In spite of a long history of educational innovation, most Catalan schools, like many around the world, are still rooted in their 19th century origins and bound by an industrial school model born 150 years ago. Successfully making the paradigm shift from the industrial model of schooling to competency-based education requires us to rethink schools and education systems, and their many interconnected and interdependent parts. This paper outlines the experience of the Escola Nova 21 alliance in Catalonia to move the education system towards competency-based learning. This civil society-led, public-private alliance builds on the heritage of the New School movement. It has also been inspired by UNESCO’s Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good? (2015), OECD research, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This paper highlights the opportunities and challenges of multi-stakeholder partnerships to promote educational change, using a bottom-up approach. The experience demonstrates that for system-wide transformation to be effective, schools have to be at the heart of the decision-making process.
(Abstract. Eduard Vallory (Center for UNESCO of Catalonia and the Escola Nova 21 Alliance)
Font:Education Research and Foresight (ERF) Working Papers (March 2019 ED-2019/WP/1)
