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 modestly 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 argued that change is needed to address inequalities between different social groups. While there is obvious truth in this as a problem, there's 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 – they argue – 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 the creation of 'nested communities' to spread the message, share knowledge and support each other.

These communities include: education system leaders, including politicians and officials, companies invested in education technology, edtech investors, think tanks and lobby groups, individual developers, early adopter teachers, as well as 'innovation labs' like the Innovation Unit that hosts GELP, and others.

Networks are supported and sustained through conferences, websites, newsletters, workshops, social media, 'teacher meet-ups', and hashtags. Corporate donations appear vital to their existance.

GELP cites itself as an example of a 'nested community'. Organisations in GELP's community include: the Innovation Unit started by the UK's Department for Education and Nesta, which was established by Tony Blair's government in 1998; 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: Google, Microsoft, RSA, Education Foundation, Facebook, Demos, Nominet Trust, Pearson, McKinsey & Company, World Summit on Innovation in Education, OECD, Asia Education Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and many others.

'Innovation intermediaries', such as the Innovation Unit, of which GELP is a part, and Nesta, also part of its network, are seen as crucial in organising these networks. They also claim to be expert in 'system change'. Nesta, for example, produced a 'Discussion Paper on Systems Innovation, which points to the importance of the role of such intermediaries (it also incidentally identifies education as in need of 'system change'): 'Their overtly visionary work helps to clarify a desired end point', it says. 'Intermediaries of this kind can also orchestrate advocacy and campaigns – focused on key points of leverage, such as laws, or corporate behaviour – and deliver demonstrations of alternatives,' it adds. Nesta says it can help 'large firms', foundations and 'policy makers' 'think through their place within systems changes'.

GELP sees these 'nested communities' as an essential part of what it calls the 'social movement' for reform (the other components being chains of independently-run schools, parent/pupil demand, and a changed workforce - see below for more on these). However, this movement for education reform appears unlike most other social movements, such as the women's movement, or the Labour movement. GELP, for example, is corporately funded; it directs from the centre; and appears not to enjoy popular support. Also, its aims could be seen as more beneficial to corporate interests, particularly the edtech interests funding it, rather than pupils and wider society, particularly given the lack of evidence that the reforms it advocates raise standards.

Other nested communities cited by GELP include New York City's iZone360 project, a 'community of innovation', which has been supported by Google among others and which has had substantial input from the UK's Innovation Unit and its head, David Albury. Alongside John White, a promient US education reformer, the team helped the City's education policy-makers come up with an 'innovation strategy', 'developed the overall design and innovation process and supported the community'. GELP has also helped to develop communities in Brazil, Australia and British Columbia.

Networks – like the one dubbed iZone360 – form a crucial part of the 'social movements' GELP sees as necessary for radically reconstructing the social reality of education.

GELP is excited about what it sees as this 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.'

Mobilise demand

'Students, their parents, carers and communities... enaging with them to mobilize demand for 21st century learning can be a powerful way of surmounting barriers, countering opposition and overcoming institutional inertia.'

GELP sees the radical reform of schools only happening with the involvement of 'users' (and 'user networks').

Students and parents need to be 'active agents in building the case for change' it says. It uses the example of what it sees as equivalent groups in the field of medicine: 'a major factor in the speed at which new drugs come into widespread use is the strength of the relevant patient networks and organisations.' It is commonly known, however, that many such networks are more accurately described as third party lobbyists funded by pharmaceutical companies to promote the uptake of their drugs.

GELP suggests that reformers need to mobilise similar 'user groups' in education to call for radical changes in schools.

Create 'choice' through school chains

'We have started to see the formation in many countries of new networks, or chains of schools – some based on new models of learning, for example Kunskapsskolan, High Tech High and Big Picture – and many based on refinements of traditional models of education... [that] taken together, create choice within an education system.'

According to GELP, school choice is another key driver of radical education reform. For example, independently-run school networks, like academy chains in the UK, can scale up innovations. A schools market will also allow for 'outdated models' of education to be displaced, says GELP.

GELP also notes that 'large commercial players' who were not previously in education, 'are now developing or using technologies to become education providers in their own right'. School chains are sometimes partners in this process, it explains. GELP doesn't elaborate further, but may be describing deals like the one between Google and the UK's largest academy chain, AET. It adopted Google Apps for Education and cloud service across its 68 schools in 2012.

Develop a technology strategy

'Just as plumbing and wiring are essential and taken for granted in a modern house, so availability of digital resources, easy access to a world of content knowledge and mechanisms for collaboration are vital underpinnings of learning in the 21st century'

Another must have for any reform effort is a technology strategy. As GELP puts it, a technology strategy is a 'unique potential accelerator of transformation'.

A technology strategy, according to GELP, could include a number of different elements, including:

• Support for 'real-time, formative assessment', pupil profile building, and data-based decision-making at the pupil, lesson and school level
• Support for digital learning resources, including games
• Develop teachers' and pupils' capabilities in using technology
• Better data management systems in schools
• Adequate broadband in schools, 'with the requisite privacy, safety and secruity'

Much of this is already happening in schools around the world.

In the UK, although there are moans from the edtech industry that a proper strategy for digitising schools is lacking, 'enabling' policies and other initiatives are being introduced that lead us there. In England, for example,

• Education secretary Nicky Morgan’s speech at the BETT edtech show in 2016 flagged up:
  • the government's investment in broadband in schools
  • its work to improve digital fluency among pupils with the introduction of computer science on the curriculum, and the government and private sector investment in training teachers to teach it
  • its support for schools to improve how they capture and use data – attendance, attainment and pupil progress – and build pupil profiles, plus how government is piloting new systems for data collection in schools (with common standards) that will help edtech firms move pupil 'within and between schools'; and
  • government's support for online, computerised and adaptive testing. This is also evident from an announcement by Morgan in January 2016 that children will have to take 'high-stakes' online times-tables tests at the end of primary school.

• Matthew Hancock, ex-skills minister underlined the government's support for technology in education in his BETT speech in 2014. He also talked of the 'big culture change coming' in teaching (see GELP on the changing role of teachers, below).

• Former education secretary Michael Gove's speech at the BETT 2012 pointed in the same direction. 'Technology in schools will no longer be micromanaged by Whitehall,' he said. 'This isn’t a finished strategy... but it shows our ambition.' His ambitions for technology in schools included:
  • training teachers so that they 'feel confident using technological tools and resources... and can adapt to new technologies as they emerge'
  • integrating and embedding technology across the whole curriculum.
  • getting pupils to learn computer science

Government to introduce 'enabling' policies

As Michael Gove has said on many occasions, government should not attempt to micromanage technology in schools, concluding that it leads to government investing vast sums in what soon became outdated technology.

However, as GELP outlines in its reform strategy, government does need to take action to 'enable' the digitisation of education.

'The fundamental question for politicians and government officials is whether current policies enable or hinder, support or impede... Are the funding and accountability regimes, the policies for teacher recruitment and development and the curriculum and assessment frameworks conducive to, or barriers to transformation?'

GELP's key 'enabling' policy areas are:

• Curriculum: Curricula can be standardised, digitised and even scripted, as is the case with, for example, Bridge International Academies as a way of stimulating change. The GELP team, for example, helped develop a strategy for digitizing textbooks and curriculum materials in South Korea 'as a stimulus to the creation and adoption of new forms of learning'. Extensive campaigns to introduce computer science and coding onto national curricula are also leading schools to favour introduce more technology in teaching. As the UK’s edtech lobby group, Edtech UK, says: 'The introduction of the computing curriculum into every state school in England has accelerated the growth of interest in new approaches to technology from schools.'

• Assessment: ‘New technologies offer huge opportunities to transform assessment’, says GELP. An alternative way of seeing it is that standardised and increasingly online, adaptive testing ‘has led to the current boom in ed-tech’, writes HackedEducation’s Audrey Waters. 'Assessment is perhaps the most cross cutting enabler of transformations in learning processes,' says GELP funder, Promethean. The massive growth in standardised assessment around the world (tied to accountability, below) has been ‘the most-salient‘ education reform in the US in terms of ‘opening doors for private enterprise’, according to one influential edtech investor.

• Accountability: This, twinned with standardised testing, has been a major reform theme in schools (alongside marketisation and 'choice'). It focuses on holding schools and teachers to account through the collection of ever increasing amounts of data. It makes schools more business-like and 'results oriented', albeit based on an increasingly narrow set of 'outcomes', like test scores, diminishing the purpose of education.

• Funding: To benefit alternative education providers, particularly virtual education providers, governments need to stop funding institutions – schools – and allocate funding on a per pupil basis. This allows for a market in education, with funding following the pupil and the pupil free to choose whatever provision they want.

• Teacher recruitment and training': ‘Workforce development is the bedrock of transformation’, according to GELP.

Change the teachers

GELP calls on governments to reform teacher training and professional development programmes, arguing that ‘teacher colleges have not significantly updated curriculum to include a meaningful and incorporated use of technology’.

'System leaders need to engage deeply with departments of education in universities and other training bodies,' it says. 'Some have proved to be seat of resistance rather than agents of change.' Where this has happened, and teaching training bodies have not got with the programme, it notes that 'chains of schools have broken away and built their own' teacher training programmes.

'The role of teachers, their identity as teachers, their relationships with students and learning, their working and learning habits, all have to change fundamentally... No matter how compelling the case for change and how inspiring the vision, without developing the capacity of the workforce, anxiety, frustration and resistance will grow.'

Create a 'leadership movement'

'Education systems have proven to be very resistant to change... the journey to 21st century learning is strewn with obstacles, setbacks, dead ends and pitfalls. System leaders must find ways to connect and align people behind the overall vision and pull the right levers and strategies to move the work forward. This requires focusing on leadership as a movement...'

Some of the most exciting and successful leaders driving education reform, says GELP, are not educators at all.

What they must be, though, is 'movers and shapers': 'entrepreneurial'; 'technology brokers'; 'willing to confront and change government policies that stifle innovation'; 'courageous'; 'culturally competent'; 'politically savvy... using their knowledge about power and influence to... get things done; people who understand how 'information from other jurisdictions helps them legitimize the political license they need to make changes in their own system'; and who are able to 'build horizontal linkages... which engage government leaders, social entrepreneurs, business executives, researchers and civil society leaders... to build circles of support in pursuit of system transformation.'

Vision for education

GELP are 'thought leaders' in education reform. However, pinning down its thoughts on what a reformed education system would look like isn't easy. Words used by GELP to describe its vision include: 'open', 'diverse', 'long term-focused', 'equity-centered', 'teacher-powered', ' collaborative' and 'humanizing'.

A 2015 publication, How School System Leaders Can Create the Conditions for System-wide Innovation by GELP's Valerie Hannon, with Tom Beresford at the Innovation Unit and Joe Hallgarten of the RSA, which was published as part of the WISE Research Series, provides some insights.

It is, however, a report of contradictory positions. While, on the one hand, the report echoes concerns expressed about the privatisation and commercialisation of education through technology, the vision it advocates, while not entirely clear, appears not to address these concerns.

Reducing the role of the state

The report, echoing widespread criticism of market-reforms of schools, rejects the current dominant reform agenda: what the report refers to as the ‘market constellation’ of competition, choice and high-stakes accountability' imposed by governments.

'The current dominant model of education ‘reform’, a twenty-year New Public Management (NPM) paradigm, is acting as a barrier to the education system that learners need... choice and competition do not appear to improve outcomes for learners, and schools are often given the types of autonomy that do not matter to outcomes... The current methods of education reform are not delivering the kinds of learners, teachers, leaders and institutions we need.'

Too much command and control from government is stifling a more radical reform agenda, in other words. It calls for the 'increasingly dominant model of education reform around the world' to evolve into a new reform agenda rather than become entrenched'.

However, in contrast to critics who reject the current reforms in favour of a properly funded public school system, GELP's solution is to radically reduce the role of the state in providing and regulating education.

'Governments would shift from deliverers and excessive controllers to facilitators of the system... a stewardship role as enablers and brokers, rather than providers and regulators.'

GELP does not appear to support a total absence of government involvement. Education, it notes, is going to be hit by a for-profit 'tsunami' of edtech. Government will be needed to ensure 'fundamental entitlements', 'equity', and 'safety and safeguarding', it says.

In addition, GELP argues that leaving the 'transformation [of education] to market forces carries significant risks'. Instead, an 'intentional effort should be made to reshape the architecture of public investment in learning and encouraging the creation of eco-systems (of both providers and users) which are more open, inclusive and diverse, with new learning patterns.'

Technology driving 'innovation'/reform

Digital technology is by no means the only 'innovation' GELP sees changing schools, but it appears to underpin much of its vision for 'transformed learning'.

The authors, however, acknowledge concerns that edtech's role in raising standards is 'evidence-light': 'innovations' in schools appear 'prone to poor quality relationships with evidence'; 'too many have failed to develop an understanding of the impact they are having on outcomes'. 'Evaluations' the report states, 'have tended to be far too success and advocacy-focused'. In other words, a lot of evidence on edtech is PR.

At the same time, however, the report promotes many of these technologies, championing the shift to data-driven schooling and technology in teaching: 'the emergence of big data, predictive and analytical techniques promise disruptive innovation on a large scale', it says.

'Whether it is software which helps schools, school administrators and the government to improve learning through the detailed analysis of academic data, or hardware like tablets that opens up access to online learning resources, the digital revolution is playing its part [in education 'innovation']'

Diminished role for teachers

The report presents an equally contradictory view of the role of teachers in future.

It echoes the arguments of critics of current reform efforts, and calls for the reinstatment of teacher agency: 'their real sense of self-efficacy and capacity to act, not just their autonomy – their supposed freedoms, must be re-established and nurtured'.

The authors' solution, however, is prescriptive and appears to diminish the profession much more fundamentally. It calls for a 'new pipeline of educators' with 'new skillets', and highlights the way the 'conventional role of ‘teacher as learning designer' is being replaced with technology.

While it explicitly states that the 'role of teacher should not be diminished', it encourages teachers to embrace what appear to be diminshed roles: 'New roles are emerging such as internship coordinators; project work facilitators; game-based learning teaching faculty; blended learning program directors.'

The problem, it claims, is 'the deadening grip of many monopoly providers of teacher training'.

GELP funders

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.