Evolving the education status quo

Recently, I wrote a letter to graduating year 12 students around Australia. It emphasised the importance of flexibility, adaptability, and resilience during a coronavirus-impacted final year of high school.

Part of my letter explores the values we use to judge educational success today are outdated, so much so that we are doing our current and future students a disservice by continuing to elevate the status quo of secondary education.

High school graduation marks the end of 13 years of school routine that – so graduating students are led to believe – define the life they will lead. But for all the importance that is placed on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) system during students’ teenage years, its relevance expires shortly after graduation.

The truth is that graduating secondary students have a lot of options after high school.

Post-ATAR education

ATAR becomes a whole lot less relevant when conceptualised in terms of a job opportunity for a graduating student’s first foray into the working world. Lived experiences have greater weighting, as do voluntary tertiary education pathways.

For a younger generation that is increasingly stressed and overloaded, these post-ATAR pathways are more accessible and less stressful. These days, universities are taking a student-centric approach, intently focused on delivering the best learning experiences for all their students.

This approach treats students as priorities, and it leads to a mindset of universities that seek to attract and attain by providing great places to learn. Universities are completely rethinking the ways they teach in order to offer the best education based on a mix of the potential of digital learning and on-campus benefits.

This is important because, as noted by the EY Megatrends 2020 report, the future is one of lifelong learning. The EY Megatrends report uses a framework to chart future growth and guide leaders through unprecedented change, and it states that it is entrenched norms that have education focused on learning as an activity that is concentrated on the first two decades of our lives.

But it does not have to be this way.

A necessary reform

Reconsideration of the post-secondary system is designed to unite the realities of work, university, TAFE and micro-credentials in a way that provides relevant skills and experiences so that students can be in step with the rapid changes of the working world.

Nowadays, the entire Vocational Education and Training sector is undergoing reform. It is a reconfiguration designed to help graduating students receive better skills that are relevant to connecting them to jobs.

After all, the qualities that are top of the list for potential employers – resilience, creativity and adaptability – are the kind that come from a mix of university and lived experience. The EY Megatrends report highlights the importance of equipping workers in a way that allows them to repeatedly reinvent themselves.

 As more factory-type work is shifted to machines, the focus is on jobs that people find truly satisfying. But while technology is being used to overhaul how we work, it has yet to be fully adopted to help how we teach.

The education system has been slow to embrace this technology-first mindset, even though the EY Megatrends report notes the student empowerment afforded by those educational institutions that have adopted a technology-driven customisable teaching approach.

 Educational revitalisation required

The EY A class of their own report makes note of the importance of revitalising our primarily knowledge-transfer focused education system to something that is relevant to a competitive global marketplace and rapidly evolving workplaces.

To keep up with these practical work realities, the report emphasises the importance of higher-order knowledge and skill mastery for students. Put simply, what they know is less important than what they do with this knowledge. To achieve this end, the report encourages teachers and students to embrace skills relevant to the 21st century: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication and leadership.

That is one part of the equation. The other is for educational decision-makers to write curricula and policy that reflects the importance of technology in teaching. Only then can the students of today really be ready for the working world of tomorrow.

EY Megatrends expose leaders to trends and forces far outside their usual scope of analysis, reducing the risk of missing the next ‘big thing’. Join the conversation. #BetterWorkingWorld.

 The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organisation or its member firms.