The Evening Standard Progress 1000 list

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This post is a mirror entry from my work site:

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“We are delighted to announce that the London Evening Standard newspaper have listed Colin Hegarty, top 10 finalist of the Global Teacher Prize 2016, and our Chief Executive, Vikas Pota in the Progress 1000 list of most influential people in London.  The list includes figures who have shaped our lives across so many different fields – ranging from HRH The Prince of Wales and Mayor Sadiq Khan, who came top of the list, to Mo Farah and Adele.

At the tenth anniversary of the awards, held at the Science Museum, Sarah Sands, Editor of the Evening Standard said: “We chose the word ‘progress’ carefully. That is what London’s influential people and businesses are achieving. And of course it is right we should celebrate progress at the Science Museum, for we are addressing the wonder of possibilities.”

Vikas Pota said:

“I am honoured to have been chosen for the Progress 1000 list of London’s most influential people. It includes so many amazing talents who have contributed so much to this great city that continues to lead the world, and  am  humbled to have been included among them.

“This recognition is valuable to our mission at the Varkey Foundation, where from our base in the capital we work to give every teacher around the world the status they deserve and every child, wherever they are, the chance of a good education.

“My family moved to London from East Africa and it has provided many opportunities to immigrants like us, which we, in the age of Brexit, would be well placed to remember when considering what the new arrangements will be.  London is an incredible city, and I am thankful for the words of encouragement and celebration that my family and I have received.”

You can see the full list here

Sustainable development goals are failing because we don’t care enough about education

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Last autumn, the world’s governments came together to agree 17 ambitious sustainable development goals, which promised to overcome a vast array of problems – from poverty and hunger to health and gender equality – by 2030.

The UNESCO report published today ‘Education for People and Planet: Creating Sustainable Futures for All’ charts the progress in meeting these targets.

It demonstrates an obvious truth: education is the rock on which sustainable development is built. In parts of Africa, mothers who have a secondary education are three times more likely to have children that survive beyond the age of five.

If Nigerian girls spend four extra years in school they have, on average, one fewer children. In Sierra Leone, young people without an education were nine times as likely to join rebel groups.

But, as UNESCO Secretary General Irina Bokova notes in the introduction, today’s report should “set off alarm bells around the world”. The fourth SDG – ‘an inclusive and equitable quality education for all’ – will not, on current trends, be fulfilled for several more decades, when today’s children will already be approaching retirement.

The number of children who never set foot in a classroom, after years of falling, is rising again.

In Uganda, only one in five elementary schoolteachers meets the minimum standard of proficiency in maths, while in Kenya, state schools teachers are absent almost half the time. Such failure if it continues will, in turn, prevent us from meeting the other sustainable development goals.

Post-financial crisis, international political will towards solving the global education crisis has dissipated. Education aid including from the EU and World Bank, has been in decline since 2010 – falling by $600 million between 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile aid spending on health continues to grow – a sign that education is falling down the list of donor priorities.

Irina Bokova
Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO delivers a keynote lecture Credit: M.A.PUSHPA KUMARA

Yet there has never been a greater need. Nearly half a billion children live in countries affected by war, famine and deadly epidemics. Syria had achieved universal primary education by 2000 but now 2.8 million Syrian children are out of school.

In many other unstable countries – from Somalia to Afghanistan – there isn’t even any official count on how many children are out of school. Yet we devote less than two per cent of humanitarian aid to education.

This is the moment for a massive increase in investment. The Millennium Development Goals already picked the low hanging fruit – increasing the number of school places across the developing world. Providing education to that hard to reach final ten per cent – and increasing its quality – will be tougher still.

If we get education right, we are half way to solving the rest of the world’s problems

The developing world is about to be hit by an economic shock. The “fourth industrial revolution” – that will replace many jobs by automation – threatens 85 per cent of jobs in Ethiopia, far more than in the West.

The rote learning culture within classrooms in much of the developing world – particularly in Africa – will not produce the curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking that the jobs of the future will require.

Achieving quality will be expensive. Teachers have to be retrained and better remunerated. Curriculums must be revised. Assuming that developing world governments do manage to devote the target of four per cent of their GDP to education, that would still leave an annual finance gap of $39 billion to provide every child with a good school place.

The Italian G7 Presidency next year is an opportunity to showcase its commitment to global citizenship through the Sustainable development goals. It can make this flesh through a commitment from the G7 countries to enshrine in law their commitment to education aid – just as the UK has done in its commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on international development.

We can’t, however, rely on aid alone to plug the gap. NGOs and the private sector must share the strain. Low-cost private schools are delivering quality education, in some cases for as little as 40p a day, in developing countries.

Parents are voting with their feet where they see gaps in government provision. In India one in three children in rural areas attend private schools – an increase of 40 per cent in the last 10 years. This is providing a stream of investment in building schools and improving teacher quality that is not at the mercy of hard-pressed government budgets.

As they stand outside the state system, schools run by charities and the private sector are more likely to be the kind of ‘disruptors’ that can raise standards and pioneer new teaching practices. But too often private education in the developing world is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Insensitive operators have, on occasion, failed to deliver. On the other side of the debate, some oppose private involvement on principal, despite evidence that it can achieve improved outcomes.

Public, private and voluntary sectors are here to stay so should be collaborating – just as in the UK’s academy programme, that hugely improved London’s state education system.

There are examples elsewhere; in Uganda, one of the organisations we have worked with, the NGO Building Tomorrow, constructs and is given the freedom to operate schools – but the Ugandan Government pays the teachers’ salaries. In India, the Akanksha Foundation has opened schools in low-income parts of Mumbai, partially funded by the state, with the aim of impacting the mainstream education system.

We need a serious commitment now by governments to meet the Sustainable Development Goals on education, unclouded by ideology, while they can still be salvaged. The evidence shows what we instinctively know: if we get education right, we are half way to solving the rest of the world’s problems.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation

This article appeared in the Telegraph newspaper on 6th September July 2016

Despite the efforts of Malala and many others, there are still too many women denied a decent education

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This week marks the 19th birthday of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist shot by the Taliban for championing the right for girls to have an education.

 

Despite her huge efforts and progress across the globe, there are still too many women denied a decent education. Across South Asia, the Middle East and large parts of Africa, men are still much more likely to be literate than women.  Sixty-five million girls are out of school globally. And for every 100 boys in secondary school in Africa, there are only 82 girls.

The statistics are well rehearsed. Mothers with six or more years of education have fewer children and higher childbirth survival rates.

A girl with an extra year of education can earn 20 per cent more as an adult.  And an educated mother is more than twice as likely to send her children to school.

Last week, International Development Secretary, Justine Greening, convened governments, business and aid agencies at the Girls Education Forum in London. Importantly, it didn’t just focus on getting girls into school, but giving them, in Ms Greening’s words, the “decent education that can give them the skills they need to live happy, productive lives”.

It was encouraging that in all the discussions there was recognition that girls education is not simply a matter of providing the school places – but about addressing the forces that keep girls out the classroom.

Poverty is usually to blame. If a family have to make a choice between financially supporting a boy or girl in school, they will tend to choose the boy, as they think an educated boy offers the greatest chance of future prosperity.

When the harvest is meagre and family income falls, it is girls that are taken out of school to work.  In Uganda, a fifteen per cent decline in rainfall caused a five per cent drop in attendance by girls in seventh grade, but had no significant impact on boys.

The curriculum too often reinforces images of girls as housewives and mothers rather than doctors or lawyers.   At home girls will often have to spend more time doing household chores before they can get down to her homework.   And cultural expectations of early marriage – and the prevalence of youth pregnancy – result in girls dropping out altogether.

So what is to be done? The ‘Making Ghanaian Girls Great’ (MGCubed) project, funded by DfID’s Girl’s Education Challenge (GEC) fund, has increased girls’ enrolment and retention in 72 primary schools in areas of rural Ghana where girls have historically dropped out of education in large numbers.

Justin Greening
Justine Greening, convened governments, business and aid agencies at the Girls Education Forum in London

Five thousand girls who are at risk of not completing their education take part in ‘virtual’ interactive lessons taught from a studio in the capital Accra, which are then broadcast into their classrooms.  This ‘virtual learning’ is a better guarantee of the quality of education: unlike in many African classrooms, there’s always trained teacher available even if they are not physically in the room.

The project also widens the girls’ horizons beyond the traditional domestic roles. Through after school classes they are given the chance to talk to Ghanaian female role models – from pilots to actresses to government ministers.

Other issues are broached – from early pregnancy and early marriage – and combined with practical advice in areas such as malaria prevention and personal finance.  Average attendance for girls in MGCubed classes has increased from 54 per cent to nearly 80 per cent and there has been a significant effect in raising maths scores.

So what wider lessons can be applied to girls programmes elsewhere?   Firstly, if quality teaching can be guaranteed every day then it will result in better attainment, which, in turn, will encourage parents to allow girls to stay in schools.

Second, families need to believe that the financial sacrifices associated with allowing a girl to attend school are worthwhile if they are to be supportive.   Girls must be taught useful life skills  – such as financial literacy – that help them support their family’s livelihood – and malaria prevention lessons, which they can share with their community

Third, if we are changing attitudes to girls we need buy-in from boys.  After they said they felt left out we set up boys after school clubs, in which gender is one of the issues that is addressed. We saw this as an opportunity for engaging them in supporting the girls in their education.

The programme did encounter real difficulties.  In Africa, children often learn at school in a different language than they speak at home, which creates an additional barrier when they are learning to read.  It makes far more sense to teach them literacy in their own language, at least when they start school.

Technology needs to be robust and simple enough to use that school staff can be trained to fix it when it goes wrong.  (In case of MGCubed, due to dust from the Sahara covering the solar panels that the schools were relying on to power their internet connection).

If we are going to keep girls in schools we must support smart, scalable and sustainable projects. Above, all we must raise expectations among their community, and, most importantly, among girls themselves, about what they can achieve.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation

This article appeared in the Telegraph newspaper on 12th July 2016 to mark the Girls Education Forum organised by the UK Government’s aid agency, DFID.

Educating Asian children in ‘exam factories’ won’t equip them for the world of work

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This article appeared on CNBC and the Forum Blog on 31st May 2016 in advance of the World Economic Forum’s ASEAN Summit in Malaysia

Educationalists and journalists have long beaten a path to Singapore to discover its educational secrets. Children within its school system perform better than any of their international peers apart from Shanghai, according to the PISA rankings, and a whole industry has grown up attempting to decode its formula.

The city state is perhaps the world’s most astonishing story of educational improvement. Its transformation from a low skill, low paid nation with high levels of illiteracy 50 years ago to a first world economy today, with a 1% unemployment rate provides inspiration and hope for policy-makers everywhere.

But the story of education in the ASEAN region goes beyond Singapore. The legions of educational tourists would do well to extend their trip to the region’s other education systems, which have also taken giant leaps forward.

In the Philippines, basic public education has recently been extended by two years to grade 11 and 12 – finally giving the poorest students the chance to study at senior high school and go on to the best universities. Since 2010, the education budget has more than doubled, 30,000 new classrooms have been built and 43,000 new teachers hired to prepare for the effort. A bold new government voucher scheme has been introduced to allow students (where state provision isn’t available) to enroll in private schools.

Vietnam caused astonishment when in 2012 it entered the PISA tests for the first time, and returned stunning results – scoring higher in maths than the UK and the US with a ranking of 17th out of 65 countries. This from a country with a per capita GDP of only $1,600. It has invested heavily in education – making up a fifth of government spending, and shifted its curriculum away from rote learning.

But, for all the impressive progress in the region, international education rankings alone will not protect workers from the brutal forces of economic change that will sweep through the world economy over the next two decades – destroying entire job sectors, creating new ones, and demanding a constantly changing mixture of skills.

The recent Future of Jobs report published last year by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council of the same name, based on a survey of executives in 15 of the world’s largest economies, argues we are entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which over 7 million white-collar and administrative jobs could disappear due to technological change in the next five years alone. New sectors – from nanotechnology to robotics to data analysis – will replace some (but not all) of these jobs.

The future economy will need strong vocational skills – which are often still treated as the poor relation to academic routes – as well as soft skills. Laszlo Bock, who is in charge of hiring at Google, says that “while good grades don’t hurt”, the company is looking for softer skills too: “leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn”.

Employers throughout the world report that the education system is not delivering the skills that they need. In 2015, more than a third of global companies reported difficulties filling open positions owing to shortages of people with key skills. Even in education poster-child Singapore, a 30% increase in skills shortages was reported last year: a reminder that there is more to a world-class education system than outstanding PISA scores.

We can only speculate about the skills mix that will be required in 50 year’s time – when today’s school children will still be at the height of their working lives – but the ability to adapt and learn new skills throughout their career will be as important as their core knowledge of physics and chemistry. As the Forum’s New Vision for Education report argues: “To thrive in a rapidly evolving, technology-mediated world, students must not only possess strong skills in areas such as language arts, mathematics and science, but they must also be adept at skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, persistence, collaboration and curiosity.”

There are already signs that governments in the region are beginning to realize that academic skills will not be enough. Malaysia’s deputy education minister recently called for an end to spoonfeeding. While, earlier this year, Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, returned from a trip to Europe and called for closer co-ordination between the economics and education ministers to ensure Indonesia has a “work-ready labour force”.

Malaysia launched the vocational education scheme 1Youth 1Skill in 2010 to provide “what industry wants”. Young people who choose this route have a higher success rate at securing jobs than graduates. Singapore radically overhauled its Institute of Technical Education (ITE) a decade ago. Previously a joke circulated that its acronym stood for “it’s the end” – the last resort for the academically weak. Today its university-inspired set-up offers award-winning programmes that attract students from around the world.

Education ministers throughout the world are rightly beating a path to Singapore’s door to find out the secrets of its spectacular success in science and maths. But, in learning these lessons, they should remember that, as far as we can tell, the jobs of the future will require flexibility, creativity, independence of thought, and teamwork – whether they are in Kenya or Kuala Lumpur. We will pay a price if we turn our schools into exam factories where these qualities have been squeezed out of the curriculum. In conversations at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN 2016 summit next week, we should remember that education doesn’t begin and end with PISA scores.

Appointment as Visiting Practitioner at Harvard

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The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is renowned for its belief that research-based education policy and practice have the power to create a more just and prosperous society. For nearly 100 years, they have prepared smart and passionate individuals to become transformative leaders in education. I have been fortunate to have collaborated with them over the past few years on projects as well as assessing the impact of the Varkey Foundation’s work. .

For example, many of you will have recently seen the work Professor Fernando Reimers, Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education, and I worked on to develop a programme to channel the knowledge and experience of the Top 50 teachers from our Global Teacher Prize initiative to benefit those in the profession who want to develop their own thinking and practice.

A few weeks ago, at the Global Education & Skills Forum we also launched an Alliance on Teachers, which brings together some of the foremost international thinkers and practitioners into a working group that is committed to writing a White Paper on the future of the teaching profession.

This year, I am honoured to be appointed as a Visiting Practitioner in Education at HGSE and am excited about sharing my experiences with the faculty and students at the school to build upon our goals to build a better world.

Following the appointment, Professor Reimers said: “We welcome Vikas Pota to the Harvard community, and look forward to exchanging ideas that have profound long-term impact on education systems through building the capacity of the teaching profession.

“Vikas’s experience in education reform projects globally, as well as his knowledge and networks, will undoubtably be a valuable resource to us. We look forward to providing opportunities for our students to interact with Mr Pota to aid their own development as professionals seeking to strengthen public education systems.”

I look forward to visiting Cambridge regularly and, especially, in providing the benefit of our experience to the student community at the school.

 

A bridge from the present to the future – Honorary Degree speech

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With my mother at the graduation ceremony

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, honoured guests, Aston Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen. I want to thank the University for conferring this honour on me.

My grandparents left India to pursue better lives in the 1920s, where they helped build the Railways in East Africa. Both regions were colonies of the British Raj. My father and his siblings were born in East Africa too, as were a number of my generation. As is well documented, political circumstances in these countries changed for the worse and in cases like that of Uganda, the Asian community had to flee, literally, overnight. In Kenya, the situation wasn’t as pronounced but as they had done once, my family decided to move for better prospects of their future generations. We arrived in London in the early 80s.

Soon after arriving, my father passed away. I was very young. My mother, a young 40 year old, raised my sister and I with the support of a loving extended family. With her world having fallen around her, she continued through her life, in what can only be considered a spectacular success. She worked two jobs at times to ensure we were provided for. She worked in a samosa shop, she worked in a photo processing plant, she worked in an old people’s home, and the reason she went on to explain to us was simply that she wanted us to live a better life.

One day, I remember this vividly, when I had to choose my GCSE options at the age of 14, she said something that has stayed with me since. She said: “all I want you to do is to get to university, because everyone around you who has, seems to have done well for themselves”. I accepted her reasoning.

It is this commitment to education that has resulted in, today, this Honorary Degree being conferred on me.

THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

We live in an age which is increasingly being referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, one which is characterized by robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous transport, advanced bio-technology and genomics, and the fundamental question that is being asked is whether universities can keep pace and remain relevant in a reality that is moving at warp speed.

Well, let’s take a look at a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Jobs, which I am a member of, that asked Chief Human Resource & Strategy Officers of major companies about their employment, skills and workforce strategy for the future. They were specifically asked what the current shifts mean to our world order.

They said that the following skills sets are what are required to remain competitive as organisations:

  • Complex problem solving
  • Critical thinking
  • Creativity
  • People management skills
  • Coordinating with others
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Judgment & decision-making
  • Service orientation
  • Negotiation
  • Cognitive flexibility

MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, FORM RELATIONSHIPS, MAKE OUR WORLD A BETTER PLACE

It is about all of the above, and more, but more than ever, my experience tells me that it is a bias for action – making things happen that trumps them all.

Furthermore, you are the most connected generation ever, and I think success will come to those who are able to join up the dots, and give meaning to situations that just don’t normally add up.

Together, your generation – more than any previous generation, can go out and make anything happen. You can change the world.

A BRIDGE FROM THE PRESENT TO THE FUTURE

So, how do universities remain relevant?

Well, the answer lies within my story. Whilst, I gained an academic degree from Aston, what I truly gained was an understanding of people. Moving to Aston Triangle and Birmingham provided me with my first independent opportunities to learn from others with many different viewpoints and backgrounds.

By embracing all aspects of life here, I became a confident person. By holding roles in societies, I learnt new skills, by living with others – like my two friends who have joined me here, I learnt the meaning of friendship. Through time, we have relied on each other, pushed each other, helped each other and, yes, learnt from each other. Together we’re stronger.

And I continue to learn from people all over the world all the time. My education goes on and on.

Friends and honoured guests – long after you have left the corridors and lecture halls of Aston, it is the people you meet that will help you build a bridge from the present to the future. That is the most important education I have received.

I had the fortune of meeting Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from house arrest, where she explained that the need of the hour in her country’s education system was to ensure that children knew how to work better in teams. How to relate to other people is the key. These “21st century skills” apply more so in building equitable and peaceful societies and I gained these and more at Aston and this is why universities will continue to be cherished and remain relevant.

I ask each and everyone of you to take this simple lesson to heart. It can make the biggest difference to your life.

Friends, Aston was important to me. I see the education I received as being broader than just the degree I received over here. Aston gave me my first taste of being an adult, and in many ways it gave me wings, which have taken me to so many places in the world, where I have had the fortune of meeting remarkable people who are doing spectacular things to make the world a better place. For this I thank the University.

I end with a message to my two daughters who accompany me here. My wife and I are immensely proud of them.

But in the end I ask them to take away one thing from today… the words from my mother, their grandmother.

Whatever the question. Whatever the question

Education is the answer.

Thank you.

Vikas Pota

22nd March 2016

Birmingham Town Hall

How to teach children so they will be able to compete with robots

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This article appeared in The Independent on 19th January 2016.

“Digital disruption” may have become a threadbare cliché in tech circles, but it barely does justice to the head-spinning scale of economic change laid out in today’s Future of Jobs report published by the World Economic Forum. Based on a survey of executives in fifteen of the world’s largest economies, the report sees us entering a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” which will transform labour markets in just five short years. 7.1 million jobs will be lost – with the greatest losses in white-collar and administrative roles. At the same time, some of these losses will be offset by the creation of 2.1 million new jobs in sectors such as nanotechnology and robotics and ever-more important functions within companies such as data analysis and sales. The report estimates that 28 per cent of the skills required in the UK will change in the four years to 2020.

The WEF report is reinforcing a message that others have delivered. Last year, Andy Haldane, Chief Economist of the Bank of England warned that nearly half of all jobs in the UK are under threat from automation in the next two decades – affecting people at all levels of the workplace.

Given the scale of this change in such a short period, what can the education system do to keep up?  Firstly we should acknowledge the perils of gazing into the crystal ball. As educationalist Sir Ken Robinson pointed out in his TED Talk, children starting school now will probably be working until around 2065 – yet we can’t even predict what the world will look like in the next five years. How can we possibly predict the skills they will need? In the 1980s, there were suggestions that Japanese teaching was essential in British schools, as that was seen as the business language of the future – obviously looking at it now time would have been better spent preparing for the digital revolution that was just around the corner.

First of all we need to move to an expectation that workers will retrain and reskill throughout their careers. This has of course often been said, but now the need is becoming urgent. It may be exhilarating or alarming that over 90 per cent of Millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years, according to the Future Workplace “Multiple Generations @ Work” survey of employees and managers.

We can’t predict exactly what those skills will be, but we can predict the qualities that will be required – soft skills like leadership, flexibility, communication, decision-making, working under pressure, creativity and problem-solving. The drift of educational policy has been to banish much of this from the classroom and fixate on core subjects like science and math to the exclusion of wider learning.

It’s interesting that the demand for a wider curriculum is coming, not from some fossilized relic of 1970s teacher training, but from the world’s largest companies. Laszlo Bock, who is in charge of hiring at Google, said in a recent interview that “while good grades don’t hurt” the company is looking for softer skills too: “leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn”. Julian Thomas, Head of Wellington College – another unlikely revolutionary – has spoken out about his sense that the current education system was “designed for a different era” and, under pressure from constant testing, has squeezed creativity out of the curriculum. Tony Little, former Master of Eton College, has written about the dangers that wider intellectual development is being stifled by an all-encompassing obsession with exams.

Some companies are stepping in to plug the gaps that they think are missing from the education system. Siemens, frustrated with the skills and knowledge among their graduate applicants, has developed its own “future-proofing” training scheme that everyone joining the firm undertakes. By the end of their course, employees are expected to be able to summarise tasks and explain how to solve them in English as well as German.

Technology can make life-long constant retraining and reskilling a more viable option. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) have lowered the price of education and widened access by removing the need for students to be taught at set times or places, facilitating those already in employment to study or those who couldn’t otherwise afford to. Udacity, an online university, recently introduced ‘nano-degrees’ designed to train people for jobs as web developers or data analysts. With the galloping pace of technology, it’s likely that future employees are going to have to take several such courses through their lifetime.

Amid this nervy uncertainty, the WEF report is hopeful about the prospects for the UK economy. For every job lost through automation and technological change here, it estimates that 2.91 new ones will be created – more than twice as many as in the US.  Just as the first industrial revolution created the Spinning Jenny and the steam engine, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is developing artificial intelligence and 3D printing. But far-sighted decisions by policy-makers are required to ensure our education system is rooted in the needs of the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth.

Vikas Pota is CEO of the Varkey Foundation and member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on the Future of Jobs

‘The Gradgrind philosophy endangering education’… To get away from our Gradgrind focus on ‘Facts’, we must free ourselves from the single-minded pursuit of exam success, writes Vikas Pota

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This article appeared in the Telegraph Newspaper on 24th November 2015:

For at least the last couple of decades, education ministers from around the world have been in thrall to a ‘back-to-basics’ educational philosophy.

They have preached the time-honoured virtues of learning times tables and to punctuate accurately, and of memorising Kings, Queens and Presidents in the order that they appeared.

They have defined themselves against the wide-eyed ‘child-centred learning’ of the 60s and 70s, in which creativity was more important than knowledge, inspiration more important than structure, and collaboration more important than competition.

Since the 1980s, a hard-nosed case against progressive education has reigned. Who has time to teach these wispy values of creativity and collaboration when students should be cramming for maths to compete with Singapore?

Why prioritise ‘soft skills’ when there is an international competitive race to be won in hard technology and science?

The back-to-basics advocates have some truth on their side. Child-centred learning did lead to a harmful abandonment of basic skills in some schools.

“Who has time to teach these wispy values of creativity and collaboration when students should be cramming for maths to compete with Singapore?”

International comparisons of educational outcomes have created a “race to the top” – a global competition in education standards that means many children are getting a better education than a generation ago.

Measures like the OECD’s ‘Education at a Glance’ index, published today, have focused minds in education ministries around the world on the importance of basic skills.

But there is a growing consensus that in rejecting progressive educational theories, there has been an overcorrection.

As Tony Little, former headmaster of Eton, and Julian Thomas, Master of Wellington College, have pointed out, the side effect of the current preoccupation with hard skills (and incessantly testing children on them) is that room for wider skills – from music to art to broader reading around a subject that is not strictly necessary for exams – are being squeezed out.

Julian Thomas says the current education system was “designed for a different era”

Pressure for change is also coming from employers who think that an excessive focus on ‘hard skills’ is not creating the kind of workforce that they want. In fact, employers say that they value most the ‘soft skills’ of teamwork, resilience and creativity – precisely the values that are being sacrificed in the rush to prepare for the next exam.

In a recent McKinsey survey of more than 4,500 young people and 2,700 employers across America, Brazil, Britain, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, some 40 per cent of employers reported that they struggle to fill entry-level jobs because the candidates have inadequate skills.

The report also found that 45 per cent of young people feel that their education leaves them unprepared for the workplace.

Soft skills are likely to only become more important in the future jobs market. As Andrew Mcafee, co-director of the MIT initiative on the Digital Economy, says, we are now entering the “new machine age” in which machines have skills they never had before.

Technology will cut a swathe through white-collar jobs in the next 50 years, just as it has through blue-collar jobs in the last 50.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne from Oxford University argue that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47 per cent of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted – including in accountancy, legal work, and technical writing.

Patrick Allen as Gradgrind in Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1977)Patrick Allen as Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1977)  Photo: Rex

As Fareed Zakaria wrote in a recent book making the case for liberal arts education, while robots have taken over the role of making trainers, the ‘value added’ is still the work of people with ‘soft skills’. A $5 pair of trainers becomes a $75 dollar pair of trainers through the work of those who know how to market, design and brand them.

The World Economic Forum in its vision for how to prepare young people for those jobs not taken by machines recognises that critical thinking, problem solving, persistence, collaboration and curiosity will be essential.

The new world of rapidly changing and varied work will require a workforce who can thrive in the face of constant change and frequent failure.

Business is not waiting for education to catch up. Siemens in Germany takes trainees and “future-proofs” them by teaching them soft skills such as team work, how to divide tasks efficiently and problem-solving – as well as ensuring that their literacy and numeracy skills are improved if necessary.

“The new world of rapidly changing and varied work will require a workforce who can thrive in the face of constant change and frequent failure.”

We are in danger of turning our schools into institutions based on Mr Gradgrind’s philosophy in Dickens’s Hard Times: “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

The world of work in which today’s school children will enter will be rich with possibilities – but if don’t widen the skills that children are taught in schools, then we are not just giving young people an unnecessarily impoverished education, we won’t even be preparing them with the skills necessary to make their living in an ever-more competitive world.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation

Syrian refugees would be getting an education if the West actually delivered on its pledges

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This article was featured in the Independent newspaper on 29th October 2015:

One of the silent casualties of the war in Syria is education.  Despite all the outpourings of international sympathy for Syria’s children there has been a lack of hard cash from international donors. Yet the sums involved are pathetically small beer for Western Governments. The UN says that just £145m is required for Syrian refugee education. If Governments had done what they promised, there would be no problem, but less than a quarter of pledged funds have actually been paid.

A lack of funding means that aid agencies have been forced to cut monthly payments for thousands of refugees, which leaves those living in countries like Jordan without free education unable to afford the school fees. In refugee camps, it also means that education is badly overstretched. For instance in Jordan’s huge Za’atari camp class sizes of 80 – 120 are common.

Improving poor teacher pay in the camps, hiring more of them, and giving them better training, would improve the nightmarish conditions of overcrowded classrooms and language barriers that they face every day.  Given the stretched resources of the host governments, this funding can only come from international donors.

The experience of conflict zones from Rwanda to Bosnia is that those in secondary and vocational education tend to see the greatest disruption to their education.  Refugee teenagers are often forced to work since their families, who have spent all their savings on the journey, can no longer support them. Education for older teenagers remains a Cinderella cause – donors tend to focus slim resources on the primary years.   For the future of Syria it is essential that this generation of young people are given skills to help rebuild the country and to avoid the hopelessness that could see them sucked into violent extremism.

The international community also needs to give financial support to countries such as Lebanon that are becoming overwhelmed by the pressures placed on their schools by the influx of newcomers. This can have a negative impact on the Lebanese children in class, who can be held back while Syrian children, who speak only Arabic, take class-time to learn rudimentary English or French.  To aid integration, more international funding needs to be given to ensure that the settled population in refugee host countries does not see a decline in education quality.

This is already happening in some countries. UN agencies, the World Bank and bilateral donors have agreed to provide 200,000 free school places in Lebanon for Syrian refugees, covering the cost of tuition, schoolbooks and basic stationary, relieving some of the pressure on the public school system. This kind of support must be extended to   Turkey and Jordan, where the education system is being stretched by the crisis.

Funding is not only required in the classroom. Many Syrians already have qualifications that are not recognized outside the country. Years of study and knowledge count for nothing in many of the countries to which they have fled.  There needs to be a concerted effort to calibrate what equivalent of these qualifications is in their new countries.  Those who fled with barely the clothes on their backs often do not have the necessary paperwork to prove their qualifications.

Resources need to be invested in a system that, where possible, collects the available data from Syria – and allows schools, universities and employers to verify which qualifications an individual holds.

Many of the problems facing young Syrian refugees are hard to fix – from the physical and mental scars of war to the sense of cultural dislocation that comes from having to leave their homes. But finding the comparatively small sum needed to provide decent education should be simple – particularly when vast sums are being allocated to help the refugees that make it to European countries.  Germany alone has budgeted £4.7bn to help predominantly Syrian asylum seekers in the country.

The UN should convene an emergency summit to discuss the educational crisis affecting Syrian refugees – in which international leaders would come under pressure to raise the necessary funds. And deliver them in full this time.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation 

Developing world education is failing, it’s time to open up to the private sector

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This article appeared in the Guardian newspaper on 25th September 2015 – on the day the Sustainable Development Goals were approved by all UN member states:

There have been some real achievements in global education following the establishment of the millennium development goals (MDGs) by the UN in 2000. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the proportion of children enrolled in primary school has risen from 52% in 1990 to 80% this year.

However, in the dash to get children into the classroom, there was too little focus on the quality of the education once they were there. UNESCO estimates that of the world’s 650 million primary school children, at least 250 million lack even basic literacy and numeracy skills.

The new sustainable development goals (SDGs), which will replace the MDGs at the end of this year, address this issue of standards, calling for “inclusive and quality education for all” by 2030. But these will remain empty conference room sentiments if the $16bn (£10.5bn) per year required to achieve good quality universal education throughout the world is not met.

However well-intentioned, governments in the developing world cannot raise the sums needed to provide high-quality education on their own. If they could, they would have done so decades ago. Education spending must be balanced against budgets for other essential infrastructures such as hospitals, roads and sanitation.

Too often government schools leave education in the hands of teachers who haven’t been adequately trained. Even worse, according to UNESCO, many countries – including Cameroon, Ethiopia and Senegal – are only meeting the goal of universal primary education by employing untrained teachers.

Low state teacher salaries, which are often paid sporadically, discourage people from entering (and staying in) the profession. In rural Zambia it can cost teachers up to half their wages to cover the costs of transport and accommodation needed to simply collect their pay from district offices each month. In Malawi, one in 10 teachers reported that they were often not in school because they were travelling to collect their salaries or make loan payments.

To build the schools and train the teachers needed to meet these new SDG targets, we cannot rely on governments alone. Parents in the developing world, even those on low incomes, are voting with their feet and opting for private education because of shortcomings in state provision.

World Bank data shows that the number of primary school pupils attending private schools is on the rise, with some costing as little as a dollar a week. In rural India in 2013, 29% of elementary school pupils were educated privately, up from 19% in 2006.

Though NGOs do vital work, only the private sector can provide the scale of investment necessary, unencumbered by political and bureaucratic obstacles. Bridge International Academies, a chain of low-cost private schools, for instance, has created 400 nursery and primary schools in Kenya and Uganda using standardised classrooms. Large-scale providers, with international reputations to nurture, can be better guarantors of quality and consistency than individual schools in the community that lack the deep pockets to invest over many years.

The notion that private business must be involved in this process has gone some way to being accepted. From the start of negotiations on the SDGs, UN officials have sought to formally bring the private sector into the dialogue, but some still see private sector involvement as a threat. Just last year the UN special rapporteur on the right to education, Kishore Singh, warned that the costs associated with private schools were exacerbating inequality and said that, “for-profit education should not be allowed in order to safeguard the noble cause of education”.

In my experience, the worlds of business and education too often speak entirely different languages. An ideological distaste for the private sector means that even where business could help philanthropically, it is rarely approached for help.

There are some notable exceptions. Aviva, through its Street to School community project, has helped more than one million children receive support and education in 17 countries. Deutsche Bank has helped more than five million school children through its support of literacy initiatives in Brazil and provided shipping container classrooms in China.

However, these great efforts pale in comparison to the scale of business philanthropy in global health. The Brookings Institution estimates that corporate giving to global health is 16 times the amount given to global education. Last year, a report by the Varkey Foundation found that the Fortune 500 companies spend just $2.6bn (13%) of their total annual CSR budget of $19.9bn on education-related projects. Fewer than half provide any spending on education-related CSR at all.

The cultural divide between business and education is particularly unnecessary given that business is deeply concerned about the impact of poor education on organisations and the future prosperity of markets. A PWC global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs found more than half were concerned that skills shortages would stunt growth, particularly in emerging economies. A better-educated population would add rocket fuel to economic growth in the developing world. According to the OECD, if all 15-year-olds achieved a basic level of education, Ghana could increase its GDP by 3,881% and South Africa by 2,624%.

As more than 150 world leaders meet in New York for the U N Sustainable Development Summit 2015, they must recognise that to have any chance of meeting the new SDGs on education, business must be seen as part of the solution.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation