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INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
And this is the same for degrees.
University teachers and employers say
to us, ‘Gosh, this person's got a degree,
but it doesn't actually say what they really
know and can do, other than that they
did poorly or badly in a couple of subject
examinations.’
And students say, ‘Look, these credentials
don't reflect who I am.’ So that's what
we've noticed.
What skills do students need to be futureproofed
for the 21st century, according to
the report?
The skills that we're talking about here
that are really necessary, but that are not
really on the credential, are pretty easy to
identify, although there's a lot of different
language that's used to describe them.
People will have heard about soft skills,
which employers often talk about, or 21st
century skills. Or in the schooling sector,
they talk about general capabilities and in
the higher education sector, they talk about
graduate qualities.
What they're talking about is things
like the capacity to work in teams and
collaborate: communication skills of all
sorts. You have to be able to communicate
through lots of different avenues these
days. Things like critical thinking, problem
solving, and creativity and adaptability.
I actually call them learning skills because
they're the skills you need to learn and keep
on learning through your school, through
your tertiary education, through life when
you don't have a teacher hanging over your
shoulder telling you exactly what to do and
exactly how to do it. These are the skills that
will set students up to thrive in whatever
they're doing in the future.
Will there be a whole new range of jobs that
require these skills?
I guess you just have to look at the situation
we're in now. There are things coming at
us thick and fast, whether it's bush fires or
COVID or jobs being taken over by artificial
intelligence or jobs disappearing and
reappearing in different forms. The whole
idea is that we need flexible people who
can respond to whatever comes down the
line at them.
And things are probably going to come
quite thick and fast because we're in the
digital era and technology is changing very
quickly. Social structures and patterns are
changing very quickly. They've always been
important. They're not new skills. They've
always been required by humans, but the
difference between previous centuries
and this century is that the recognition is
everyone needs them, and that they can
be learned, and that it's important for our
educational system to allow students to
learn them when they're at school and to
show the degree to which they have, which
is where we come back to the credentials.
We need people to be flexible, creative,
communicative, collaborative, and able to
work with people from different cultures
and different language groups. These are
skills required by everyone if they're going
to thrive, and that's the challenge.
A lot of kids hate school and usually you
find them at the back of the classroom.
They grudgingly do what the teacher does.
And what we need to do is find ways to
get them engaged, to get them learning,
to get them to be able to be as creative,
communicative and collaborative as we
know they can be if we set up the learning
environment properly.
One of the challenges, I think,
is identifying that students from
disadvantaged backgrounds who are
normally the ones who drop out of school
quickly are the ones that will benefit
most from having a special focus on
these skills.
What are your thoughts on criticisms that
many report cards give parents no useful
information?
I had the privilege of reading my sevenyear-old
granddaughter's report card,
which she proudly brought home from
school yesterday. And in fact, the grade
two teacher had given quite a lot of
attention to these sorts of skills. And so
do kindy teachers, because learning to
cooperate, share and communicate are
fundamental at that age. I think teachers in
the early years pay considerable attention
to this, but they do it informally and it's
normally reported to parents as sentences
on a report card.
By the time you move up the school,
up into post-compulsory, so years 11 and
12, and then into the tertiary sector, that
sort of reflection on the students more or
less drops off and it's assumed, I guess,
that if you get, say a high A pass score,
that you are amazingly collaborative, and
cooperative and critical, and so forth, when
in fact that might not be the case.
I think the real challenge gets bigger and
bigger as you go up the schooling and
People are telling us
there's a real mismatch
between what they want
to teach students … and
what's assessed and what's
credentialed.
education system, because things need
to be more formalised and it needs to be
captured and represented in a more formal
manner. And that's quite a big challenge.
Do you think the idea of a learner profile,
that really gives a holistic representation
of what a student can do, will take hold
across Australia?
That is the question. And like most other
people, I don't have a crystal ball. But if I
was a betting person, I would say that it
will catch on because I've met very few
people who think it's a bad idea to be able
to represent in very broad detail what a
student knows and what they can do, and
who they are as a result of their education.
The challenge comes in how to do that.
And I think there's a desire to do it, the
question is how to do it. And it's actually
tougher than it looks on the surface,
because to be useful for, say, school leavers
or graduates from tertiary education, these
things have to be done carefully.
One of the strengths of the Australian
education system is that the assessments
are of high quality, they're regulated and
there's a series of mechanisms in place so
we can trust the credentials. To put a trust
factor underneath the assessment of general
capabilities or learning skills or soft skills,
whatever you want to call them, is harder
because you need to work out how you can
ensure comparability. For instance, is one
person's excellent collaborator the same as
the next institution's judgement of that?
There needs to be some work done
at the professional level to put in some
mechanisms to make sure the assessments
in credentials in this kind of area can be as
trusted as the more traditional ones, which
we need also.
That's the challenge and our report
looked at a number of institutions that are
really working on this and what they've
done to ensure the trust factor. And I think
that will take a little while because it's a fairly
big shift for the profession. ■
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