Valerie has been a trailblazer for equal opportunity, leading by example as the first black woman in the British cabinet and then as the head of the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator. As Vice Chancellor of SOAS, she is now ensuring that a generation of learners understand local context, and the contested narratives of history. In her podcast interview for this project, she traced this back to the arguments her parents encouraged at the dinner table.

John is a force of nature who has already had a huge impact on how to deliver higher education at the global level. The architect of NYU’s global campus concept, his legacy was to give students (from every continent) the chance to develop the cultural understanding that can only be developed by living and studying with learners from different backgrounds. The university of the future - or as he stresses “a university of the future” will owe much to the approach he has pioneered.

Many academics are captured by the systems in which they work. But Fernando and Connie have developed a curriculum that - as it is more widely adopted - can change education at all levels. Aiming to equip diverse students from all over the world with a comprehensive global citizenship education, their 2016 book “Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course” presents itself as a thorough curriculum to teach and learn the competencies and skills necessary to navigate our times.

“One of the ways in which we can make progress is to break what is a very ambitious undertaking: I don’t hope that we are going to have necessarily every country in the world ready to include a mandatory global citizenship curriculum in their courses. `{`...`}` but I don’t doubt for a second that you can build coalitions with various individuals and groups and networks, interested in global citizenship, and that you can tell them how to do it.``

Goldie has long practised mindfulness and promoted wellbeing. But it was after 9/11 that she realised that this was a campaign that needed to be felt far beyond California. Through her Foundation, she is now working hard to find partners to translate a mindfulness curriculum into more languages, including Arabic. Pioneering educators in the Middle East and beyond are recognising the potential of such a programme. Watch this space.

Sarah is a board member of Towards Global Learning Goals. As an activist for women and children in the toughest of environments, she has brought extraordinary tenacity and courage to the global education effort. She has helped us understand that the next leap forward in global education has to prioritise those currently denied a decent education. And that nothing will succeed unless we convince parents of the need to change.

Visiting Alperton Community School, where Andria teaches art, you are swept up by the infectious energy she brings to her vocation, and by the evidence - on walls and in student conversations - that this works. She argues passionately that creativity is the basis for success in all subjects. Last year, she was recognised by the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize as the teacher of the year.

“Grab the high hanging fruit, and cling on”. For almost a decade, Sarah has been at the intersection of the business, NGO, social media and government coalitions most engaged on global education. More than anyone in this space, she has identified the way in which public campaigns can combine with innovative pilots and quiet, patient lobbying to make change happen. She maintains that the way to get education higher up the agenda is to show that it is the key that unlocks all other global challenges. Sarah’s choice of campaigns, and methods (from youth ambassadors to podcasts) are normally a good indication as to where other reformers in the sector will be in two years. Sarah even gave us a four-step blueprint for how to change the world based on her experience with TheirWorld.

A close friend’s death led Tariq - a Canadian innovator - to set aside a successful career as a tech investor, and look instead at how to ensure poor communities can access educational resources. Years of experimentation led his team at Rumie to develop ‘the LearnCloud’, a crowd-sourced platform of material. Now backed by Accenture, UNICEF and others, Tariq allows us to imagine the equivalent of an education Wikipedia, from which educators and learners can select the resources they need. If the best learning resource on, say, Pythagoras, is available for free online, why would you choose anything else? Tariq is not someone who thinks small. Rumie’s aim is to become the world’s largest open repository of free learning content, collaboratively organised and localised for different communities and cultures.

One of the most useful debates sparked by our conversations has been ‘What is education for?’ Efosa Ojomo from the Christensen Institute has just launched a brilliant book - ‘The Prosperity Paradox’ - he had a similar analysis of the problem, but a different perspective than many of our other interviewees on the balance in that debate.

“Instead of educating kids with the hope that they find some job somewhere, you have to look at the needs of the economy, and work backwards - that’s an uncomfortable thing to do but that’s how we’ve always done it. Some people will say, how can education be dictated by private sector, education is a human right, there is value in education in its own right. There *is* inherent value in learning, but there is a significant cost, and somebody has to pay for that learning, and if we don’t find a model for how to pay for it, there’s not going to be any education at all.”

A board member of Towards Global Learning Goals, Jairaj is an Innovation Executive at Salesforce, and has donated his time to the project as part of Salesforce’s pioneering scheme for employees to support initiatives of social value. Jairaj has built an impressive network of Indian education pioneers, of great interest given that India will be the laboratory in which many of the most interesting innovations are tested - combining as it does a dynamic entrepreneurial sector and a formal education system that has so far been slow to adapt. Jairaj has also brought to the project a strategic rigour to focus where we can add genuine value.

Fadi does not look like a revolutionary. He wears a dog collar, and listens quietly and modestly. Yet in reality he is on the frontline of the key arguments in the Middle East, and increasingly the world. His NGO, Adyan, has pioneered a curriculum to teach coexistence, among Lebanon’s often fiercely divided religious communities. If it can work in Lebanon, it could work anywhere.

Dubai had won ‘Young Arab of the Year’ even before winning a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. A successful author of children’s books that challenge stereotypes, she has been an outspoken advocate of the importance of young people shaping their own lives. As the centre of gravity for much policy innovation moves east and south, it will be pioneers like Dubai who will increasingly shape the debate.

“When we were in first grade we were taught the importance of colouring inside the lines. We need to learn the exact opposite: the importance of colouring outside the lines.”

Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms have written ‘New Power’ a nifty guide to the 21st century that is genuinely new and informs much of our approach. Instead of one more catchy way of describing how the world works, they have written a manifesto for organising that world with more humanity and purpose. Ultimately you’ll either hate it or wish you had written it, depending on whether you believe in old or new power. But more importantly, they are putting the ideas into action though ‘Purpose’, building the kinds of coalitions and campaigns that change the world. We hope that those lessons can inform the education revolution to come.

A blockchain pioneer, Loubna is also driven by a passion for education. Among those we have met, she stands out as wanting to use the immense technological potential he is developing to make a genuine difference in people’s lives. Blockchain will in the coming years reshape the way that schools and universities manage their operations. It could also provide the answer to the accreditation challenge we identify in this report. If learners can carry with them a digital recognition of
the skills and knowledge they have developed, that can have credibility with future employers and others. It would mean the disruption of national control of educational qualifications.

A former brain surgeon, Randa has a forensic ability to map the global education sector and make connections that no-one else sees. As a TGLG board member, she has also brought to this project her networks and belief in the importance of working with existing research. The global education sector needs people who can make the linkages between so much brilliant but disparate activity. No-one does that like Randa.

As a neuroscientist, Tara really understands the brain. But unlike most neuroscientists, she can really explain it. What she shares is that all of us face an urgent need to take better care of our brain health, particularly amid the sensory bombardment of the digital age. As parents and educators become more worried about the negative effects of exposure to digital technology, she is a thought leader who can help guide us as to what balance to strike, to ensure that learners make the technology work for them, and not the other way round.

There are few senior officials at international organisations whose names are known beyond their corridors. But Andreas Schleicher’s work has gained him rock star status on the global education circuit. Having developed the PISA assessments of national education success, he became worried that his work was driving governments towards a more assessment-based competition. So he has changed tack, developing innovative ways of teaching and assessing ‘global competence’.

``Students who grow up with great smartphones but poor education are facing very significant and unprecedented risk. in the past teaching content knowledge was always a tower of education but in the world in which we live today we are no longer rewarded for what you know.``

Graham has been on the frontline of these arguments for some time, making the case for a reimagination of education. He has stuck at it tenaciously as others have come and gone, consistently martialing the facts and picking the right arguments. As vested interests dig in, he is someone who can help to corral and convince people of why change is necessary.

New arrivals and their parents at Buckingham University - ranked No 1 of the UK’s private higher education institutions - are probably not expecting the Vice Chancellor to perform part of his welcome standing on his head. But Anthony is not a conventional education leader. He has written prolifically about the importance of teaching wellbeing, and put his ideas into practise through groups such as the International Positive Education Network and as a Board member on this project.

“We’re still in this third stage, the factory model of education. Very few people in education ministries around the world have explored what education is or can be - what it means to be human. This needs to be understood more clearly as we are now entering the fourth education revolution, which is the most important revolution for 500 years: artificial intelligence is altogether different from what happened earlier.”

The Baan Dek Foundation, an NGO based in Northern Thailand, established the Digital Superheroes Academy to teach slum children essential life skills, in the form of superpowers. But unlike the many institutions which focus on 21st century skills, the Academy works on a more practical set, including internet safety, and dealing with discrimination and domestic violence. These are the educational needs that are most needed among the vulnerable communities they are working with. This focus on practical life skills should not be unique to poorer populations. Traditionally these were taught at home and in the community.