In March 2025, the Ministry of Education and Children in Iceland, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and Education International will bring together education ministers, union leaders and other teacher leaders for the International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP). The aim is to better support the teaching profession in meeting the formidable challenges of 21st century education.
One of the secrets of the success of the ISTP is that it explores difficult and controversial issues on the basis of sound evidence, provided by the OECD as the global leader for internationally comparative data and analysis. This report provides the background for the Summit, with a focus on education in the early years, which was one of the priorities set by the Ministry of Education and Children for the 2025 Summit.
The 2025 Summit takes place at a time when the gap between what education systems deliver and what economies demand is widening in many parts of the world. This will have dramatic consequences over the decades to come, as our students today will shape our economy, society and democracy of tomorrow.
Governments are under pressure to deliver results while ensuring that citizens’ taxes are spent wisely and effectively. They set ambitious reform agendas and develop strategic plans to achieve them. But in my conversations with education ministers around the world, the main challenge they face isn’t deciding what reforms to make but figuring out how to implement them successfully and sustainably. To transform education at scale, a vision of what is needed and knowledge of what is possible are not enough. It also takes smart strategies to make educational change happen, but this knowledge is only as valuable as our capacity to act upon it. This is where the International Summit on the Teaching Profession can make a difference because it brings together the actors that can affect change both at the system level and in the classroom.
Public policy faces tough choices when evaluating policy alternatives. It needs to weigh the potential impact against the economic and political cost of reform, keeping in mind that the costs for reform are usually short-term and certain, while any benefits will be long-term and uncertain. Should countries pursue what is most technically feasible? What is most politically and socially acceptable? What can be implemented quickly? What can be sustained over a sufficient time horizon and across electoral cycles?
Reforms often fail when the challenges of transformation are treated merely as technical issues. Technical issues have known solutions, which can be resolved within the structures and mechanisms of current education systems. Transformational issues can only be addressed through changes in priorities, beliefs and behaviour. This is much harder to achieve, because education systems tend to be a complex maze of stakeholders. The laws, regulations, structures and institutions on which policymakers tend to focus are just like the small visible tip of a huge iceberg rather than the larger invisible part under the waterline – the school systems.
This invisible part is about the beliefs, capacities, motivations and fears of the stakeholders who are involved in education – teachers and parents included. This is where collisions occur, because this part of the education system often tends to evade the radar screen of public policy. That is why educational leaders are rarely successful with reform unless they build a shared understanding and collective ownership for change, and unless they build capacity and create the right policy climate, with accountability measures designed to encourage innovation rather than compliance. This is where the “why” of reform comes in.
In fact, most successful educational reforms started with a compelling ‘why’, the purpose and cause of reform. They inspired the education system to act through this ‘why’, and they used the ‘what’ of the reform, the specific actions and processes, as the tangible outcome of that ‘why’. By inspiring educators and administrators with the ideas underpinning the reform, educational leaders gave them a sense of purpose or belonging that is not solely linked to external incentives. For those who are inspired, the motivation to act is always deeply personal and thus sustainable beyond the short term. Great school systems become great because people inside feel they belong. People across all cultures share the very basic need of belonging, which arises when people share values and beliefs. Where policymakers are able to clearly communicate the ‘why’ of educational reform, and where educators buy into the value proposition of these reforms, they will often go the extra mile to implement those reforms even when they encounter difficulties.
At the beginning, ideas are fuelled by passion that drives people to make sacrifices so that a cause bigger than themselves can be born. However, most countries have seen pilots and programmes, even very successful ones, that struggle to scale up. Countless initiatives that were highly successful when they were small never made the grade at the national level. It is always culture that scales, and culture is one of the hallmarks of effective leadership. This often comes about due to close collaboration between policymakers and teacher organisations. Culture is about system learning, system-wide innovation, and purposeful collaboration that leads to large- scale and ongoing improvement. We have succeeded as a human species because of our ability to form shared cultures. Building shared cultures – inspiring people to come together around shared values and beliefs – is also our best bet for effective reform implementation.
It is equally important to detect the formal and informal exercise of power of individuals and stakeholder groups within the education system, and to understand the commitments, loyalties, beliefs and fears of each stakeholder and how these affect their decisions. One should never underestimate how much stakeholders may perceive a reform as a threat to them and their values, even if it is only their desire to maintain what is familiar, stable and predictable in their work and life. One of the key challenges is that the benefits of reform are often thinly spread. As a result, it is easier to mobilise opposition to reform, rather than garner stakeholder support.
Policymakers need to forge alliances with people who will support the reform, to integrate and defuse opposition, and to give valuable dissenting voices a role to adjust perspectives and implementation processes. Again, this is what the International Summit on the Teaching Profession is about. By understanding the core values of stakeholders, it is often possible to align their interests with the goals of the reform, reducing opposition. Successful reform therefore requires the ability to recognise potential losses to different stakeholders and predictable defensive responses to those losses at the individual and systemic level. The potential loss of advantages or privileged positions is of particular importance in education reform, because the vast structure of established providers means that there are extensive vested interests. As a result, the status quo has many protectors – stakeholders in education who stand or perceive to lose a degree of power or influence if changes are made. It is equally important to understand the network of alliances each stakeholder is embedded in. Policymakers are likely to encounter hidden alliances between different stakeholder groups that can facilitate or hinder the effective implementation of reform.
An understanding of these connections, and the relationships beyond organisational charts, can help identify ways to leverage supportive alliances and mediate opposing ones.
Policymakers need to prepare stakeholders for the disequilibrium the reform will introduce in the system, and closely watch for signals on how much heat the system can stand. By engaging with the resisters, policymakers acknowledge the sacrifices they are asking them to make and how difficult these may be for them. In the same vein, it is essential to understand the true degree of resources, power and influence each stakeholder has over success and failure of the reform; and how much the stakeholder actually cares about the reform and its outcome.
Often there is also uncertainty about costs, because the education infrastructure is large and involves multiple levels of government, each often trying to minimise or shift its own costs for the reform. Assessing the relative costs and benefits of reform in education is also difficult because of the large number of intervening factors that can influence the nature, size and distribution of any improvements. The investment may be expensive over the long term, while in the short term it is often difficult to predict clear, identifiable results from new policies, especially given the time lags between implementation and effect.
Timing is also relevant to education reform, and in more than one sense. Most significantly, there is a substantial gap between the time at which the initial cost of reform is incurred, and the time when it becomes evident whether the benefits of reform will make themselves felt. While timing complicates the politics of reform in many domains, it seems to have a greater impact on education reform, where the lags often involve many years. Education reform becomes a thankless task when elections take place before the benefits of reform are realised. Policymakers may lose an election over education issues, but they rarely win an election because of education reform.
Sometimes crises can facilitate reform. When nothing is certain, anything becomes possible. In crisis conditions, change is often the only available choice. Moreover, social acceptance for change is usually much greater in crisis conditions. In normal times, when digital technologies were seen as an addition or as an extra in education, there were often many reasons to resist their introduction. During the pandemic, these technologies became the lifeline for education and the discussions shifted from the “if” to the “how” of their use. Shocks that can leverage change are not confined to events that suddenly disrupt the ability of educational institutions to function, they can also be events that alter perceptions of the education system. For example, the view of employers that educational qualifications are no longer relevant can lead to hiring practices on the basis of alternative criteria and thus devalue established educational pathways.
It is important for governments to strive for ambitious outcomes that can take a longer time to deliver. But they also need to deliver tangible results in the short and medium-term to keep stakeholders engaged. As important as it is to design reforms to scale across space, it is equally important to carefully craft their trajectory over time. Few educational reforms start out with conceptualising the entire trajectory of reform, i.e. the entire sequence of steps, their interrelationships, and their short-term, intermediate and long-term outcomes. The effect is often a piece-meal approach, which can result in layers over layers of incoherent reforms.
Communicating short-, medium- and long-term outcomes will help build ownership for reform implementation and sustain efforts and resources over sufficiently long periods. This requires honesty about the length of the reform cycle. Even if it were possible to change early childhood education overnight, it would take many years for the outcomes to translate into improved learning in school and better labour-market outcomes in life. Radical and erratic changes in education rarely lead to improvements, but rather cause reform fatigue. Progress tends to be radical over time when it is incremental, consistent and coherent in time. Helping stakeholders in the system to reach the periphery of their comfort zone in the short-term often leads to more sustainable change. The challenge is to keep the temperature within the productive zone of disequilibrium and to anticipate and counteract tactics that people will use to lower the heat to more comfortable levels.
Clear trajectories help to monitor and understand progress in the education system, but they also enable an informed discussion on the questions that are central to successful reform implementation: What is the reform trying to achieve? How will it achieve this? How will the system know whether the reform implementation is on track? And if implementation is off-track, what should be done about it? Where stakeholders and the public do not see the entire trajectory, with clear perspectives of when specific outcomes are expected to materialise, it is harder to sustain effort over long periods. It also becomes easy for subsequent governments to criticise reforms, by pointing to the lack of immediate outcomes, even if those results were only intended to be achieved in the medium or long term.
Finally, an important aspect of effective policy implementation is the ability to look not just forward but also outwards. It is not surprising that a strong and consistent effort to carry out international benchmarking, and to incorporate the results of that benchmarking into policy and practice, is a common characteristic of the most rapidly improving education systems. And the faster the context and thus the demands on education evolve, the harder it becomes to just borrow on past experience. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet for policymakers to follow their predecessors, because these knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But in a fast-changing world, it becomes much harder to distinguish between timeless wisdom and outdated bias. The International Summit on the Teaching Profession is helping policymakers and union leaders look outward in deliberate ways, and this has never been more important than today. The world has become indifferent to tradition and past reputations, unforgiving of frailty and ignorant of custom or practice. Success will go to those individuals, institutions and countries which are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. The task for governments and union leaders is to help educators rise to this challenge.
Andreas Schleicher
Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD Secretary-General