Education leadership goes global

by John Craig

The narrative about education leadership is increasingly a global one and so it’s great that our work on educational leadership is going global too. Here is a talk by Cisco’s Michael Stephenson about the future of the learning society, delivered at the first event of the Global Education Leaders Program in New York

He argues that demographic change, globalisation and new technology are creating a perfect storm that makes education as it stands unsustainable and ineffective. And he describes a learning society – Education 3.0 – in which how well you can learn trumps what you know and in which schools are just one among many sites of learning. As learning becomes ever more ambient, he argues, the role for schools radically changes.

The Global Education Leaders’ Programme is genuinely ambitious programme, seeking to enable collaborative leadership development for some of the most significant leaders from seven constituencies, including England, New York and Ontario. And we are really proud that the Innovation Unit is part of the team designing and delivering the programme, alongside such luminaries as Mckinsey and Harvard.

And it links powerfully to the work we have done on a national scale in educational leadership – for example, supporting the Fellowship for the National Leaders in Education. And now our aim is to bring home what we are learning at the cutting edge of leadership development and to apply it in localities. We are now offering Leadership of Innovation Residentials to local public sector professionals, enabling them to shape policy in there own local authorities and Local Strategic Partnerships.