I have just attended the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai as a guest of the Varkey Foundation. As a top 50 nominee in  the inaugural year of the Global Teacher Prize in 2015, I joined 122 other nominees from the past three years at this year’s summit. It was good to meet other nominees for the first time, all interesting educational innovators from around the world. 

 The Global Education and Skills Forum was then held over two days in Atlantis The Palm Hotel. It was an opulent affair with never-ending food and a constant parade of dignitaries. A number of the United Arab Emirates royal family attended and the plenaries were rather different – Bear Grylls and a yogi spoke, and Andrea Bocelli performed at the closing ceremony. The diversity of the conference was refreshing and there was a real focus on social justice, with survivors from the Boko Haram kidnapping speaking, as well as refugee Olympians.
Andreas Schleicher from the OECD framed the conference when he spoke about the importance of creative reimagining and the digitalisation of education. He suggested that most school curriculums were “shallow shadows” in the  very artificial world of education and the future of education is not about doing more of the same. School systems are good at ranking, not at developing human capital. He called for a new approach to teaching, not standardisation. He predicts that the days of university admissions dictating the final years of school are quickly ending and that big data will sort out college admissions because Google knows everything about us. 

 Tom Friedman, New York Times journalist, gave a great keynote noting the exponential acceleration fundamentally reshaping schooling and he sees the central learning challenge as helping more people cope with a faster rate of change.

 I attended a number of Great Debates. UK education minister Nick Gibb and Daisy Christodoulou won a passionate debate against Andreas Schleicher about whether we need to fill 21st century learners’ heads with pure facts. 

 I met up with Professor Fernando Reimers and a group of Harvard grads and we discussed the current political situation in the US, fears for the future of democracy, and the growing role of philanthropy in international education. I enjoyed listening to Graham Brown-Martin, Geoffrey Canada, and Arne Duncan warn that current schooling is simply not preparing kids for their future. I also heard how every teacher in Singapore has a mentor and students are not evaluated on their results, they are evaluated on their own self-assessment. And it was great to finally meet Jelmer Evers face to face and discuss his flip the system work and be introduced to Education International. 

 My key takeaway was that education is on the cusp of radical transformation and doing it the way it has always been done is a recipe for extinction. I was reminded that innovating in education is often lonely and perilous, and it is important to take succour from networks like the Varkey Teacher Ambassadors. My thanks to the Varkey Foundation and congratulations to the 2017 Global Teacher Prize winner, Canadian Maggie MacDonnell, whose award was announced from a space station!