CERI Eye: Conference on Social Futures: Developing an Integrated Framework for Education and Social Policy

Henno Theisens reports back from the conference on ‘Social Futures: Developing an Integrated Framework for Education and Social Policy’ held in Sydney, Wellington, Melbourne on 23 October to 4 November 2007

I went to Sydney to deliver a key note at the Dean’s conference of the University of Sydney Faculty for Education and Social Work. The conference was titled ‘Social Futures: Developing an Integrated Framework for Education and Social Policy’ and also saw presentations by Deryck Schreuder (on developing integrated frameworks for education and social policy), Ken Smith (on education training reforms), David Hogan (on the impressive Singapore multi cohort, longitudinal study on students) and Philip Mackenzie (on a smaller but very interesting Australian longitudinal study of students). The conference was attended by academics, policy makers and practitioners from all over Australia as well as a number of Deans from different “Pacific universities”.

I spoke on the trends and scenarios for the future of education using materials that we collected for the ‘trends for education’ tool (soon to be online) that we are developing. In this presentation I focussed first on futures thinking and what it means. I then presented demographic, economical, technological and social and cultural trends that are affecting the future of schooling. I concluded with presenting the SfT scenarios, showing how the combination of different trends may drive towards re-schooling and de-schooling scenarios. The presentation led to interesting discussions and showed that there is a lot of interest in the kind of trends material we are developing. The Deans and the teacher trainers present showed a particular interest in the tool.