The Character of a Future-Facing Education: Local Solutions with a Global Perspective

Education in the post-COVID context

How do you see education delivery evolving – both at the sharp end of innovation and more broadly on a global scale?

Online is now central to the experience of a preferred mode of on-campus learning: we have experienced a normalisation of online / digital modes of learning in what it is that we do on a daily basis but there has been a widespread affirmation of a preferred mode of in-person on-campus learning shaped within teacher-student-community relationships. I think we also feel as though we’re working harder than ever to make it all happen as we do more things better in a blended learning environment.

Experience at the margins informs learning in the middle: there is an increased teacher, school and system capability in adapting learning to support the needs of students whose learning, social, emotional and psychological needs numbers of students are different (particularly neurodivergent students and the 50% who will experience challenges with mental health by the time they’re 18) has helped us personalise learning better but we are aware now of a larger minority of students who never came back to school and have gone “underground” with their learning or are accessing alternative, much more intimate modes of schooling.

Global experience and perspectives are more important than ever: more students and teachers are hungry to find a place of belonging alongside and within overseas learning communities and take advantage of opportunities to live and work all over the world but rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty along with ongoing cultural barriers mean that connectivity and accessibility are being challenged.

Education now that AI is here

How do schools need to change their thinking on education given tech disruption in the future world of work?

We are only at the beginning of the journey: Artificial intelligence is just at the start of its journey with us. It is evolving and moving forward quickly. Whatever it is now won’t be what it remains. We imagine it’s about students gaining an unfair advantage in getting their homework done. But it’s not this – it’s so much more and many of the best and brightest and most determined thinkers and entrepreneurs are out there working out how to make it an essential part of our lives now and for ever.

We need to model the adaptive expertise our students need to use AI well: AI is already fundamentally changing the process of learning in a way we cannot hope to stop. Students are way ahead and we need to catch up. We are too stuck trying to defend walls that have already been breached. Too many of us are offended by what we think it means for the honour of our past. All of us need to be thinking much more about our future, especially the future of our students. This requires a different mindset and a different pace for many in a risk and innovation averse profession that is more likely to want to slow any change down with a safe incremental adaptation to an existing model as opposed to the rapid and bold design and deployment of a new model that characterises so much of the rest of contemporary society.

We need to defend our humanity and enhance our character and creativity as we move forward with AI: We have a moral imperative to hold fast to the enduring meaningfulness of the values, relationships and character that define humanity at its best. We need to work out how to allow creativity to flourish in a space where it’s faster and easier to rely on summaries of what already has been and is the case than it is to allow heads, hearts and hands to create what might be. And we also have a concurrent moral imperative to ensure that what and how we teach and the way we shape the environment of our schools to be a home for learning reflects the characteristics of the world that our students will inhabit.

Innovation for a whole education across the whole world

Which schools, systems and countries are leading the pack in terms of innovation? Are schools getting more holistic about assessing and reflecting on what successful academic achievement looks like?

I’m lucky to work in many places globally. I don’t get to see everywhere so what I’ll talk about is that which I’m experiencing. Others will have more to add. 

Innovation continues to be a necessary but not always welcome disruption to school education. We are a profession that is mostly quite sceptical of change. Our workforce is proud of its choice to dedicate themselves to educating children and the expertise they have acquired in doing so. They tend to prefer to dwell in the certainly of what they themselves know rather than jump into the uncertainty of what others tell them they could do to maintain their relevance and utility for a rapidly moving local and global societies. Yet there’s lots of good work going on in lots of places around the world. You’ve mentioned a few already. Some of the work is very contextual. 

I’m seeing schools in the UK wrestling with the intentionality of an education for character in a context where examinations are not seen as adequate markers of growth and preparation for life beyond school for both the minority who seek highly competitive entry to university education and the majority who are looking at other employment and training pathways for which school systems aren’t as adept at preparing students in the later years.

I’m seeing schools in South Africa and India and the South Pacific that are making very meaningful strides towards cultural transformation in a postcolonial sense that will admit and graduate children from families who may never have received a formal education in years gone by. Doing things differently means reaching and supporting different students and that’s a good thing.

We can learn much from schools such as these about how to challenge privilege and improve the access that all children have to good schooling. Technology can play a big role in this so long as it is supported by infrastructure on the macro scale and close relationships of character apprenticeship that teachers can do so well on a more intimate and local level.

There are lots of exemplars in thinking about and doing a whole education better: the Green School, Avenues World School, THINK Global School and Verso School are some of the high-end, high-touch private institutions playing seriously in the space of an holistic education for character. The Misk Schools Diploma and the Mastery Transcript Consortium are pioneering ways of recording and accrediting the whole of student success. And there are many, many more who have featured on The Game Changers Podcast over the past five years.

In terms of innovation in the process of education itself and holistic assessment of academic and other outcomes, I’d like to highlight two areas in particular.

Innovation in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and reporting: Australia

There’s a reason why our educational institutions are held in regard all over the world. We teach really well and we keep up with the ever-growing body of research on how to become even better at what we do. 

Since the 1990s, our schools and teachers have learned how to shift practice towards future-facing schooling. We are experts in integrating a variety of approaches and perspectives into schooling that prepares our graduates with the character, competency and wellness to thrive in our world. 

In particular, we are leading the world in thinking and practice about how to measure and accredit the key competencies that underlie learning and equip students with the knowledge, skills, dispositions and habits required. The Department for Education in South Australia, Melbourne Metrics, Learning Creates Australia, Future Anything, HEX, the Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment, the Sydney Academy for Teaching Excellence, and my own Sydney Character initiative at the University of Sydney (amongst others) are all playing significant roles in wrestling with the challenge of identifying, mapping, teaching, experiencing, growing in, mentoring, leading, tracking, recording and accrediting character and competency in a manner which transcends the out-dated primacy of content-based examinations.

Innovation in school and system leadership: Singapore

Building on decades of work in evidence-based practice that focused on an economically  driven focus on assessment performance and social mobility, Singapore is now focusing on how to develop this platform into an education that regards the development of the whole person for life in addition to helping them gain the jobs that will fulfil their aspirations and support their families as the desired output of learning communities. Their track record in doing what they say they will do suggests that they might have a very realistic chance of doing this work of a whole education for thriving – for life and for jobs – as a system of schools.

The character of a future-facing education

What is getting you most excited in your day job?

After more than twenty years teaching and leading in Australian schools, in 2010 I began leading the work of CIRCLE Education in 2010, a School for tomorrow. and our public education program – the Game Changers Podcast – and I’ve loved it all. This work in strategy, leadership, character and high-performance continues in ongoing projects with schools and systems across the world.

In the new additional role I’ve taken from 2025 onwards as the Hooke Family Professor of Practice in Educational Leadership, I’m relishing the opportunity to connect purpose to practice in the vocations of teachers and leaders in Australia, the South Pacific and the rest of the world. 

I’m enjoying collaborating with my colleague from the UK, David Atkinson, Headteacher at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, on a positive framework (and book) for boys’ education that will challenge the pervasively crisis-ridden and antagonistic narratives about boys and men that are clouding the eyes and closing the hearts of too many of our good young men.

And, perhaps most of all, I’m excited by the opportunity to establish the Sydney Character initiative at the University of Sydney. This community of inquiry and practice is focusing on helping schools answer three fundamental questions:

What is good character?

How should we educate people with the character they need to learn, live, lead and work with purpose?

How might we lead for and with the character required to thrive in our world?

Now, perhaps more than ever, we need the influence of strong, positive character. In a time of social fragmentation, moral uncertainty, and institutional distrust, Australia and the region urgently need leaders of integrity, with the curiosity, compassion, courage and conviction to act with integrity and wisdom for the sake of people and place and planet. 

Sydney Character is collaborating with our friends at the University of Sydney: the Centre for Leadership for Good, the CREATE Centre, and the Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment. We are standing alongside and engaging in strong conversations with our global colleagues at the Harvard Human Flourishing Project, the Oxford Character Project, and the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest  University. We are supporting colleagues in schools who are doing the work of teaching and leading for character and school-based professional associations such as the Australian Character Education Alliance that are helping them to gather and share their ideas.

That’s enough to keep an old bloke with a beard fully engaged, for a while at least, in pursuit of the “Who?” that lies at the heart of a future-facing education.

I’m excited!

I can’t wait!