Global Education Leaders’ Partnership

This article is part of the Spinwatch privatisation of Schools Portal project.

Global Education Leaders’ Partnership (sometimes referred to as Global Education Leaders Program), or GELP is a group of education reformers operating in and across countries, with a particular focus on pushing the digitisation of learning.

GELP was initiated in 2009, and then funded and, until 2011 managed by, the technology giant Cisco. It should be seen as part of a much wider effort by Cisco (and other technology interests) to reform education systems around the world through technology (see Cisco profile for more of its lobbying for education reform).

Since 2011, GELP has been run by the UK-based Innovation Unit.

It says it is ‘dedicated to reimagining the future of education at a global scale’.

A Cisco project

GELP began life as a series of ‘white papers’ for technology multinational Cisco.

According to Cisco, it 'launched the Global Education Leaders Program (GELP) in September 2009 to challenge and support education leaders ready to implement the vision outlined in the white paper Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century.

The publication, published the previous year, was described by Cisco as 'only one contribution to the flood of new thinking that is coursing through education systems in every part of the world.' Following this, Cisco brought together 'opinion leaders, educators, and politicians from developed and developing nations' to discuss its education reform ideas. 'Our aim is collectively to refine a vision for 21st century learning, and to gather the best and most powerful insights into how that vision can be realized,' it said in 2008. Cisco's thinking was subsequently published at: www.transformglobaleducation.org (no longer live; accessible via Wayback).

According to Cisco, the core ideas of Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century were initiated by the company's internal education strategists, but it also worked with, among others, Michael Barber and Tony Mackay. It also consulted with CoSN (the Consortium for School Networking), P21 (Partnership for 21st Learning), and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) in the US.

In July 2011, Cisco transitioned ownership and management of GELP to the the Innovation Unit.

Lobbying for education reform

GELP describes itself as a ‘community of key education system leaders, policy-makers, thought-leaders and world-class consultants collaborating to transform education at local, national and international levels.'

Main objectives

GELP lists its aims as:

• 'accelerate and sustain transformation' in the education systems in which it works;
• develop 'transformational capacity' in education 'system leaders' in these countries;
• define and lobby for its vision of '21st century' education; and
• manage the network of education leaders and 'change agents' pushing reform around the world.

Where it works

To date, GELP has worked with policy makers in the following jurisdictions

• Finland
• Brazil
• India
• South Korea
• Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

• England
• Victoria, Australia
• British Columbia, Canada
• Ontario, Canada
• New Zealand

USA

• New York City
• Colorado
• Kentucky
• Council of Chief State School Officers Innovation Lab Network of US states.

Modus operandi

According to GELP, every six months GELP teams from countries around the world gather to share ideas and compare notes.

It says that the first three years of the programme were spent building this community of reformers and refining their 'vision for the future of education'.

More recently the focus for GELP and individual country teams has been on 'dealing with practical challenges as they move from ideation to implementation and transform their education systems for real.

How to reform public education systems

GELP has come up with a blueprint – a series of strategies – for reforming education systems.

These strategies are outlined in a 2013 publication, Redesigning Education, which, GELP hopes, will also be used by countries as yet untouched by GELP.

GELP’s ‘roadmap’ for radical reform of whole education systems is made up of the following components:

• create narratives and messages for why reform is needed
• build an ‘ecosystem’ of different actors to support and grow reform efforts
• mobilise demand for new forms of education among students, parents and teachers
• create networks, or chains of schools
• develop a technology strategy
• government to introduce policies that ‘enable’ reform to happen: these include policies on:
  • curriculum
  • assessment
  • accountability
  • funding
  • teacher recruitment and training

Taken together these strategies, according to GELP, ‘present a very different approach to system-wide change and scale from conventional means of transformation’, presumably government-led, top-down reform.

'Rather than the trench warfare often associated with system reform, this approach relies more on organic growth, akin to the building of a social movement'

Such ‘campaign efforts’ have obvious benefits over government mandated reform, says GELP: ‘it provides support to those struggling with the inevitable barriers and resistances’ and gives reformers ‘a common cause’.

Construct a narrative

'All jurisdictions start their journeys by building and communicating a powerful case for change... without creating a sense of urgency, transformation will always take second place to the daily pressures of current practice.’

Coming up with this 'compelling case for change' is the ‘critical first step’, according to GELP. It ‘creates receptivity’.

Taking lessons from the public relations industry, GELP says the narrative needs to:

• ‘combine an emotional and a rational appeal': personal stories as well as statistics;
• address global factors but relate them to local conditions
• critique the current system as being appropriate to the past, but inadequate for the future
• present a truly inspirational vision of what transformed education could be like
• appeal to a range of audiences – from policy-makers to parents – and use different formats, such as ‘short arresting videos’.

Common elements in the ‘cases for change’ developed by GELP jurisdictions include:

• 'International comparisons of school performance': we see this in the constant focus by governments on PISA scores, which report on the performance of students across countries
• 'Existing educational inequalities': for example, reformers in New York have focused on inequalities between different social groups. While there is obvious truth in this as a problem, it is little evidence that the reformers' solution can solve it. A cynical reading would be that this is simply a communications strategy, rather than being based in reality. As Terry Moe and John Chubb outline in their 2009 book Liberating Learning, market reformers since 1990 ‘have focused most of their reform efforts on poor and minority parents in the inner cities.’ The ‘modern arguments’ for school privatisation are around ‘social equity’, not ‘free markets’.
• 'Student disengagement and dissatisfaction': Pearson, for example, surveys pupils on student satisfaction, particularly in relation to technology use.
• 'The economic and social demands for new skills and behaviours': there has been a huge surge in public debates around ‘21st century skills’ and what schools should teach in an age when information can just be Googled; as well as the need for schools to foster positive behaviour traits, such as ‘grit’, that children will need to cultivate in order to succeed.
• 'Insights from the learning sciences': take the ‘early learning’ market, for instance, which according to investors, is where ‘smart brain research/neuroscience is actually being applied to learning products and services’, a market that one investor describes in 2014 as ‘hot’.
• 'The possibilities opened up by new technologies and social media'. The Education Foundation's Facebook Guide for Educators, funded by Facebook, for example, makes the case for Facebook as a 'vital tool for teaching and

learning in the 21st century and for making education more social'.

What’s clear is that these narratives don’t have to be true: they are stories to sell a proposition, although, GELP notes, they will be ‘augmented with evidence... as transformation proceeds’.

Build an ‘ecosystem’

'As the compelling case for change becomes more widely promulgated, more and more educators and entrepreneurs are called to action.'

GELP's next reform strategy is to build what it calls 'nested communities' to spread the message, share knowledge and support each other.

These communities incorporate: education system leaders, including politicians and officials, companies invested in education technology, edtech investors, think tanks and lobby groups, 'innovation labs', individual developers, early adopter teachers, and others.

GELP cites itself as an example. Its 'nested community' includes the Innovation Unit started by the UK's Department for Education; corporate and philanthropic funders Cisco, Promethean, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; as well as wider networks that include a vast number of edtech champions, that includes: Nesta, RSA, Education Foundation, Demos, McKinsey & Company, World Summit on Innovation in Education, OECD, Asia Education Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and many others.

Networks like these form a crucial part of the 'social movements' GELP sees as necessary for radically reconstructing the social reality of education. Other 'nested communities' cited by GELP include the iZone, a 'community of innovation' in New York City, which has been supported by Google, as well as communities in Brazil, Australia and British Columbia.

These communities are supported and sustained through conferences, websites, newsletters, workshops, social media, 'teacher meet-ups', and hashtags.

GELP is excited about what it sees as a growing global community.

'German ornithologists and animal behaviorists use the word zugunruhe to describe the restlessness to move of flocks of birds and herds of animals before migration. Throughout the world, individuals and organisations are displaying this zugunruhe with regard to educational transformation.'

Funding

GELP says it is, or has been, supported by the following companies and foundations: *Innovation Unit

• Ellen Koshland Family Fund
• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Cisco
• Promethean

GELP also says it ‘draws on specialist contributions from a wide range of partners, including to date [2013]:

• Hay Group
• Harvard Graduate School of Education
• McKinsey & Company
• Bridge
• Asia Education Foundation

People

GELP refers to its people as a 'faculty'.

• David Albury
• Valerie Hannon: Co-Founder of the Innovation Unit UK and founding member and Co-Chair of GELP; senior consultant to the OECD Innovative Learning Environments program; regular contributor to the World Summit on Innovation in Education (WISE).
• Tony Mackay
• David Istance
• Kathe Kirby
• Albert Bertani
• Keren Caple
• Lynn van der Elst

Steering group

• Lynn Olson, advisor on Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation US ‘college ready’ programme.