Education is still in the hands of the very few with the education systems of each country publicly managed and teachers publicly employed. Resources are dedicated to public education and schools are forced to compete against each other based on grades.

Schools in Finland, Estonia, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada, are ranked amongst the highest in the PISA (OECD). In these countries greater emphasis is placed on on the sciences and a teaching style heavily reliant on repetition and memorisation. They score highly.

Schools in these countries are more likely to inhibit students’ creativity, imagination, individual expression and critical thinking.

In many European countries, the OECD now recommends a focus less on memorising and more on critical thinking, teamwork and creativity to improve. However this does not remove the focus on exams PISA - is still a test.

In the Nordic countries, there is a greater emphasis on ensuring quality and equal opportunity across all schools. Teachers have more independence to plan their lessons based on individual pupils. There is much less emphasis on examinations. Countries like Estonia fond they score much higher on PISA even with their less emphasis on testing.

Australia, is entering the global debate on how to improve education arguing that the quality of schools will improve when parents can choose the best available school for their children arguing against a common system, where so that education is no longer in the hands of a few and schools are given greater autonomy.

The global focus of success

There is a reliance on tests and evaluations that focus on reading comprehension and mathematics which judges the quality of education - and no emphasis on creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, empathy and communication.

Teaching

We are still training our students like hamsters on a wheel in a cage without a global focus on people who can communicate with each other and work on the skills that are required to be successful in our current and future society.

If all teachers do is measure, they miss so much in student potential. If 48% of our students are achieving success and going to university, 52% are failing. These 52% are usually multi-talented but do not appear on the global data.

Developing a learning, teaching model

What is required is that every individual has an opportunity to develop their talent, learning style giving all students the potential to contribute to the culture that they are living in.

Teacher-centred models need to evolve to learning based on questioning and problem-solving. Teachers need to be listened to and empowered with a focus not only on learning but also on well-being. The barrier - globally there continues to be an emphasis on measurable performance and results.

Impact in the classroom

This has a real impact in the classroom at the expense of a holistic view of education where values and attitudes are also important - as teachers are forced to focus on results and in many cases their jobs and appraisals depend on this. Similarly schools are measured on their success by results - and these attract more budgetary benefits.

This is a long term global debate, which will continue slowly as governments continue to control curriculum and assessment and are not being greatly influenced by the new generation of educators.

In the meantime, teachers do have the potential to look deeply at what happens in their classrooms - with a real emphasis on empowering the learner - a style that still can achieve good results.

The continuing barrier is that many teachers were not taught in these ways themselves - and all they know is to train students to pass exams, do most of the speaking and find the more important skills difficult to manage and indeed measure.

Many schools have taken the first steps - inspiringly the IB is now taking great strides to have impact - and prevent default teaching to the exam, - although there is a long way to go before a DP teachers does not feel forced to teach to the test...

Views welcome.

Dr. Tassos Anastasiades