[School bell ringing, sounds of children playing in a playground; introductory sound bites]

Jennifer Macey:

From the New South Wales Department of Education, this is Charlie’s Future.

Duncan Ivison:

What does someone in Kindergarten today need to understand, need to know, need to learn, in order to thrive not just economically, but culturally and personally in the 21st century, in an age of artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, the 24-hour news cycle, the extraordinary things that our children, ourselves deal with every day.

Jennifer Macey:

Welcome to Charlie’s Future, a podcast series that explores the role of education in preparing young people to thrive in an age of Artificial Intelligence. This podcast is part of the Education for a Changing World initiative by the New South Wales Department of Education.

Join us as we meet some of the leading thinkers on this issue. We’ll explore the future of work, the future of education, and the future skills needed to navigate this brave new world.

Think back to when children were starting school in 2006. Twitter was yet to launch, Snapchat was not invented, and quantum computing was in its infancy. Those students are now finishing high school and contemplating their future.

Now let’s imagine little Charlie who’s starting school this year. He or she will be finishing their school life in 2030. What will Charlie’s future look like? Will Charlie go to university or will they learn on the job? And what skills will Charlie need to learn to thrive in this world?

Mark Scott:

It’s very hard to anticipate precisely what jobs will be available for them. We know that through an education system we’ll have to set them on a pathway of lifelong learning. Because the jobs that will be created, and the technology that will be created will force those young people to learn and master the new over and over and over again. So, for us as educators today it focuses the question – well what should be teaching? And how should we be teaching? And if we are committed to young people how do we best prepare them for the complexity and for the change which will be a feature of their entire lives?

Jennifer Macey:

As part of the Education for a Changing World initiative, the New South Wales Department of Education put these questions to some of the leading thinkers in Australia and around the world, commissioning a series of reports to trigger a conversation about the future of education.

This episode looks at the questions raised in the report 'Preparing for the best and worst of times'. Professor John Buchanan was the lead author of the report.

John Buchanan:

You’ve heard the question, a child entering Kindergarten today - what should the education department be doing for them? A great question. So what did we find? I’ll boil it down into three general areas. First of all, about artificial intelligence. There is at the moment a moral panic about artificial intelligence. There’s “the robots are coming and they’re going to wipe us all out.” This is an unhelpful narrative, and we’ve basically said let’s unpack the elements of it. There’s the overt impact on jobs and their content. More importantly, there’s the covert impact which is how it affects our abilities to communicate with each other and make decisions. And there’s its amplifying impact – it makes problems associated with inequality, globalisation, and climate change either better or worse. So, amplification, be for good or evil. And so our conclusion was, what’s the impact of AI? It’s going to lead to really good times, really bad times, and it’s going to lead to a combination of both. It’s basically going into a quite complex and messy situation.

So, the question then becomes, how do you handle that complexity? And we address 3 key issues. The first one you’ve got to ask is what types of pupils are we developing? And if you look at the narrative that is coming out of mainstream business bodies they are particularly interested in flexible and adaptable labour. And we are concerned by this, because we should be thinking about flourishing human beings, productive citizens, not just efficient and flexible labour.

The second big issue is how do we think about skill. It might seem obvious, but we take here a life course perspective. It might seem obvious, but from the mental health literature there’s really good work on mental health and mental capital over the life course. And the thing that is often overlooked in debates over education and the future of work is the importance of primary education. And we go to quite some trouble to actually say when we’re thinking about skill here we’ve got to think about giving people basic learning dispositions. And we don’t talk about this enough. This is things like the ability to concentrate, the ability to follow an idea through, basic stuff like socially just getting on with people. And, interestingly enough, the physical side of work – the Greeks were very strong on this, we deal with the total person, not just their brain. And the primary sector has always thought of this and has great ideas around it. That’s the first thing when we think about skill, let’s think about the learning dispositions because if you don’t get them right there’s no foundation for moving forward.

But probably the most important part of our work is challenging this idea that we need to focus on problem solving, collaboration and the like in the abstract. What’s called 21st century skills or generic skills. As we show in the report, this is a narrative that has been propagated for about 30 years. And we show that it is an unhelpful way of thinking about skill. And what I found interesting when we did our focus groups, when we did our workshops they weren’t focus groups, was actually a health sciences educator who said she was sick and tired of hearing about how she needed to create more problem solvers, and she was particularly annoyed about collaboration because she said “you just don’t need collaborative skills, when you’re sick you need a team of people with a whole range of expertise. You’ve got to have people with deep expertise with the ability to collaborate”. That’s when it really struck me, it’s not just in my area labour studies which has made this point – you’ve got the health sciences looking at it, we found the positive psychologists saying it, the cognitive psychologists are saying it, and I think this idea is something that has not got the attention it deserves. What is the future of expertise? Because if you don’t have a domain of expertise you don’t have the foundations required to get those more general skills of problem solving and collaboration.

We’ve got to be critical, however, of how expertise is currently defined. Because it’s very academically defined in the school system. And we would argue that we need to make the academic side of life more practical, and on the vocational side of things we need to have more powerful underpinning knowledge.

But finally we finish up on a pretty ambitious note, saying if we are to change all this it’s not just a matter of changing the curriculum here, or getting a bit more conscious about AI there – we need a new settlement around education. Social relations are not fixed in time. Education represents a balance of social forces, and we say if we are to move more creatively into the future two players in particular need to change their relationship with the system – employers and teachers. Employers are fast to criticise and slow to act. But they have a critical role to play because workplaces as sites of learning are highly underdeveloped. We think as we move into the future there needs to be more vigorous debate, not about what educators should be doing more, but what should employers actually be doing to lift the education profile. And similarly, with teachers. We think teachers are the absolute bedrock of the system, the anchor of the system, and they are too often passed over or dismissed in the so-called industrial models of education. Teachers day in day out have to have the fight for crowd control. It’s not just educating it’s actually keeping a classroom together. And we think the expertise that’s required to be a great teacher is something that needs to be respected more and developed more.

Jennifer Macey:

So how can we foster that deep, content specific expertise while also giving students the skills for life-long learning to prepare them to continually evolve with their jobs? And will this age of artificial intelligence really be as life changing as the headlines suggest?

Automated voice:

My name is Sophia and I am an artificially intelligent robot who wants to help change the world for the better.

Jennifer Macey:

Joining Professor John Buchanan on the panel were two co-authors of the report; Dr Sandra Peter the head of Sydney Business Insights at the University of Sydney’s Business School and Professor Rafael Calvo an expert on artificial intelligence also from the University of Sydney. They were joined by Emma Hogan the NSW Public Service Commissioner and Stacey Quince the Principal at Campbelltown Performing Arts High School in Sydney’s west.

The Deputy Secretary of External Affairs and Regulation in the New South Wales Department of Education, Leslie Loble, was the moderator. She challenged the panel with a quote from economist Robert Gordon that it was the industrial revolution that had the most profound impact on human life, ever.

Leslie Loble:

Essentially, he says that, there’s been no era with greater innovation than the century that went between 1870 and 1970, nothing before and nothing since comes close to that era in terms of changing daily life and he points to electricity, steam, railroad, communications, chemicals, on and on he goes, and absolutely nothing that comes close including the 50 years of computers.

Jennifer Macey:

Leslie directed her first question to Professor Rafael Calvo who says rather than an industrial revolution, we’re in the midst of an intelligence revolution.

Rafael Calvo:

I think it is different. The first part of the industrial revolution, the steam engine, a lot of inventions that you mention were changing the physical aspect of our work life. And it’s true a lot of those changes were huge, but that changed the physical aspect. What happened then, in the 1840s, is happening today with the cognitive aspect of human beings. It’s changing at the same speed that we saw at that time, we’re seeing that from the way we think, the things that we pay attention to – we’re in the attention economy, where they were in the logistics economy moving big volumes of heavy things and so on.

Now we’re in the same [period of change] but at the intelligence level, changing the way we think altogether. And I think that has a very significant impact for the conversation we are having here, because we are in the attention economy, so policy makers, schools, they need to be aware that media and tech companies are in a war for the kids’ attention. And we need to teach them how to defend themselves. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we’ll have. How do they keep their attention on the things that matter? It’s already hard, even for adults, right? So imagine for them, in 20 years from now, how much harder it will be because the algorithms are going to be better, they already recognise emotions, they can anticipate the things you are going to be thinking, they can anticipate the things you are looking for. That’s great, it has a lot of benefits. But they need to develop the skills of autonomy, a sense of agency, I think is one of the most important skills that we need to have and develop in order to have a flourishing life.

Leslie Loble:

I promise you I’ll stop Robert Gordon after this next question, but he also said that the era of prosperity is under significant threat. He points to a number of headwinds – the demographic headwind of ageing, climate change, inequality and what he says is we’re in for an extended era now of flat earnings. So, Sandra, a lot of your work looks at these sorts of headwinds, and what it means for business and what it means for the economy. Do you think he’s right?

Sandra Peter:

I think what you’ve picked up on there is actually quite important. Because quite often these conversations revolve purely around the overt impacts of AI. How many jobs are going to disappear? Is it 47%? Is it 67%? Is it tasks? Is it jobs? We argue that this is actually not a very useful narrative to just look at that.

If we are to understand the impact on the future of education, we need to understand, yes, the overt impact on the nature of jobs and yes, some jobs will be displaced and some jobs will disappear, some tasks will be replaced – we see doctors working with machines, we see lawyers working with machines and the nature of those industries is changing – but then there are more subtle things and I think that gets to both the question around rising inequality and those sort of issues, as well as to Rafael’s answer, which is around this covert aspect and that’s much more subtle and it doesn’t get nearly as much attention in the media or in general in our conversation as it should.

And this covert impact is really on the types of social connections that we have and on the decision making around us. So, when we say covert impacts of artificial intelligence what we really mean is trying to think beyond social media and beyond Facebook to all these recommender services that we have around us. Just think of the new business models that we have. So besides Facebook, we’ve got Amazon that can predict what we want to watch, what we want to buy next, what mode of transport we want to take home, at what time do we want to finish work and go home so that the traffic’s not too bad.

So all of these things have kind of seeped in to the background of our lives and ruled the way we interact with each other, what choices we make, what job we get – because they are now in recruitment and selection services – whether we get a loan or not – because they are now in finance and insurance – all of those things have become part of the fabric of our society. And the questions get really complex once we start to unpack it, because the new types of artificial intelligence systems that we’re seeing cannot tell us exactly how they made that decision, cannot give us a good explanation of why they might have rejected you for a loan, or why, let’s say, I didn’t see an ad for Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney because I’m a woman of a certain age and so on. So that gets much more complex. So there’s that covert impact.

Then the last impact is that of amplifying other things. You mentioned inequality, and last year for example it was about 1% of the population made 87% of the wealth that was generated – that’s huge inequality. AI is actually working to amplify that, not just through the types of jobs and the rate at which those jobs are changing, but also through this polarisation of the jobs that we’re seeing out there. You have companies like Facebook that employ 8000-9000 people who rate content, they watch suicide videos and inappropriate content and delete them. They are the low paid jobs of the new economy. And we see them in that, we see them in the gig economy and a whole range of industries. Not only that, but when we’re looking at inequality think also inequalities of hope. The skill, the knowledge that you need to have to work in this new economy, with these new systems. Who are the people who know the types of news we are getting off Facebook, who know what to read, how to prioritise that content, how much time to spend on social media and so on. So across things like for instance climate change we see amplifying effects, whether that’s more computing power to use this system, whether it’s economic growth because we have these apps in the first place, or whether it’s helping us deal with the effects of climate change.

Jennifer Macey:

To circle back to education and jobs, the conversation turned to people’s first jobs. How does education prepare students for their first experience in the workforce when many of those entry-level jobs are being hollowed out by AI and automation?

Leslie Loble:

So a lot of the people in the room here think of our role as getting kids ready to move out into that labour force, now if that stepping stone job is developing some cracks what do we need to think about as educators?

John Buchanan:

Well educators frankly need to be more aggressive. It’s not the educator’s role to simply absorb and respond to what else is going on. I think educators have a role for saying, we should be defining the character of the policy mix. It’s not, the economy creates these problems and education runs around and picks up the pieces afterwards or prepares people to go in there. I think, we as a society need to think, we want a policy mix which takes the development of human capability as the end point. And all arms of policy should be directed at developing human capability and that’s not some far left idea that’s been picked up from the 1930s or whatever, that’s Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the kind of rock stars of the academy. And I think educators need to be more assertive in that regard.

Now, that’s the big picture. But they’ve got to be practical. We’re not going to see that change anytime soon. And I think this is where, when we’re talking about rethinking vocational education in particular, we’ve got to give young people the capacity to handle rejection. One of the most eloquent quotes I ever picked up from one of the researchers I work with is, he came back from interviewing a bunch of teachers and he said “I just got a really good insight. The teachers were telling me, ‘what are we doing with the bottom 80%?’”. I think we’ve got to think about how we equip people who aren’t going to go to university and don’t necessarily have to go to university to flourish. That’s why we take up these broader notions of developing humans in the broad.

Leslie Loble:

Emma, you have a long career in employment in the private sector. But as you reflect on, in particular, now as Public Service Commissioner, what do you see coming towards the public sector? What do you think is the role for the public sector in these sorts of debates in terms of our own employment relationships and so forth?

Emma Hogan:

I think what struck me both about the report and the conversation that we’re having now is in the same way that people in this room are thinking about the future of education for the future of work, that’s happening at the same time we’re trying to define what the future of work actually is. There isn’t this finite picture. We’re changing the wheels of the car as it hurtles up the freeway and the tyres perhaps represent all different things. I’ve just come from running a two day offsite with my team to start thinking about what’s this future of work conversation for the NSW Public Service Commission to be having? And one of the get to know you exercises we did was what was your first ever job? And it ranged from milk run, to paper round, to mine was a Saturday girl at the hairdresser. But actually what really struck us today was how many of those jobs actually don’t exist anymore from only 20-30 years ago. I think we have the privilege in the public sector to think about those things on a deep level.

Leslie Loble:

Stacey, I’m now going to switch over to education, when you think about what you’re doing at Campbelltown Performing Arts High School.

Stacey Quince:

So our students do projects where they draw both on skills and knowledge at a deep level, and they are engaged in learning that replicates real-world experience. So some of those examples are things like, we’ve had students work with Campbelltown City Council over an extended period of time to increase the use of local parklands and develop a deeper understanding of the importance of sustainability in the local community. And in that project our students created a range of products to be implemented within that parkland to increase the use of that space. So one group worked on identifying ways to get young families to use the parkland more effectively, they created an interactive play board for young people and some signage with QR code embedded information in it around the biodiversity in that area, and they pitched that concept to council and it went into production and it sits in the parkland.

We had another group of students who developed a picture book to teach young students about the flora and fauna in that parkland. They worked with teachers to create a range of teaching and learning activities that go with that picture book, that’s been distributed to schools and public libraries in the broader community.

I could give you a dozen other examples but those projects that students are involved in both allow them to develop deep knowledge around science, around English, they allow them to develop skills like literacy skills, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills, but most importantly they demonstrate to our students that they’ve got the capacity to make a difference in the world beyond school. It develops in them a sense of agency, it empowers them as young people, and it really instils in the whole broader community this notion that young people who are in our schools now have already got the capacity to work beyond the four walls of our school.

Jennifer Macey:

The example of the applied learning projects that Stacey and her team at Campbelltown Performing Arts High School have been running, and the impact of those projects on the local community and the school, really resonated with the audience. And there was a sense that for many, this is the type of education we should be striving for.

So what do the parents on the panel think – what do they hope education will provide for their own children?

Emma Hogan:

So I have an 11 year old stepdaughter and I have a one year old baby. I’m actually more worried about the 11 year old at the moment than I am about the one year old, because I feel like, my youngest daughter, we’re really thinking about this now in terms of her future, but I worry for my 11 year old that we won’t necessarily have our thinking straight in education or work by the time she’s graduating. I worry about that because some of the language that she uses with me, she’s sort of got this view that if she’s not good at science and technology she might not have a future.

And some of the language that I think is happening, you talk about the amplification of the AI argument that robots are coming to rule the world, well that feels like it’s happened to her a little bit around this idea of STEM and STEAM etc that if she’s not good at these particular things she might not have a future, and that stops her from exploring the things she’s actually really good at and they’re much more around creativity, storytelling, stuff like that and she doesn’t necessarily hear in the language of society at the moment that that’s as important. So as a parent I worry about the narrative and the messaging right now about whilst where all sorting out this future for our kids and the future for adults and the idea of lifelong learners, that we’re also as families talking to our kids about their holistic worth.

Leslie Loble:

Rafael, that’s a lot of what you think about as well.

Rafael Calvo:

Yes, in many ways. I have a 12 year old boy, so he can get engaged with a video game literally for four hours straight. But my concern is that those technologies have been designed to absorb him. Unless school is more engaging, he will lean towards playing video games or do other things that are more attractive. Then one has to play the role of the arbiter and say “no! you have to limit to 2 hours” or whatever. But I would like the school, for example – and I’m not saying it’s easy – to be more engaging in ways that he feels more inclined to other topics of interest rather than just video games. And there are psychological drivers to engagement. So we studied in my research lab on how you design technologies. And those are the same psychological drivers that engage people in schools or in the workplace – autonomy, competence, relatedness. Those three factors have a huge impact on what kids want to do at school or what kids want to do with the use of technology, video games or something like that. And I would like to see more of that in my kid’s school at least.

John Buchannan:

One of the most inspiring case studies I’ve ever done when I was studying in abbatoir and was one of the best workplaces I’ve studied actually – you don’t normally think of abattoirs as best practice sites. What I noticed is that there were a lot of Indigenous people there and I said well where did those Indigenous people come from and they said that’s part of the program we have with the local school. I traced it back and a nurse who had been working in Indigenous health for 20 years got sick and tired of nursing Indigenous people to an early death and she did the research and found that if they stayed at school for one year longer that they, on average, live 5 years longer. So she went in and worked out that getting kids engaged with school was critical for increasing longevity. She tracked through a group of Indigenous kids and found they got to school but only walked through the school gates – they didn’t quite make it to the classroom. She then said well how do I get them engaged? She ultimately found that by getting them part-time jobs, getting the on-the-job trainer to explain to them why they needed maths and English led to then high motivation in school.

This is why when I talk about a new education settlement, employers aren’t just there to shout from the sidelines. Workplaces are profoundly, potentially educational sites. Now, not every workplace is a cathedral of learning. But I think we’ve really got to mobilise a broader constituency – teachers and schools cannot do it on their own. There’s so much thrown onto schools, and I think this is where the settlement comes in and I think this is where employers have got to step up and think I’m going to take a role here. Now that’s a very radical agenda. That’s not saying employers take over the curriculum, it’s saying employers take responsibility for part of the curriculum – and that’s what the abattoir was doing.

Sandra Peter:

I’ve been asked recently to talk quite a lot about this in schools – this question comes up of what do you tell them right now and what should they be most concerned with. One of the things I found most wonderful in those conversations is moving the conversation from this is about AI and STEM to this is about asking the right questions and instilling in them a sense of agency. This future is not happening to them, we don’t have to prepare them for the future that is coming regardless of what happens. These are the kids who will build this future. So instilling in them that sense of agency – the fact that they can change this that they can think differently about how these things come into our lives.

I was in one of these big halls presenting and always the questions about autonomous vehicles because if you talk AI it has to be autonomous vehicles – I moved here from the Netherlands and we put up this picture of Amsterdam and its lots of cars, lots of people on bicycles, lots of pedestrians all walking around and the lights turn green and then just everybody goes and there’s bikes in between the cars and pedestrians and everybody seems happy, everything is moving along and then we ask them what would happen if we put autonomous vehicles in there. Would it make it better? And the answer from the kids is well no you’d have to get all the people and bicycles out and fence them off – it wouldn’t be a city in which you’d want to live. Now our kids have to learn that they have to answer those questions as well, about how we want to live in that world.

Jennifer Macey:

From the global to the local, the conversation next dove ‘into the nitty gritty – what specifically would you change about the current education system and talk quickly turned to assessments and the curriculum – what do you take out? And what do you leave in?

Stacey Quince:

What I would change? A few things – first I’d have a very close look at assessment, we know that there’s been lots of discussion in the media lately about NAPLAN and the impact that discourse around NAPLAN has on driving an agenda in schools. I welcome that discourse, I think for too long the focus has been, in some places, on literacy and numeracy and there is scope for us to broaden that. I also think there needs to be a good long look at the HSC (Higher School Certificate) as an exit credential. We know some of the most innovative systems around the world are thinking differently about credentialing and we know that they’re providing students for instance to have an opportunity to put together a curriculum that is far more personalised – that allows students to undertake for instance internships whilst they’re still at school, there are opportunities for them to develop portfolios of work in areas of passion and that we don’t necessarily have to run a set number of subjects for a set period of time.

I also think there is a need to re-look at our curriculum and syllabus documents. We know that a number of them are really content-heavy and the research tells us that if we’re really going to prepare students for the world beyond school they need opportunities to be engaged in applied learning, to solve real problems, and that requires deep work. Some of our subjects really require people to cover so much content that it’s difficult to do that at a deep level. You know, the greatest assets in our schools are our teachers. I work with the most phenomenal professionals who know their students really well and can really excite young people about learning and turn them on to learning so it is an exciting place for them to be. So we need to continue to invest in our teachers – we need to give them the time and space to have a look at new and emerging pedagogies.

John Buchannan:

We need to think about what we call vocational domains, and this is something we're actually researching with the Department of Industry at the moment. Currently, the vocational education training system is structured around competencies, which atomize skill and then aggregate them into fragmented qualifications, we actually say, what are the domains that give people an underlying expertise that can be deployed in a range of areas. The classic case is care work, right? Currently, we have aged care workers, disability support workers, drug and alcohol workers, youth workers, there's an underlying domain of care, how can we define that in a way that gives people the capacity to get an ability to think broadly? And then be rapidly redeployed?

Emma Hogan:

Okay, I'm on the board of AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience), the Indigenous mentoring experience, and I was just reflecting on your point then about, how are we helping kids that perhaps don't have a real cultural structure at home to help them? And so I would be looking at not just the curriculum, but what's the holistic support around it.

Leslie Loble:

Stacey?

Stacey Quince:

Probably no surprise, my answer is what's the knowledge and understandings and the skills that students will need to thrive beyond school? And how can we recreate space in the curriculum to allow teachers to have some judgment about what that looks like on as it lands in the classroom, whilst maintaining a high-quality curriculum for all students.

Leslie Loble:

Sandra?

Sandra Peter:

Well, the good ones have been taken. So I'll go to the controversial one, which is, what would you take out? All these conversations about curriculum are about what we put in and there's extra every time we do this. What do we need to take out to actually leave space to breathe?

Leslie Loble:

Rafa?

Rafael Calvo:

I'm an engineer, so I have to talk about computers, I think, looking into the impact of the technologies not just as a productivity tool, but also the impact they have on the psychological wellbeing of the individual is very important.

Leslie Loble:

Please join me in thanking a terrific panel.

Jennifer Macey:

Next, we turn the microphone over to some members of the audience. And many believe that employers and industry need to work more closely with schools to future proof our education system.

David Robson:

David Robson, and I'm the Principal of Keira High School.

Jennifer Macey:

Do you think your school is ready for the challenges of the future and particularly around artificial intelligence?

David Robson:

I do, and I'm really fortunate to have two students in my Year 12 who have just gained a place in a science forum in London, and one of the students said, “I don't really want to be prepared for this future world, I really want to be able to make what that future world looks like.” And that's why I feel confident in what we're doing at this school.

Mark Diamond:

My name is Mark Diamond and I'm the Principal of Lansvale Public School. What resonated for me was the notion that we're developing whole children in schools. It's wonderful for them to be literate and numerate, but we need to develop kids with confidence and the capacity to think critically, and to recognise their challenges and strengths, address their challenges, and optimise and embrace their strengths.

Bianca Hughes:

My name is Bianca Hughes, I’m from Northern Beaches Secondary College Manly campus, which is on the Northern Beaches. When I run projects in schools, I actually connect with the business community institutions, basically, we call them experts, but we're often finding you know, parent body, engineers, architects, people who run small business, entrepreneurs and get them into the classroom and actually talk to the young people about the projects that they're doing, as well as giving them feedback on the final product that they produce. I think that the people who are working in industry actually they feel really valued when they've been invited in so we just have to give them the opportunity.

Kelly Stephens:

I'm Kelly Stephens, I'm a Director of Strategic Analysis in the Centre for Education, Statistics and Evaluation. What resonated for me was the extent I think to which there is increasingly agreement that both content knowledge, deep content knowledge, and what we might call skills are both important. Problem solving in maths is not the same as problem solving in history and they may add a very abstract level have some similarities but you become a good problem solver in maths by solving lots of maths problems and you become a good analytical thinker in history by knowing a lot of history and creativity often comes out of knowing a lot about a number of things and suddenly putting them together in new ways.

Jennifer Macey:

The report calls for a new education settlement between schools and employers and also a challenge to review the curriculum - so we asked Mark Scott, the Secretary of the New South Wales Department of Education, for his views.

Mark Scott:

One of the lines I like, is a question that was asked - is your organisation changing as much as the world outside is changing? And I think we’ve got clear evidence of how dramatically the world outside is changing and our real challenge for educators is to think carefully through what it means is going on in the classrooms today.

Jennifer Macey:

Do you think schools aren't ready for a future, an uncertain future or a future around artificial intelligence?

Mark Scott:

I think the schools are aware that they've got to prepare young people for lifelong learning, and so in some respects I think they are. I think we need to do more work together about the supporting infrastructure that we place around schools and classrooms. I think it fundamentally goes to the nature and the shape of the curriculum, what it is we're expecting young people to learn, the way that we teach, so how we use technology how we use partnership with industry and I think very importantly, the kind of professional development that teachers and schools are going to need, the kind of support they're going to need for that. I thought what we heard from Stacey at Campbelltown is an enormous professional effort of staff to really be equipped to manage this change and in our government schools anyway we need to replicate that in 2200 different locations.

Jennifer Macey:

But as John said, does the onus just have to be on schools?

Mark Scott:

No, certainly not. I think there's a lot of educational research that says education works best in partnership - you know it's that old African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child. So, it was very interesting hearing the members of the panel reflect as parents on this challenge, partnerships with home but also partnerships with business and a sense of collective community investment that's required to make this transformation happen. John's an agent provocateur, you know he likes throwing the bombs, but John's challenge about really are we spending enough money on education given the benefit that will accrue to us as a society, as an economy and to millions of individuals that we get this right. I mean is there any more important area of investment than investing in children and in their future?

Jennifer Macey:

It's more than just teaching students how to code, isn't it?

Mark Scott:

You know once upon a time we probably thought it was about teaching kids how to code while the machines are actually going to do a whole lot of the coding themselves, but to be able to have computational thinking, to be able to understand how the machines do that work, to be able to think through the ethical decisions that emerge on the back of artificial intelligence - these are the really important things. So I think you need a confidence and an engagement around the technology, but you really need to be able to think through the human dimension of all of that. I mean if the machine can do it, given Moore's Law, given artificial intelligence, the machine’s going to do it really well. So we need to understand those machines, but we need to focus on what makes us humans and what humans can uniquely do - and that's part of the challenge that's presented by the paper tonight and this thinking.

Jennifer Macey:

That was Mark Scott, the Secretary of the New South Wales Department of Education, ending this episode of Charlie's Future, part of the Education for a Changing World initiative by the New South Wales Department of Education.

You can find the report ‘Preparing for the Best and Worst of Times’ online - just do a search for Future Frontiers using the search function on the department's website and do join this conversation.

If you have comments get in touch with us through our Facebook group Future Frontiers: Education for a Changing World. The Twitter handle is @education2040 hashtag #FutureFrontiers or email us at futurefrontiers@det.nsw.edu.au. Listen free to Charlie's Future wherever you download your favourite podcasts. Thanks so much for joining us.

This is Charlie's Future.