OECD International Futures Programme (OECD 2016a) unsurprisingly concludes that young peoples’ daily lives as adults will be “radically different” compared to today.
The OECD predicts that the world economy, society, governance, technology (OCED 2016), and employment (ESPAS 2016:13) will be subject to “major transitions” in the future. However, the OECD concludes that it is impossible to accurately predict what these ‘transitions’ will be or their impact on the future lives of children and young people.
The World Economic Forum concludes that “in many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in… […] job types that don’t yet exist” (WEF 2016).
In his 2006 ‘TED Talk’, Sir Ken Robinson observes that children; “starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue […] what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.” (Robinson, 2006).
The traditional response of policy makers to emergent challenge tends to be two-fold: (i) structural or systemic change; and/or, (2) short-term policy goals (Ilott et al., 2016 with Norris and Adam, 2017). These responses are understandable in the context of the UK political cycle that “naturally tends towards short-term activity” (Ilott et al., 2016:8) and the reality of education policy makers having a limited number of ‘levers’ to achieve change (Parliament. House of Commons, 2010, p.4).
Ilott et al. (2016) and the National College for Teaching & Leadership (undated) remind us that many of the recent structural changes to education in England and Wales (including, but not limited to, the content and delivery of the National Curriculum, and professional standards for teachers) were often short-to-medium term solutions to long-term challenges.