And if the “doubling” part may seem a little ambitious, remember this. If every class in every school in every country that participates in PISA could get even close to the highest performing comparable ones, you would comfortably achieve that goal of doubling learning outcomes.
This is the challenge: how can we help to replicate educational excellence at scale? And, in doing so, what’s the balance to be struck, to use the language of the moment, between sustaining and disruptive innovation?
Take one of the world’s best known education institutions, Harvard Business School, as an example. It is grappling with its biggest strategic decision in 90 years: should it move online, and risk devaluing its on-campus education? Or stand apart and risk being left behind?
This absolute juxtaposition of “sustaining innovation” versus “disruption” is, I would argue, a false dichotomy that we can add to the long list that already bedevil the world of education: teachers versus technology, knowledge versus skills, outcomes versus process, to name a few.
At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning, we think about four things.