Successful economies encourage innovation. Successful employees know how to develop new ideas and ways of working. Education needs to prepare students for working lives that will require them to consider multiple perspectives and generate novel solutions for complex problems. Learning to use knowledge creatively and critically is key to mastering subjects and disciplines. The OECD Innovation Strategy for Education and Training team explores approaches to equipping people with innovation skills and supporting innovation and continuous improvement in education systems.
Innovations in education and skills
Innovation is a key driver of growth and wellbeing. Creating an innovation-friendly ecosystem is key to creating education systems fit for the future. This means nurturing innovation skills like creativity and critical thinking and ensuring the main drivers of innovation remain active: namely, individual, organisational and system learning.
Key messages
Whilst most agree innovation skills are important, too little is known about what this means for everyday teaching and assessment. Education’s ability to foster and monitor progress is limited by a lack of shared practical knowledge about how innovation skills materialise at different development stages. Education systems have rarely established ways to consistently nurture them and to assess them formally. Working with member and non-member countries, the OECD is developing tools to make these skills more visible and measurable for teachers, students and policy makers. These tools seek to encompass innovation skills and the subject knowledge included in the curriculum.
More broadly, measuring innovation in education and understanding its drivers and obstacles is essential to improving the quality of the education sector – and of specific educational establishments. Education systems need better methods to measure whether pedagogical and administrative practices are changing in the expected direction. They need more understanding of what it means to have a positive innovation culture that supports innovation. The OECD aims to help policy makers and institutional leaders understand which factors of innovation they can influence to support educational objectives. This can be accomplished at the system or institutional level, as is often the case in other sectors, or through specific innovation projects.
Context
The move to competency-based curricula
Many education systems, schools and higher education institutions across the OECD have moved towards competency-based curricula. They focus on what students can do with their knowledge, not just on what they know. In addition to developing knowledge, developing competences that help students deepen their knowledge and tackle complex challenges with creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication has become foundational in education.
Percentage of jurisdictions where the following domains/school subjects refer to creativity in system-level curricula or learning standards, by level of education (2022)
Professional learning and training for innovation
Teachers and institutional leaders also need innovation skills. Institutions need to innovate to keep pace with rapid changes in society, from the rise of Artificial Intelligence to the emergence of new professions. In turn, professional learning needs to adapt to meet these changing needs and support education actors to improve teaching and practices.
Teachers’ beliefs about creativity and critical thinking in school
