Schools are facing a looming teacher shortage and they are finding the quality of graduates from teaching degrees “somewhat unpredictable”. What is the answer?

Students will need global competence to engage in international collaborations in fields such as science, health, and technology, navigate an internationally interdependent economic and political landscape, and tackle global issues like climate change, Research indicates that these practices can be adapted for use in a diversity of schools across various countries, which makes their potential for impact “quite inspiring”.

Instead of classes or exams, students will complete two terms of set projects before developing solutions to their problems, building portfolios to apply to university or having the choice to pitch ideas directly to businesses. By term three, students will be constructing their own projects and working with teachers and mentors within the college and across industry.

With the exam approach, we don’t know much about the student, we only know their score. Reliance on exam as sole criteria for entry skews the student population to a less diverse group of students than is appropriate for university. The Big Picture programme is a new direction.

Despite occasional bursts of rhetoric about developing that mysterious beast ‘the world class workforce’, the goal of most education ministers turns out to be beating Singapore or Finland in the tables of PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment: in other words, to keep racking up the test scores, without stopping to think what those scores are meant to indicate. Examination results are proxies for our underlying values and intentions, not ends in themselves. Most of what kids learn in school they forget within weeks of having taken the test. As Einstein said, ‘Education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learnt in school.’ So what are the valuable residues which we want for all our young people after those 12 long years in school?