Does education have a role to play in preparing our societies for an age of artificial intelligence? What may the impact of climate change be on our schools, families and communities?

OECD CERI’s work on Trends Shaping Education highlights key economic, social, demographic and technological trends and their potential impact on education, as well as education’s potential to shape those trends. Based on a variety of robust international sources of data, including the OECD, the World Bank and the United Nations, the project provides two main outputs:

• Trends Shaping Education reports: An OECD flagship published once every three years, Trends Shaping Education provides a visual and insightful overview of key global megatrends and their potential links to education.

• Trends Shaping Education Spotlights: Each spotlight explores the links between one particular megatrend and education policy and practice in more depth, taking a multidisciplinary lens combining OECD analysis, state-of-the-art academic research and concrete policy examples in a visual and concise format.

The future is always changing. Trends slow down and accelerate, bend and break. This is why strategic thinkers need to consider both the futures that appear most probable as well as those that we are not expecting. In addition to the Trends reports and spotlights, Trends Shaping Education provides:

• A set of speculative alternative futures for education – the OECD Scenarios for the Future of Schooling. These help us reflect about the future more systematically, providing us with tools to think education from a systems perspective, which allows us to anticipate change and navigate complexity.

• Future Labs, which include a set of curated tools and dynamic exercises to support countries and other stakeholders in learning from and preparing for the future.

The OECD CERI’s Trends work is a stimulus for thinking about major developments that may influence education in the near future as well as in the longer term. All of education is explored, from early childhood education and care through to tertiary education and lifelong learning.