This report, entitled “Curriculum Flexibility and Autonomy”, produced by the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, is one in a series of six reports presenting, for the first time, international analyses on curriculum with the aim of supporting countries in their curriculum reform efforts.
Curriculum reform is pivotal because it acts as a significant driver of student performance and well-being. A well-designed curriculum ensures consistent quality across different educational settings and age groups, contributing to equity in education. It provides a framework that supports teachers, facilitates parent-teacher interactions, and maintains educational continuity across various levels. Moreover, curriculum reform is essential for keeping the educational content relevant and responsive to societal changes and innovations. Without periodic updates, a curriculum risks stifling creativity and not aligning with the students' and society’s evolving needs.
Curriculum reform has proved to be a real challenge for countries at each phase of its unfolding with unintended consequences been experienced from design to implementation to its evaluation. While remaining a domestic issue, policy makers have gradually come to the realisation that there is much to learn about how to successfully manage “curriculum change” from other countries’ experiences. This realisation, coupled with the aspiration of governments to find some common language to articulate a broader vision of education to inform future curricula, are at the origin of the OECD Future of Education 2030 project.
The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (E2030) project, which will evolve into Education 2040, was launched in 2015 to help countries adapt their education systems to better meet the demands of the 21st century. Specifically, the project aims to support countries in their efforts to respond to the following far-reaching questions:
“What” questions - what kinds of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values are necessary for students and teachers to understand, engage with and shape a changing world towards a better future in 2030?
“How” questions - how to design learning environments that can foster these competencies, i.e. how to design and implement future-oriented curricula?
The answer to the first question has developed into a comprehensive future-oriented learning framework, the OECD Learning Compass 2030, which sets out an aspirational vision for the future of education grounded on the notions of student agency, co-agency, and well-being as powerful means for positive transformation in education and in society. Specifically, student agency refers to the belief that one can shape one’s own future rather than being shaped by it.
The OECD Learning Compass is neither an assessment framework nor a curriculum framework. To successfully foster the competencies it sets out, education systems need to design future-oriented curricula that are appropriate and relevant to their local context. This is part of the “how” question, which the E2030 project addresses by conducting rigorous international curriculum analysis (i.e. descriptive, rather than prescriptive, with the goal of supporting curriculum change processes that are more evidence-based). This has resulted in a series of six thematic reports exploring key policy challenges faced by governments related to curriculum reform. The present report focuses on “curriculum flexibility and autonomy”, an important aspect of curriculum re-design and implementation. The other reports in the series are:
What Students Learn Matters: Towards a 21st Century Curriculum: Managing time lag between today’s curriculum and future needs.
Curriculum Overload: A Way Forward: Addressing curriculum overload.
Adapting Curriculum to Bridge Equity Gaps: Towards an Inclusive Curriculum: Ensuring equity through curriculum innovations.
Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum: Shaping a Better Future: Embedding values in the curriculum.
Adopting an ecosystem approach to curriculum redesign and implementation (OECD, forthcoming).
The international curriculum analyses also includes subject-specific curriculum analyses, with a 2019 report on physical and health education and a forthcoming report on mathematics curriculum document analysis. For more detailed information on the project and the six reports outlined above, please refer to the Overview brochure of the series.