G20 countries must ensure that children and youth, especially vulnerable ones, have the opportunities to acquire and develop the interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive skills for citizenship and work during early childhood, primary and secondary education. Basic education is one of the few paths that vulnerable children have out of poverty (World Bank 2013). Thus, in order for G20 countries narrow the Education-Workforce Divide, it is pivotal that school systems become malleable to societal and market signals and prepare students to contribute civically and economically to their communities.

It is in this context that curriculum reform and teacher professional development become central to close the Education-Workforce Divide. With the support of high-quality resources in schools – especially a curriculum that is able to develop the whole child and teacher professional development tailored to developing skills – children and youth may become more likely to deal with the complexity of today’s and tomorrow’s world and actively contribute to the advancement of G20 economies and democracies.

On one hand, the curriculum establishes the kinds of knowledge and competencies to be mastered for civic and economic participation, as well as the types of activities that children and youth may experience during their school life cycle to develop these same competencies. On the other hand, teacher professional development prepares teachers to bring this curriculum to action and foster these competencies equitably in classrooms. However, curriculum redesign processes and teacher professional development mechanisms are diverse and may not always lead to these expected outcomes. Moreover, incongruent and divergent evaluation mechanisms may hinder the process of collaborative learning across G20 countries.

Consequently, supporting functions must be in place to guarantee that curriculum is designed to avoid content overload while ensuring quality content and equitable implementation, in addition to timely meeting society’s social and economic needs. Moreover, teacher professional development must be aligned with national and subnational curricula, providing teachers with time, teaching resources and space for collaboration to hone teaching practices that can truly enhance and shape students’ knowledge and skills, in addition to evaluation mechanisms that can inform such practices across G20 countries creating a school system learning cycle.

Supporting Functions to Foster

 School’s Malleability and Mitigate Future Inequalities

 Vision 1 – Supporting Function One: Curriculum Redesign

In order to map societal and market needs and technological advancements, government entities, such as the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labor and Ministry of Innovation and Technology of G20 countries, should articulate with one another and integrate a joint committee, workforce or entity, together with civil society and other key stakeholders, to reach out to labor markets and map the demand for different types of knowledge, skills and technological advancements.

Such committee must be responsible to inform current and future curriculum redesign initiatives carried out by the Ministry of Education; benchmark local and national standards to ensure quality of curriculum content; curate the curriculum to avoid content overload and to allow for differentiation; align national and subnational curriculum for equitable implementation, and provide ongoing technical assistance to such efforts.

Once the curriculum is being implemented, the committee must reconvene, especially after the first cohort of students experiencing the new curriculum finish the basic school cycle. It should study the educational outcomes from these efforts through formative and summative assessments, map novel economic and social trends, compile lessons learned and amend the curriculum and teaching resources. Lessons regarding the national redesigning of curriculum to transform school systems at scale may be shared with G20 countries, which may or may not be carrying out their own curriculum reforms, to improve their practices and inform policy making on an ongoing basis.

 Vision 2 – Supporting Function Two: Teacher Professional Development

For teachers to bring the curriculum to action in classrooms, and allow every student at every classroom to develop the skills and competencies for the future of work and citizenship, it is pivotal that they also hone these skills on an ongoing basis, learning to cultivate experiences in classrooms to develop these skills in their students too. To accomplish this, effective teacher professional development must be in place from the moment teachers enter the profession. This is the lever of change that allows teachers to evaluate their practice and learn from peers what can be most effective to foster the process of learning and skills development.

The teacher professional development must be content focused, incorporate active learning as part of their pedagogy, supports collaboration, uses models of effective practice, provides coaching and expert support, offers feedback and reflection and be of sustained duration (Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner, 2017). Moreover, as previously suggested, teacher professional development must be aligned with curriculum and evaluation systems. For example, through collaboration – the act of working together with others – teachers may be able to develop their leadership and communication skills while taking advantage of opportunities to learn new teaching sequences that are known to be effective with students, as evidenced by their own evaluation systems. Each G20 country must evaluate whether the professional development in their schools possess these ingredients for success and, most importantly, assess whether these initiatives are yielding the expected results in terms of students learning and skills development. Such lessons may be shared with other countries to improve their practices and inform policy making on an ongoing basis.

Vision 3 – Supporting Function Three: Evaluation Mechanisms

 One of the greatest challenges facing G20 countries is to create cohesion by aligning measurement parameters to inform practice and monitor skills’ development, especially those placed in the social emotional domain. Once established, these evaluation mechanisms can be applied to teacher professional development and classrooms. In fact, to comprehensively inform the debate across G20 countries, it is germane that evaluation is cohesive among nation-states and that they are used to inform school practices.

G20 countries should aim toward the creation of cohesive national evaluation indexes and decide how they will define, measure and monitor the development of skills. For example, among other matters, governments have to determine whether they will focus on biometric, psychometric and experimental evaluation methods of social emotional skills, the frequency in which this data will be collected, as well as its validity and reliability mechanisms.

Each Ministry, based on the needs of the country and on the mapping of the demand for different types of skills, can determine the types of skills that need to be developed and acquired in their school systems, respecting their own local contexts. Based on this information, G20 countries can use the index to determine how they will measure and collect this information, build lessons and share these system wide, informing policy making on an ongoing basis.

Overall Vision

Altogether, these functions operate to support G20 educational systems become more malleable to ever changing societal and economic transformations, allowing schools to improve their practices and tailor them to skills development. This way, its populations of children and youth will be able to build human capital and support their economies and democracies, thus mitigating future inequalities.