At the College of Teachers' Awards Ceremony on 18 May 2010, Sir Michael Barber delivered The College of Teachers’ Biennial Lecture, “The prospects for global education reform”, in which he considered what kind of world the children growing up all over the world today will live in.

Sir Michael was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of The College of Teachers at the Awards Ceremony, along with several other notable educationalists. In his lecture he also made reference to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh who was awarded the Lady Plowden Memorial Medal and to the children of Aldersbrook Primary School in London who gave a dance performance themed on the Olympic Games.

Thank you very much for the kind introduction and for the opportunity to be here. It’s very daunting actually - there’s probably only one thing worse than doing a lecture after you’ve had a royal visitor and that’s doing it after children have been dancing on stage. You’re almost bound to be a disappointment after those fantastic children from Aldersbrook. I’m also somewhat daunted to do this in the presence of the colleagues who are honoured with me this morning. It’s amazing when you hear the huge contributions that each of them has made in different ways to the quality of education in this country and far beyond the reaches of this country. I would like to mention a few of them, specifically Chris [Waterman] and Alan [Tuckett]; I came across both of them while working in government. Elizabeth Vallance and Michael Reiss were colleagues here at the Institute in different ways, all a pleasure to work with. Johnny Ball I haven’t met before but he told me as we were coming in that in a situation like this in Glasgow where he was honoured, he sang rather than give a lecture, so I’m sorry to disappoint you. And I’ve left Yvonne [Burne] till last because I can vouch for every one of the kind words that were said about her qualities as a headteacher because my daughter was in her school at City of London and Yvonne was a wonderful headteacher and leader, an inspiration for Alys. Of course you could also have had Chris Waterman singing Abba “thank you for the targets” - I assume that was meant personally. I suppose the reply is probably “you’re welcome”.

Anyway, what I want to do, exactly as the introduction said, is to take us outside the confines of the United Kingdom for a little while and think about the prospects for global education reform. We’ve had two or three weeks since the election and the formation of a new coalition government, during which we’ve been focusing on our own country quite rightly, but I want to try and look beyond our borders. I will start by just asking a question which would apply equally to the children of Aldersbrook: what kind of world will the little girls in this picture from the Punjab grow up into? What kind of world will they live in? What kind of world may they lead five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or even forty years from now?

There will, for example, by 2050 be nine billion people on the planet. When I was born in 1955 there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. It will be a very crowded planet. And as the world, with all the ups and downs of global economics, gets wealthier, those nine billion people will all want to use the amount of resource that we currently use in Europe, putting huge pressure on the earth’s natural resources. It will also be an increasingly urban world. In this country 1851 was the first year in which the majority of the population lived in urban areas. In 1920, the United States passed that milestone and in the last decade the whole planet passed that milestone. So more than half the world’s population lives in cities, many of them very large. Lahore has about six or seven million people. Karachi, elsewhere in Pakistan, has 17 million people. So it will be a crowded planet and an increasingly urban planet. It will also be, as we saw from the children atAldersbrook, but you also see in all the major cities of the world, an increasingly diverse planet with race, ethnicity, religions interwoven, in those large cities. In Toronto, for example, 57 % of the population was born, not just outside of Toronto, but outside of Canada. That’s quite remarkable. In London 33% of the workforce was born outside of the United Kingdom so the children at Aldersbrook are growing up in a diverse, global city. So are the children in the picture. You could ask the same questions about these boys from a school nearby.

The world is not only crowded, urban, diverse. It is also deeply unequal in the way it distributes resources.

And it’s fast changing. In 1969 when Neil Armstrong stood on the moon for the first time, one of the items he had in his spaceship was a slide rule. It seems bizarre to even think about it now. It’s an increasingly changing world. We’re all getting used to technology. The internet is now old history, but once it was new. I don’t know how many of you took a while to get used to internet shopping. I certainly remember getting a very large bag of sugar which I didn’t really want and it took me a long time to use up. I remember the first time I learnt text messaging from my daughter Alys who was in Yvonne’s school. She was teaching us at home in something like 1998, I guess. And my wife finally thought she’d got the hang of it and she said “ok, I know what I’ll do, I’ll text a message to your older sister” who at that time was away at university. She typed “I love you” and sent the text message from Alys’s phone but mistakenly sent it to a boy at the City of London School for Boys, which resulted in a fairly tense situation around the kitchen table for a few minutes before my wife Karen ended up ringing up this poor 14-year-old boy and saying “Alys doesn’t love you and neither do I”. So technology poses us all kinds of challenges. What really represents the development of technology for me happened on 11 May 1997, shortly after a previous election, when a computer beat Gary Kasparov at chess. To me, that symbolised a big change in the way we think about the world. And now there are a whole lot of new technologies. I don’t know if any of you have seen those people ... they’re going to stop reading books soon because you see the people with these Kindles and all the other brands that allow you to download entire books. I became a member of the governing council here at the Institute [of Education], having been a professor here and one of the things I like best about the Institute is the Library. We had a briefing as members of the governing council about the library. It was absolutely fantastic; it’s amazing what they can do. The briefing lasted 20 minutes and the librarian, who is a wonderful man, didn’t mention books once.

The other point about the world is, because of the pressure on its resources, we know that it’s going to get warmer and we know that climate change is going to be a challenge. If you look back over recent centuries, you get some fluctuations in the variation of the planet’s temperature, but a 2 degree Celsius rise in a century is completely unprecedented and that’s what it will be, even if the Copenhagen Agreement were fully implemented really effectively right round the world. So when you look at the children in these pictures, all the children at Aldersbrook, or the children that many of you see in your work, or the grandchildren of the people here on the panel, we’re preparing them for an extremely challenging world.

To me it seems to be very important that education reform keeps up with the challenges that our children are going to face. And there are some really, I think, very encouraging developments in the understanding of education reform in the last ten years or so and I want to spend my time talking about those. Many of you in the room will be familiar with the work done in the 1980s on what makes an effective school. Much of it was done here in this Institute by esteemed colleagues such as Professor Peter Mortimore, Louise Stoll, Pam Sammons and others, but also done in other universities across the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Hong Kong and in the United States: very important work, and by the end of the 1980s it was pretty clear from multilevel modelling and other good statistical techniques what were the characteristics of effective schools. Some of you probably recall the lists of nine, ten or eleven characteristics that defined an effective school. And then people said, well, that is very interesting and it’s very important. A lot of it tells us what we thought we already knew, but nevertheless it’s important to have it evidence-based and really seen through, and increasingly international. But then people said, well, it’s one thing to be able to define an effective school when you find it, but the really important challenge for a headteacher or a principal or, indeed, for a policymaker is not what is an effective school, but how do you become effective? And so in the 1990s the research moved on and a lot of it was about school improvement. How do you take a school that is quite good and make it brilliant? How do you take a school that is struggling and make it good? And we had a lot of very good, profound research, again much of it done here in the Institute, but also all round the world on school improvement. What’s happening in the most recent decade or so is that people are taking a similar approach in looking at whole systems. So in the last decade we began to get much clearer about what a good education system, a whole system, whether a state of the United States, a province of Canada, or England, or France or whatever it might be, looks like. We began to understand what were the characteristics of effective school systems. And now, just as happened with schools in the 1990s, people are beginning to say, well it’s one thing to be able to tell us what an effective system looks like, but the really important question for policy is “how do you enable a system to become effective?” And for the children in the picture, this is a really important question and it’s a really urgent question.

One of the reasons we’re able to do that is that over the last decade, starting probably with the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)results published in 2000, a set of international benchmarkings that showed how countries compared. (There are other benchmarking exercises too that compare education systems’ performance). We are now getting really significant data, on a time series, of what good school systems look like. The citation when bringing forward my Honorary Fellowship here mentioned the report that we wrote, “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. We literally took the data from the PISA and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) comparisons and one or two others and we asked “What do the systems that keep coming out on top in these international benchmarking exercises do? How do they do that?” What we are able to do now that we have got a time sequence is to study systems that have changed over a period of time, say from the mid-90s or from the beginning of the last decade and have significantly improved. In December of this year we will publish the follow-up report looking at how school systems, whole systems, have improved over time. This data, this information, this set of insights will be really important because for the time that The College of Teachers has existed (since the 1840s), actually politicians around the world and leading administrators around the world did their best with the information they had, but they didn’t have the data, the evidence or the research on which to base insights on how to reform whole systems. And so they published White Papers like the famous one in 1944 or indeed the Plowden Report of 1967 mentioned earlier, that were important, pulling together the evidence they had at the time, but rarely taking a whole system perspective and thinking about how to shift the whole system forward.

Colleagues, given the challenges these young people are going to face when they grow up, whether in Pakistan like the children in these pictures, or in the United Kingdom like the children from Aldersbrook, or children anywhere else on the planet, don’t we face an urgent challenge of doing the very best we can to reform education systems, not just in this country, but right round the world, as effectively as we can, as soon as we can? The more effective systems are doing a quite different job from the less effective systems. The more effective we can make all our education systems, the more likely are the children in the picture or the children who were dancing on this stage a few minutes ago, to be able to meet the challenges, the very daunting challenges, that face them in the first half of the 21^st century.

Before I come to some of the characteristics of effective systems, I want to spend a bit of time talking about what we think the children should be learning. It’s one thing to say that we want an effective system, but before that we need to say, “Well, what would we like the effective system to enable the children to learn?” And because I’m in the presence of some fantastic maths and science educators, Johnny Ball and Michael Reiss among them, I thought I’d summarise what I thought the curriculum of the future should be in an equation.

This is my attempt to summarise the curriculum of the future in four letters. Start inside the bracket. It’s quite clear that children need some knowledge in the future. Sometimes you hear educators ask, “Why do we need to teach knowledge, you can just ‘Google’ it?” Well, not really. There’s a lot of knowledge that you need that Google won’t give you. Being able to read and write well, for a start, so that you can read what comes up on Google, but also some mathematical capacity, something about the country you live in, something about the world you live in, and so on. So there is a body of knowledge that we do need to pass on. Because the amount of knowledge in the world is expanding rapidly, it is extraordinarily difficult to select the right knowledge and that’s why you get vigorous curriculum debates, whether it’s in Australia where they’re currently introducing a new national curriculum or here endlessly, or wherever it might be. Nevertheless some knowledge to high standards is really important.

But nobody thinks, I think, that knowledge on its own is enough. So the K stands for knowledge, but the next letter in the bracket is  T which is thinking; something that Johnny Ball and others spend much of their time trying to promote. Knowledge, dry knowledge, knowledge on its own, knowledge that is just a set of facts that can be recited or recycled in a pub quiz may have its own intrinsic merit, but it’s not really useful until you can think about it, you can analyse it, you can critique it, you can connect apparently unconnected pieces of knowledge, you can put them together and build new ideas, whether logically or creatively, inductively or deductively. And what you see in many of the best schools is teachers who teach that thinking, through whatever the content they’re teaching, whether it’s maths or science on which there is a great body of evidence, but also history or English and indeed games, art, drama, music and dance. So K + T seems important. Sometimes people say “Knowledge is power”. But actually knowledge on its own, for the reasons I’ve just given, isn’t power at all. Knowledge plus Thinking, K + T,  may be closer to power if you’ve got knowledge and you can think about it and apply it in new situations. But even those two things on their own aren’t really enough to be powerful.

How many times have you left a meeting where a decision has been made and somebody walks out with you and they say, “I didn’t agree with that”. And you say, “Well, why didn’t you say so?” and they say “Well, I didn’t think it was the right time”. The decision has gone, the decision has been made. They had the knowledge, they’d done the thinking, but they didn’t intervene at the point of decision. If you don’t intervene at the point of decision, by definition, you’re not powerful. So having the K and the T isn’t enough. You also need the L and the L is leadership. And here I don’t just mean leading big organisations, important though that is, as we’ve heard this morning. I mean the ability to be influential in all kinds of situations whether your family, your classroom, your workplace, your community. So by leadership, I mean in terms of exercising influence. And to me it seems really important that children, the children who were pictured on the screen before, leave school not just with knowledge, not just with the capacity to think, but also the capacity to lead. So K + T + L. If all children left school with that, I would have a great deal more confidence than I do currently about our ability to tackle the challenges of the 21^st century.

But outside the bracket, there is an E.  And there is an E for a reason, because you could have knowledge and the ability to think and the ability to lead, but you could use it for all the wrong purposes. So the E stands for ethical underpinning. You see, in the multicultural diverse world that we live in, those big cities that I was talking about earlier, we need children who grow up believing that it’s better to live in a diverse city, that people from different backgrounds need to find ways of getting on with each other and indeed ways of thriving in relationship to each other, of making a virtue out of difference and diversity. That’s a value, that’s an ethical position. It’s not inevitable.

And when you look back over the 20^th century, you see that in this country, in the early 20^th century, most children would get a similar ethical education from the church, from the family and from the school. But you can’t rely on that any more because people’s backgrounds are diverse; family structures are different; the world is full of change. But the school is the one social institution which can, and often does, provide that ethical underpinning. It’s not something you want governments to specify, an ethical underpinning. It’s something the professionals in school have to design their schools to be able to do. So to me that is the curriculum we want, not just for the children at Aldersbrook, not just for children across the United Kingdom, but for children across the world. And obviously there’s lots of detail to add to that. And you see these debates being played out in the curriculum debate in Alberta, Australia or the United States where a number of states are debating this as we speak. But if that’s what we want children to learn, what would systems need to look like to bring that about for every child? Well, as I say, there’s an emerging knowledgebase. It’s difficult to summarise that on one PowerPoint slide, but I’ve attempted to do so here.

I want to start on the left hand side as you look at it, about standards and accountability. One of the things that great systems increasingly do is that when they set standards, for example in maths or science or the national language, but also other areas, they set those standards conscious of what the best in the world is like. They globally benchmark their standards. They are doing this right now in the United States; for the first time in history there will be common standards in English and maths in America’s schools. They’ve looked round the world. What do the best systems in the world teach? Physics doesn’t change at national boundaries. Nor does maths.  So people are consciously trying to set their standards globally benchmarked. David Hawker, who is in the room, thought about this when he worked for the QCA’s predecessors, as I’m sure Mick Waters did. This is very important because when children move from a big city like London or somewhere else, which many of them will do, thinking they’re good at physics, they’d better be good at physics in Singapore or New York, as in London. Whereas if we’ve taught them a different set of standards, they might discover that we told them they were good but actually they weren’t.

The second thing great systems are doing in relation to accountability is generating really good data, really good information about how children are doing, how individual children are doing, how individual schools are affecting individual children, how individual teachers are affecting individual children. In the United States now, to join the Race to the Top, a radical Federal programme, a state has to agree that it will build a database that connects individual teachers to individual students and their progress. We will see databases like this developing round the world over the next decade or so. Here in England we have some really really good data in the current department; the challenge will be to build on it to match the systems that are rapidly improving. It’s only with the data that we can do what everybody argues in favour of, evidence-based policy-making.

And then thirdly, the great systems in the world make sure that every child is always on the agenda. It’s simple conceptually. When a child falls behind, the great systems, like the great schools, do something about it. It was mentioned earlier on that I was a history teacher in Hertfordshire, in Watford. That is absolutely true. I think back to my first job, which that was, teaching. I remember, for example, a boy sitting at the back of the room looking out of the window, which is very unusual in Watford because there’s nothing to see. And I said to him “What are you doing?”. And he said “I’m thinking”. And I said “Well, stop it and get on with your work”. So I ignored the T in my equation. So you learn from your mistakes. But the other thing I did, and I did this right through the four years I was a history teacher in Watford, I taught my class a chunk of the history curriculum, whether it was modern European history or medieval English history, or whatever it was. And some of the children learned it and some of them didn’t. And in the next lesson I went and taught another chunk of the curriculum and some of the learned it and some of them didn’t. And so on and so on. And when some children by the end of the year had fallen a long way behind, I didn’t say “I didn’t teach that properly”; I said “they didn’t do their homework”, “they didn’t really like history”, “they’re not inspired by the subject”, “their parents don’t care” - I had a whole range of excuses. I didn’t do what the great systems do. They say “That child has fallen behind; how should we change what we do to make sure they get up to the standard too?”   There was a Charlie Brown cartoon a few years ago where he promises to teach the dog to sing by the end of the week and the children take the bet on. On Friday they come to him and they say “The dog hasn’t learned to sing, we’ve won the bet” and he says “no, no, no, I promised to teach the dog - I didn’t say it would learn”. That’s what I was doing in my history classes. That’s what lots of us did in the 20^th century, but in the 21^st century we can’t afford to do that. As soon as a child has fallen behind, we have to ask ourselves “How can we change what we do to get that child up to the standard?” The best systems in the world are already doing that.

In the middle panel of the slide what you see are a range of characteristics about really high quality teachers, something that is embedded in what The College of Teachers stands for, recruiting great people into teaching. The great systems in the world are really doing a fantastic job of that. Actually in England we’ve done a pretty good job of that from a low base over the last decade, but making sure that we get many of the best and the brightest, not just straight out of university, but also people who want to switch back into teaching when they’ve tried something else. One of the best little stories I heard in the last couple of years was an action taken by the Training and Development Agency in this country on the day that Lehmann Brothers collapsed, 15 September 2008. 6,000 people lost their jobs in the City of London. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) opened retail space directly opposite the Lehmann Brothers building and they advertised the possibility of becoming maths and science teachers. About 250-300 people walked across the road and made enquiries. 25 of them began on teacher training and some of those are now maths and science teachers in our schools. A very innovative approach. Obviously you want to make sure you get people who don’t just have the intellectual qualities, but also the personal qualities of teaching. But thinking hard about how to get the best and brightest into teaching, into education, is important. And then in the middle of the slide, making sure that they develop continuously, making sure that that sense of collective capacity, not just each teacher getting some training but all teachers collectively developing their skills, planning lessons together, looking at the student work, seeing how they taught different parts of it to get certain results. These are what the great systems in the world are doing. For example, in Shanghai every teacher has to watch eight other teachers teach each term. There are many examples around the world of ensuring that development of collective capacity.

Last point on the middle panel; the quality of leadership at school level is really critical. The head is like the conductor of an orchestra in a way, the person who is pulling together all the different human and other resources in a way that enables the whole school to achieve that ethical underpinning as well as the standards that are expected and makes sure that each individual person, each child, is properly valued. So the quality of school leadership is fundamental and you see it again and again in the system research.

And then over the far side of the slide, a challenge that I struggled with both in my time in the Education Department and when I was in Downing Street. To bring about a big radical reform, whether it’s in education or any other area, you also need to change the government department at the heart of it. This is a tough thing to do. Actually, largely I hasten to say since I left, I think the Civil Service in this country has made real progress with that, evaluating the performance of departments, using outside experts, challenging people to do better, to think differently, to draw on the evidence and to think about strategy, policy and leadership in different ways. Of course, there is much further to go. Around the world this is a huge challenge, but unless the bureaucracies that lead these reforms can reform themselves, it will be very difficult for them to bring about system reform at the scale and pace that is required.

Then systems struggle a lot with the various different types of middle tier, whether it’s the local authorities, an area in which Chris Waterman has been hugely expert and influential over the last decade or more, or whether it’s US states, (the fundamental building block that everybody in the United States now knows needs to be reformed and strengthened if they’re to carry through their reforms there), or whether it’s the regional offices in Victoria in Australia, or wherever. Getting that middle tier to be aligned, an enabler of reform, not a barrier, another critical part of success in great systems. And then finally, which we in this country in many ways lead the world on, devolve responsibility to the school leaders themselves, so that they can shape their budget, decide how to spend it, allocate those resources in the way that best meets the needs and aspirations of the students in that school and the community.

Any system which can - and I realise I’m summarising a body of research very rapidly - put those nine features together, in a coherent way, will make very very signficant progress over the next decade. And if I was trying to bet on which systems were really going to make progress in the next four or five years, I would bet that Australia will be leading the way four or five years from now; it’s already good and will get better. I would bet that Ontario will do very well and I’d bet that a handful of US states will also make really good progress. We’ll see what happens in Europe. A lot of the real progress in Europe over the last decade has actually been in Eastern Europe, in places like Poland and Slovenia.

Now I just want to take that framework and give a couple of examples from different parts of the world. In the United States they talk about four assurances and the fifth assurance. I’ve already mentioned the standards; it’s historic for the United States to develop common standards in maths, science and English across all 50 states. It’s never happened before. It’s a big challenge which they’re working through. They’re also working on a common assessment system across the 50 states, again an unprecedented challenge for a country in which states’ rights has been a very powerful strand of politics since its creation 200 and more years ago. The second assurance is strengthening teacher quality, using the data that I mentioned, which the third point here, to influence the way in which they train and develop their teaching professions. There are increasingly a number of good developments in the United States, to strengthen teacher quality. Fourthly, they have a lot of seriously underperforming urban high schools which are firmly on the agenda, with each state or city, depending on the constitution in the state, thinking through how to turn round those deeply challenged and troubled schools. I believe we will see real progress in the US. Fifthly, they are setting out consciously to build state capacity. What you see is that the four or five things on here relate very clearly to the nine boxes I just showed you. Obviously it’s all in the detail but nonetheless you could argue, and I think quite convincingly, that Arne Duncan, the American Secretary for Education, has a broadly evidence-based position on whole system reform and is likely to make progress with it. Certainly it’s the best opportunity to reform American schools for a generation.

And then at the other end of the global spectrum, take Pakistan - again this was mentioned in my citation - where I’ve been spending a week every six weeks since last December. Pakistan has a really troubled education system. It’s one of the most challenged education systems in the world: less than two thirds of children are in school at all. Of those that do attend, for every hundred that start school aged 5, only one will still be in school aged 16. Then if you look at what they actually learn; of those who attend elementary school for three years, about 35% of them still can’t do single digit subtraction. So this is a very challenged system. The reason I want to mention it here - and I can’t go through all the details of this - is that if you look through the various factors on this slide, which summarises the national education policy, what you see is that Pakistan is now seeking to change the circumstances that I’ve just described. Again you’ll see that the strategy is firmly based on the nine boxes - the setting of standards, the development of teachers and leaders, and so on. If they see it through it will work. I mention this not to spend time on it now, but to say that if you take this growing body of evidence about what system reform looks like, about what effective systems look like and how systems become effective, and apply it to any country in the world, the chances of reforming systems successfully will be much improved. I think that for too long we’ve thought, when we think about reforming education systems, that it’s just too big a task, too daunting. Some of us maybe thought like that Russian Prime Minister who resigned after a year in office in 1995 and said “We tried to do better, but everything turned out as usual”. We can’t afford it to turn out as usual this time. Of course, there are many many things that we don’t know about system reform. Some of you might remember - or might prefer to forget, I’m not sure - Donald Rumsfeld and his famous garbled remarks about the known knowns and the known unknowns. The nine boxes are the known knowns. There are also some known unknowns which are relevant here.

For example, what should the 21^st century curriculum consist of? I gave you my formula but I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree with me. It’s a debate they’re having most vigorously in Alberta in Canada. It is a really important debate. If we ask the question here at home, what is Britain’s place in the world? How do we want to prepare children for that?

Secondly, the human capital model, the way in which we deploy people in schools, ought to be changing significantly as we combined highly skilled teachers, highly skilled other staff and technology in different ways. Some of the most innovative headteachers in this country are doing just that. We face a very different set of circumstances from when The College of Teachers was founded and around the world we see experimentation, but we don’t see, yet, I think, convincing evidence of what the most effective models will turn out to be for mixing different types of staff and technology. There was a debate in the media yesterday about the police force. Some police forces in this country now employ more civilians than police. The first reaction to that is to complain that that sounds like a lot of bureaucrats; but maybe if they’re forensic scientists, or a range of other skilled specialists, it’s the right thing to do? Either way, it’s the same debate playing itself out in relation to policing. Then there’s the question of how we relate school and out of school. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, which was mentioned earlier, is a fantastic programme and some schools have done a wonderful job of connecting their formal curriculum to their out of school curriculum using that as an overarching model. But what are the models that connect learning at school to both learning in formal settings out of school and to learning at home in coherent ways so that children are getting E (K + T + L) in all of those circumstances, not just during the school day? What does that look like? Finally, there’s knowledge management. We’ve been very very poor as educators collectively, I think, about gathering our knowledge and applying it systematically, about developing and making use of centres of knowledge. The Institute of Education over the last decade has made a real contribution in this area, but there is much more to do to get the knowledge quickly and easily accessible to the people who need it when they need it, in the way that you see in many other lines of work. And technology I list on the side as an enabler of all previous points.

To finish - this is my favourite of the slides. This is Annapurna, the first 8,000-metre peak that human beings climbed in 1950. I walked round it two years ago - I hasten to affirm round it, not up it! It is absolutely spectacular, as you can see. It was first climbed by a French team led by Maurice Herzog. It was a heroic climb and if any of you ever find his book, I commend it to you. It was desperate. Maurice Herzog and one other made it to the top and then shortly after they’d left the top, he dropped a glove, which is a pretty devastating thing to do at 25,000 feet high. He began to get frostbite. So did his friend. They climbed down slowly to a fairly high camp. And then even more slowly, they had to be carried down to the valley, quite literally losing fingers and toes on the way. The very last word of Maurice Herzog’s wonderful book is, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of people”, which I think is a very beautiful line. He actually went on to become a minister of culture and found his own “other Annapurnas”.

I think successful education system reform is our collective Annapurna for the next decade. I hope that we don’t lose our fingers and toes in taking it on, but we have to do effective whole system reform not just here but right round the world, quite quickly I think, if we are to enable the children that I pictured at the beginning of this presentation to learn what they will need to learn to rise to the challenge of the 21^st century. As a result of the developments in knowledge, many of them undertaken here at this Institute, we are at base camp. We are beginning to know what we need to do to reform education systems successfully. Now the challenge is to actually go about doing it. And the question for us is do we have the courage, the persistence and the ambition to climb right to the top of Annapurna and not just to walk round it? Thank you very much for your time and attention.

SIR MICHAEL BARBER joined McKinsey in 2005 as the expert partner in its Global Public Sector Practice, working on major transformations of public services, especially education, in the USA, UK and other countries. He is co-author of the international benchmarking study “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”.

Previously, as Chief Advisor on Delivery to Prime Minister Tony Blair, he was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Prime Minister’s priority programmes in health, education, transport, policing, the criminal justice system and asylum/immigration. Between 1997 and 2001, he was Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards and prior to that was a Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London.

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