge and skills obtained
through education become the source of
value that customers appreciate (GEFF
2014). There is in addition the sheer level of
investment of the giant tech companies in
their education arms: every major player has
an education initiative demonstrating and
evolving deeper learning through technology.
Moreover, there is the very significant entry
into the provision of schooling by companies
offering ‘low-cost private schools’. The
companies range from quite small
enterprises to the giants of the sector like
Pearsons. Views vary about the cumulative
impact of these developments. For some,
they derive from an efficiency argument: in
the largest 100 public school districts in the
US, only 51 cents in every dollar gets spent
‘on the classroom’ (by which we assume is
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meant directly impacts student learning).
Some, like Professor James Tooley of
Newcastle University have a very clear
agenda: “'I want to see private schools
emerge and then the state just move aside
from education'. Cumulatively, the impact
of these could be significant. The read
across to policy is not yet clearly apparent,
because developments are too easily
assimilated into the existing model of
schooling, and their disruptive potential yet
unrecognized.
‘Public Opinion’
The common perception is that the influence
of ‘public opinion’ is generally one of
conservatism. Even where education
manifestly failed a parent (and was hated) it
is not uncommon for them to hold that
education should not change, or should be
restored to ‘what it used to be’. That is
generally how politicians behave in ‘selling’
education policies. “Raising the bar and
closing the gap” (in the existing standardsbased paradigm) was about the most
sophisticated formulation of this stance –
holding out the promise of evening out
education’s presumed benefits, whilst raising
‘performance’ to fuel economic
competitiveness.
There are some signs however that this
position can be changed, and that the views
– and therefore the demands – of parents
and citizens are subject to shift when
authentic opportunities for engagement are
offered. In the US, ‘Citizen Schools’ has
been founded by Eric Schwartz:
“I think the biggest challenge has
been butting up against people's
belief in what is possible. Too
often people are stuck in the
current paradigm of what is that
they have a difficult time seeing
what could be. The very idea that
an organization like Citizen
8
Schools -- an organization that
looks differently at when a child
learns, how they learn and who
can teach -- can have direct
results and shared responsibility
for education outcomes, can run
up against scepticism. People are
so used to the idea that schools
and traditional instruction are the
only way for students to learn. In
fact, much of a child's education is
driven from outside of traditional
schools. Citizen Schools is proving
this at the same time that we are
helping schools rethink the school
day and open their doors to the
surrounding community. In terms
of opportunities, Citizen Schools
has played more of a role in the
public policy arena in the past few
years. Because of our results on
the ground, we have a powerful
story to share. We are looking to
help inform policymakers and
leverage our work and examples
in the broadest way possible (…).”
In the UK, despite the very variable results of
the policy of ‘Free Schools’ in terms of
enabling innovation, where citizens do come
together to debate what it really is that a
school should be trying to do; and where
new possibilities are modelled, the space for
creating momentum for change has opened
up. Where the practice of student exhibitions
takes place, in the context of project-based
learning, then parents and communities are
exposed to the higher quality work that
students can create in enabling
environments – shifting perceptions about
value and purpose, as well of what young
learners are actually capable of. This
process is mirrored in the developing world
where initiatives such as citizen-led
assessments – where parents and others
administer simple tests to get an indicator of
learning levels. In use in India, Pakistan,
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parts of East Africa, Mali, Senegal, they are
being championed by the World Bank (and
UNESCO) as a more useful alternative to
large-scale assessments that can better
handle cultural and local specificities,
provide information more quickly, and
engage communities in a different kind of
dialogue (World Bank 2013).
Finally, as the channels of access to
knowledge and skills do indeed become
more open and accessible, families’ options
grow, and they may bring pressure to bear
on systems through the simple selection of
alternatives. The number of registered home
schoolers in the U.S., steady for a long
while, has doubled in the past fifteen years
to at least over 1.75 million, and continues to
increase at a rate seven times faster than
the regular school enrolment (NCES, 2014).
Freedom of Information requests show a
similar process is apparent in the UK
(Razzall, K et al 2007). However, the
question is: can this level of ‘exit’ be
translated into a call for change? These
taxpayers are receiving nothing for the
education-related taxes they pay. In alliance
with the edupreneurs who are increasingly
meeting their needs through the provision of
a whole range of goods and services,
alternative funding policies may need to
emerge. And broader policy objectives may
‘follow the money’. In the developing world,
the key dilemma for those with political
power may be the balance to be struck
between seeking to establish developedworld schooling systems (which citizens may
see as the benchmark of progress) as
against – or alongside – serious investment
in and support for open, mobile technologybased solutions with their revolutionary
empowering potential.
Lobbyists, think-tanks, philanthropy
As education policy has become more
contested (albeit generally within a taken-for-
9
granted improvement paradigm) the
numbers and influence of think-tanks,
lobbying organizations, and indeed
philanthropists promoting a given point of
view has grown. The Brookings Institute
recently published an examination
(Whitehurst 2015) of the degree to which
advocacy efforts succeed in influencing the
state-level public policy making in the US.
Brookings found that the influence of
lobbyists was undoubtedly impactful, in
terms of the introduction, the content and the
eventual voting patterns on, given policies.
Interestingly, the study found that lobbyists
are at their most effective when they
coordinate their efforts in pursuit of a goal
(which may entail working through
disagreements/compromises out of the
public eye) and then each focusing on what
it is they do best.
In the case of philanthropists, the power they
wield is generally exercised by the use of
money to fund instantiations of practice of
which they approve. In the US, where their
influence is greatest, such practices range
across the whole spectrum, from funding
creationist teaching approaches; promoting
(or attacking) the Common Core; supporting
Charter Schools; and indeed enabling
serious attempts at transformation such as
the New York City iZone. Where a
philanthropist will match-fund a policymaker’s initiative, so will their power and
influence be expressed and increased. The
interventions of philanthropists at one level is
an indicator of the welcome evolution of a
wider learning eco-system, with more
distributed levels of civic engagement. It
should not go without careful critical
reflection: what protects the polity against
quixotic use of vast sums of private money?
It is of course in this environment that
partnerships such as GELP, the Global
Education Future Forum, the World
Innovation Summit on Education and others
which are springing up can evolve and
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nurture different conceptions of education
transformation. What justifies these
groupings (and indeed their opponents) is
that they seek influence solely on the basis
of their ideas, the evidence, and an open
values-debate; not money. It may be that
these groupings have something to learn
from the Brookings study’s findings around
alliances. Whole Education in the UK is one
umbrella organization predicated on this
notion.
System
Transformations: an
interplay between
politics, markets,
innovators and
users
In their illuminating study of the
transformation of complex systems (Systems
Innovation 2013), Mulgan and Leadbeater
show how, across a wide variety of systemic
transformations including, amongst others,
the introduction of a new Health Service;
postal systems; containerization;
electrification; sustainable energy systems;
and more; at least some of the following
elements are in play:
1. New ideas, concepts, paradigms;
2. Coalitions for change;
3. Development and diffusion of
technology;
4. New skills, sometimes even new
professions;
10
5. Agencies playing a role in the
development of the new;
6. New laws and regulations;
7. Changed market metrics or
measurement tools; and
8. Changed power relationships.
I would argue that we are close to achieving
1-5 (to differing degrees). The red Items 6-8
are those which inhabit the political realm
and where the dynamics suggested in this
paper are at work in maintaining the status
quo.
With respect to regulation, there is a view
that the ‘industrial’ model of education is so
firmly rooted in ‘developed’ countries that it
could be easier to leave than seek to repair
it; and that the space for the evolution of the
new will be in elsewhere: “The systems of
the future will be created by leapfroggers”
(NESTA 2013). We cannot accept however
that the millions of learners being ‘schooled’
in the old model must just get on with it.
There are some indicators of shifts that
policy and policy makers could advocate
publicly and undertake which would not see
them condemned as crazed hippies, but
rather as principled visionaries, attuned to
the realities of citizens’ needs and wants.
Bringing the vast resources of the State to
explore and develop new conceptions, and
supporting promising emergent practice
should not be beyond our capacity. Leaving
these to emerge in the narrow margins, or in
the private sector through business interests,
is an unacceptable dereliction of duty.
The theory of change which has been
implicit in the GELP approach has always
emphasized that energy, leadership and
alliances will spring in the first instance from
the combination of two vital ingredients:
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The weight of the combination of these two
elements has to be greater than the weight
of fear, inertia, risk aversion and selfdeception.
11
Perhaps we might propose:
Both of these need to be made available to
political actors in ways that they can own
and align with. Case/s for change need to be
crafted, evidenced and promulgated in
accessible ways that a local or national
politician could recognize, amplify and
advance. The power of emergent successful
examples has to be spotlighted (albeit
recognizing that this is, perforce, limited and
fragmentary), with practitioners but most of
all students describing and advocating the
benefits. All involved in GELP have a duty to
provide these and propel them into the public
domain.

Begin the shift in vision and hence in
public rhetoric. Indicate both the need
for, but more significantly the benefits
of, a renewed vision for education and
its landscape. Legitimate the question:
what do we want our C21st education
system to do for our society?;

Develop a context-specific narrative of
educational success, and desist from
lionizing standardized-based global
benchmarking narratives. Globalisation
is not an unqualified good; nor need it
be irresistible in education;
Were this to be persuasive then we have
some evidence from system transformation
in other sectors about what could and should
be done. And the GELP ‘roadmap’ concept
suggests that flowing from these forces are
some clearly identified spaces for action:

Provide safe spaces for prototyping
and testing new models – innovation
zones, hubs, incubators (building on
the NYC iZone; Learning Frontiers in
Australia) – which operate at the
system level. This needs to go beyond
skunkworks and individual institutions –
but consider the interrelationships
between layers of the sector (as the Big
Picture movement in the US is seeking
to do in integrating school-college
provision) and explicitly (proudly)
designate them as the system’s D&R
wing;
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
Intentionally commission work –
perhaps by a consortium of think-tanks
– to work through the
interdependencies of systems change,
especially those concerning flows of
funding and the leanest necessity of
regulation required;

Provide opportunity to build capacity
amongst system leaders to
reconceptualise learning (preferably
across a range of related Ministries)
and consider the implications;

Decentralize and devolve in the
framework of shared vision and goals
to release localized energy and
imagination. Give up on micromanagement of Total Strategy;


Set out to create a different dialogue
with the workforce/professional
educators, separate and distinct from
that around industrial relations. Create
spaces for facilitated dialogues,
bringing in activist learners, parents
and other stakeholder groups. That
facilitation should include an
accessible, evidenced, powerful case
for change (appropriate to the context).
New alliances with teachers, either
through their unions or otherwise, need
to grow and be predicated on win-win
(i.e. teachers’ job satisfaction, status
and ultimately their success, will be
enhanced not diminished by working
together to create a different learning
system);
Task leading universities and
vocational colleges to leverage their
powerful alliances (especially with
business) to come forward with
alternative models which are more
inclusive, more flexible and more
integrated. Create an ‘open challenge’
12
on behalf of the nation for them to
address;

Invite MOOC providers to consider the
adaptation of their models to apply to
all learners, including those at school,
free at the point of use;

Require ministries responsible for
education, skills, employment, business
and energy to create frameworks which
will seriously incentivise and enable
institutions to address, not only the
existing skills gap, but also to support
the future landscape of selfemployment and entrepreneurialism;

Encourage the development of the new
education by helping to establish ‘edtech’ incubators - bringing together
educators, engineers and
entrepreneurs for joint work on ed-tech
start-up projects;

Use social media to invite student
participation in an ongoing debate
about learning for well-being,
sustainability and thriving societies.
Make it count by committing to
consequent action; and

Invite leading editors to host debates
about the creation of a new learning
society. Storytelling is an absolutely
vital element of the enterprise; let
oxygen be given to stories of inspiring
experience.
The choice of action from the (beginnings of)
the menu offered above will of course be
hugely dependent on context. Key
determining factors may include:

The degree to which the existing
system has political power
concentrated, or decentralized and
distributed; and
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
The culture of innovation which exists
in the system; evidenced by the
prevalence of innovative practices and
models (across all aspects of learning);
their emergent promise; and how they
might fit together in a system.
All politics is local. If it is true that politicians
must appeal to the simple, mundane and
everyday concerns of those who elect them
into office, then abstractions won’t cut it.
Connections need to be made – and plainly
they can be – with the everyday lived
experiences of ordinary people, young and
old. Thus, this endeavour is not about
seeking to converge on a single solution.
The politicians need to eschew the magnetic
attraction of presenting prefabricated
policies, which suggest that they know all the
answers. Rather it is about creating the
space, or the platform, for a simultaneous
step back (to reconsider goals and
fundamental objectives, and the co-creation
of fresh and inspiring ones); and a step
forward (to promote emergent and promising
solutions).
It has been said (Bason 2010) that the four
critical elements for successful leadership of
public innovation are: consciousness (that
case for change); capacity (knowledge and
skills); co-creation (embracing participation
in designing the new system) and courage.
Only the last of these needs no definition; is
fundamental to the mission; and may be
exactly what is lacking in too many contexts.
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13
GELP – POLITICS AND POLICY: IS TRANSFORMATION BEYOND POLITICS?
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