IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 24

"Eric Ries in The Lean Startup describes the need for rapid iteration of concepts through active customer feedback. The Education and Human Capital Requirements Roundtable called for building ‘a resilience into education systems, improving their ability to respond to rapidly changing needs by allowing for as much 30 per cent or more customisation and adaptation.’ In essence, education systems need to think like the ‘lean startups’, finding these innovations from within the systems or from the emerging ecosystem of education start-ups that are able to tackle market needs faster than ever before" - I suppose in a way the Academy system can be viewed as "lean start-ups" so perhaps Michael Gove is ahead of the curve in this respect.

"In emerging markets around the world, these schools, often charging less than $5 a month, are able to deliver better educational outcomes at less cost than government systems. Some countries have seen these as a threat to public education dominance, and are stifling the schools with legislation. Others, such as Punjab in Pakistan have seen them as a complement to the public system, choosing to fund them and increase access to them. Indeed, around the world, while the evidence is mixed and the idea controversial, it is our view that choice, vouchers for low-income students and the encouragement of alternative providers are likely to become increasingly important ingredients of systems which combine effective whole system reform with serious innovative capacity" - this is a very important paragraph and one that you should read several times.  I am especially intrigued by the reference to choice, competition and education vouchers - this could have been written by Dr Rhodes Boyson thirty years ago!  Education vouchers would transform the educational sector in the United Kingdom and also open the public schools up to children from ordinary backgrounds.

"...to be successful in the 21st century, systems need not only to drive forward whole-system reform, based on the evidence; they also need the capacity to innovate, to learn from that innovation and continuously improve the system" - I am a little disturbed by the way this report uses "reform" and "revolution" interchangeably as if the meaning for both words was the same.

"We need perhaps the first truly global generation; a generation of individuals rooted in their own cultures but open to the world and confident of their ability to shape it" - do we need a truly global generation?  Where is the democratic consent for this?  Who will control this trans-national generation?

"...an education revolution will be required. It will need to be based not just on the growing evidence of what works, but on the capacity of the systems to innovate. It will need to unleash the leadership capacity that the next 50 years will demand" - we cannot agree to revolution (reform of course, but not revolution). 

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 23

"...set high standards; monitor whether they are being achieved; provide excellent teachers who improve their teaching throughout their careers; ensure well-trained, well-selected principals or headteachers; and then reorganise the system’s structure so that it becomes a dynamic driver of change rather than a static bureaucracy – a driver of quality rather than an enforcer of compliance. John Hattie has probably done more than anyone else to summarise and make practical the evidence on each of these elements. His most recent book Visible Learning for Teachers is a masterly synthesis" - this all sounds very laudatory until one reaches the bit about dynamic driver of change.  Who is in charge of this dynamic driver?  What is the change that is being driven? 

I don't wish to be alarmist, but where is the democratic oversight of all this? 

"Increasingly, a science or quasi-science of effective delivery in government is emerging. A number of countries around the world have adapted and refined the approach developed by the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) in the Blair administration and demonstrated real progress – Malaysia, Ontario in Canada and the California state university system are just a few examples in APEC countries. In the US, the Education Delivery Institute is supporting more than a dozen state education systems in the adoption of this proven approach" - this is very depressing.  Government as process, implemented by political technocrats (or technocrat politicians if you prefer).  I thought Blairism was thoroughly discredited?

"High Tech High is one such island – a network of schools that was and is ahead of the pack in the global move towards a 21st-century education. Through project-based learning and community internships, students take on real-world challenges and come up with innovative solutions, rather than focusing on rote memorisation of concepts. Teachers are empowered to create forward-looking, innovative lessons to inspire students. The incredible results speak for themselves: 100 per cent of graduates are admitted to college, 35 per cent of college-goers are the first in their family and 30 per cent enter the maths or science field (compared to an average of 17 per cent)" - not convinced by this I'm afraid.  What do you think?  It sounds wonderful, but a network structure is hard to control democratically (parents will be easily bamboozled).  Project-based learning is all too easily disconnected from the thousand-year continuum of of Western culture.  Empowered teachers means what exactly - whose power are they being given?  Who is deciding what are the "real" challenges in the world?

http://www.hightechhigh.org/

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 22

"Among the most promising experiments in education today are the developments in hybrid schooling, which combines great teaching, great technology and much more independent learning. However, it is important to note that technology alone and not integrated into the learning day rarely results in improved learning" - possibly the best educational technique is that of the personal tutorial where a student has to work independently on a piece of work and then defend it on a one to one basis with a teacher who is a specialist in that field.  The tutorial system works extremely well at the more academic of the public (independent) schools.  Obviously to extend this system into state schools will require a great many more good-quality teachers, but there is no reason why the teaching profession cannot be expanded if it can be proved to generate national wealth in the way this report suggests. 

"...teachers become enablers, activators, connectors, facilitators, mentors and challengers as well as sources of expertise" - this sounds like a shirkers charter to me.  The difficulty with non-traditional forms of teaching is the tendency of teachers to just coast along doing the minimum.  If the activities are non-traditional how will the students and their parents know when they are being short-changed by the more lazier members of the teaching profession?

"...education reformers are seeking to design a system for 20 years ahead, teachers struggle with the present and parents remember the system of 20 years ago: the conceptual gap is therefore 40 years – a major communications challenge which governments and educators often underestimate" - this emphasis upon "experts" planning for the future sounds sinister I'm afraid.  Where is the democratic accountability?  The United Kingdom's state schools are in the mess they are currently in because of the "education reformers" who destroyed the old system in the 1960s and 1970s and gambled everything on comprehensives which brought everything and everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 21

"Wen Jiabao, the (then) Chinese premier, said in August 2010: ‘We must encourage students to think independently, freely express themselves, get them to believe in themselves, protect and stimulate their imagination and creativity’ " - if this is genuinely the policy of the Chinese government there is little to fear from the emergence of China as a superpower - we are used to thinking of China as a threat to the West, but it is conceivable that Chinese influence may be beneficial to mankind.

"in the 20th century... the goal of a school system was to sort children out – the minority who would go to university, fill the professions and go on to lead the country, from the rest who would work in manual, skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. With that goal, a school system needed to provide high academic standards only for a few, while the rest needed the basics. Much of the trauma surrounding contemporary education reform has its roots in the need to abandon this outdated model" - this sounds like an exercise in double-think!  Education in the United Kingdom has dumbed down to the extent that semi-skilled office workers educated in the 1950s and 1960s have far higher standards of literacy and general education than most of today's university graduates.  And today the professions (all sectors) are crammed with the off-spring of the elite (from both left and right) whereas in previous decades the grammar schools provided a route for ordinary people to enter the professions.

"The 21st century, by contrast, demands that ...all need a standard of education that will enable them to adapt and change as they respond to the constant dramatic shifts in the global labour market" - not sure I like this reference to a "global labour market".  Are we going to see the emergence of a global elite moving around the world and paying minimal tax, while at the same time a class of global serfs is used to drive down working class wages?  Where is the democratic consent in this model?

"In That Used to be Us by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum:  the world increasingly will be divided between high-imagination-developing countries, which encourage and enable the imagination and extras of their people, and low-imagination-enabling countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their people’s creative capacities and abilities to spark new ideas, start up new industries and nurture their own “extra”’ " - the United Kingdom is already a high-imagination country, but we continually fail to take full advantage of innovations which tend to be "sparked" here and taken to production overseas.

"...success is a matter of hard work, persistence and good coaching (10,000 hours of deliberate practice being the key to reaching high levels of performance) rather than some special gift" - I have read this before but not entirely sure it can be true.  Where are the examples?  10,000 hours if you divide it up into forty-hour weeks roughly equates to five years.  A 3-year university course plus two years post-grad study will take someone to minimum competence level but not really to "high levels of performance".

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 20

"School21 based in the east of London, near the 2012 Olympic Park and due to open in September 2012.100 School21, a privately run, state-funded school, founded by Peter Hyman, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, has an engineered curriculum with particular emphasis on learning how to learn and developing thinking and questioning skills" - you used to see Peter Hyman interviewed on programmes such as Newsnight, but not recently (presumably he is too busy now?).  This school might be worth further study.  Presumably it is intended as a blueprint?  http://www.school21.org/news-and-events/

"...leadership in the sense of being able to influence those around you in the family, community, workplace or classroom. In this sense, leadership really is, or should be, for everybody. The challenge for a school or school system is to teach this quality which encompasses much of what sometimes goes under the heading of ‘21st century skills’ " - the idea of teaching leadership sounds disturbingly like the activities of Common Purpose.  And surely the left is not so degraded as to want to create political leadership schools on the model of the German napolas?  This seems almost Jesuitical in ambition.

"As traditional institutions, such as the family or church, break down, increasingly schools are the only social institutions we can rely on to inculcate in young people the values or ethical underpinning on which our collective future depends" - absolutely not!  The idea that we would surrender the "inculcation" of ethics to teachers is alarming in the extreme.  Can you imagine the sort of society we would end up with.

"The population explosion of the past 70 years, the rise of cities, especially megacities – many with extremely diverse populations thanks to the extraordinary and growing patterns of migration in the past half century – all demand that a shared ethical basis crosses the boundaries of culture and nationality" - I think the authors are falling into the trap of assuming migrants are just economic units acting rationally, whereas many of them (perhaps most) will be attracted to particular countries because of their national characters (America and the United Kingdom are almost overwhelmed by migrants desperate to get in, whereas very few migrants are clamouring to get into Russia or China). 

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 19

"Tom Loveless, in his book How Well Are American Students Learning?, observes that there is a negative correlation between students’ confidence in their mathematical abilities and their maths scores on the TIMSS, and an even stronger negative correlation showing that the less their enjoyment of maths, the higher their maths scores" - state schools do not teach self-confidence, whereas the British public (actually private) schools tell their pupils from the moment that they enrol that they are the best.

"...the belief that systems which ensure high standards in reading, writing and arithmetic inevitably do so at the expense of creativity, thinking, individuality and so on. Especially in Atlantic societies, this is put forward, often by teachers themselves, as an explanation for the poor performance of, say, the UK or US compared to Pacific Asia. It seems plausible at first sight, but it is completely untrue. For one thing, it would not explain why the UK or the US performs worse than Canadian provinces such as Ontario or Alberta" - again and again the evidence is irrefutable, we have lazy self-justifying teachers and they are impossible to get rid of.

"...the evidence shows overwhelmingly that when children are taught to think, and to reflect on how they are thinking as they learn their subjects, their performance significantly improves" - possibly, but one leading poet has said he cannot think, he can only feel.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 18

2012 OECD article, Knowledge and skills are Infinite – Oil is not, suggests that nations which had wealth in natural resources, such as oil or valuable minerals, invested generally in consumption and not in education systems to build the skills and knowledge of their citizens. By contrast, those who invested for long-term skills have reaped tremendous benefits in economic and social welfare - it is not natural resources that underpin wealthy societies; wealth always comes from superior social organisation.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 17

Pacific Asia: these are societies and cultures which place a high value on education... this belief that a poor person from a far-flung corner of the empire, through a combination of talent and hard work can make it into the elite - this sounds like an argument in favour of grammar schools.  But this is not quite what we have seen with the recent "handover" of power in China where only Communist Party members qualified for entry into the ruling elite.

Pacific Asian systems have often had long-term technocratic and strategic approaches to improving their education systems, with excellent civil servants in the lead- long-term policies on education are impossible while the political parties are unable to reach consensus or even to agree openly that the comprehensive system has failed (an admission of which would require embarrassing public apologies).

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 16

"attach high value to the teaching profession. Indeed, teachers are revered. In Korea, a key part of the strategy over decades has been to attract great people into teaching by paying them excellently – and finding the money to do so by having large classes" - no discussion about the issue of teacher gender.  In the United Kingdom teaching has increasingly become a female profession and thus suffers from the relatively low value that society places upon female professionals.  I cannot imagine that teaching in Pacific Asia is a female dominated "velvet ghetto".

"the quality of the teachers creates a virtuous cycle with families, which across Pacific Asia are strongly committed to education and have very high expectations of their children" -  unfortunately in the United Kingdom the comprehensives are ideologically wedded to ideas of equality that mitigate against any parents wanting their children to do better than the norm. 

"In contrast to Atlantic societies, neither the schools nor the parents in Pacific Asia expect their children to do poorly simply because they are from poor backgrounds" - no discussion here about discipline in schools - is it as lax in Pacific Asia as it is in the United Kingdom? 

I'm afraid that the more I read the IPPR Report Oceans of Innovation the more I conclude that it is at best flawed, and possibly even deliberately misleading and ideologically biased.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 15

Barack Obama’s words in his 2011 state of the union address: ‘We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world’ - it seems that he is good at analysing a problem, poor at doing anything about it - but why this obsession with what the Americans are doing?  Britain is not America and what might work there does not necessarily work here.

By what processes are future teachers attracted, selected and trained? - the politicisation of teacher training in the United Kingdom is one of the key issues that need to be tackled.

McKinsey 2007 report, How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top, highlighted three lessons emerging from an analysis of high-performing school systems: ‘The quality of an  education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers; the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction; and achieving universally high outcomes is only possible by putting in place mechanisms to ensure that schools deliver high quality instruction to every child’ - unfortunately the quality of teachers in British comprehensive schools is poor, mainly because of the security of employment they have enjoyed, making it impossible to get rid of bad teachers.

The 2010 McKinsey report, How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, went a step further and analysed how the top performing school systems continue to improve. The work concluded that a system could become better, no matter what its starting point, given a sustained leadership and a focus on key interventions necessary for systematic improvement - this seems to be the Deming formula of continuous improvement.

PISA and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study)... if Australia, New Zealand and Canada, each of which generally does reasonably well in PISA and TIMSS, are added in as Pacific countries, the region could certainly be said to lead the world. (In addition, Chile is the most improved Latin American system in the last two decades) - this is worth knowing.  And sometimes, reading this report, it sounds as if the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏 Dai-tō-a Kyōeiken) is coming into fruition but under Chinese hegemony not Japanese.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 14

"Cities that sprawl across the landscape because suburban land is (or was) cheap, such as Phoenix in Arizona or Houston in Texas, are less creative, innovative places than cities where people are more likely to jostle together and less likely to be isolated in their cars" - but there is a price to pay in terms of mental health from cramming people together where they are likely to become neurotic and crave access to nature.

"A third key theme for public policy is the attitude countries take toward openness both to the world and to their citizens. In Saxenian’s later work, The New Argonauts, she highlights the vital issue of immigration. Over half of all new companies in Silicon Valley since 1995 have been founded or cofounded by immigrants, and immigrants to the US register patents at twice the rate of non-immigrants" - this is a very alarming argument, since it seems to be promoting the idea of a pan-global intellectual oligarchy (which is fine for the quasi-Oxbridge innovative types able to travel the world and settle where they like, but condemns to serfdom the non-elite who are currently in theory able to control nation states through majority-rule democracy).

"Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel argues that this openness and interaction across the European nations in close proximity to each other was a major factor in their global dominance" - personally I think the Protestant Work Ethic created the conditions for European dominance of the world.

"...if the Pacific is to provide global leadership, how does the region’s capacity to innovate stand up against the criteria set out here? Or to put it differently, how much further must China and other countries in the region travel in the direction of openness?" - they would be foolish to swop rule by a communist (sic) oligarchy for rule by an international oligarchy of perpetual-tourist elite people endlessly moving around the world between their different properties and not staying long enough in any one place to pay taxes.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 13

"...creativity and innovation have major implications for public policy. Most significant are the implications for education systems..." - to a certain point, but I am not sure we can order creativity into existence in some kind of Goethean will to power, people are either creative or they are not.

"A major tendency of academe in the past 50 years has been increasing specialisation and therefore increasing expertise in ever-narrower fields" - pure research by universities leads to the greatest amount of innovation, rather than chasing all sorts of leads that subsequently turn out to be dead ends.

"True breakthroughs and large stepchanges will take precedence and need to be rewarded accordingly" - and also subjected to democratic control as we cannot tolerate innovations such as GM food that are pushed through against the will of the majority.

"...the Pacific Asia region is at the forefront of urbanisation and is likely to continue to lead the way. By 2030, over 60 per cent of China’s population will live in cities..." -this is very interesting as presumably we can expect in the next twenty years or so an anti-urban reaction and intense nostalgia for a pre-urban pre-industrial China profound (with Sino pre-raphaelites, Sino bucolic poetry, a Sino wandervogel movement etc).

"...the bigger the city, the greater its power to drive innovation" - not sure this is true, Vienna in 1900 had a population of 2 million and produced "Freud, Mahler, Mach, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Herzl, Trotsky forged the world we know today - a meeting point of individualism and collectivism, of egotism and idealism, the erotic and the ascetic, the elevated and the debased" (Lebrecht) but these were individuals, and it is not sure whether their creativity streamed from the size of the city, the geographic location in the heart of Europe, the psychological security of the Habsburg monarchy, or any number of different factors.  To ascribe the brilliance of 1900 Vienna to the size of the city seems an over-simplification.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 12

"The growing emphasis in business organisations on greater equity for women and minorities should pay dividends" - but no mention of the white working class who are (male and female) the majority and yet entirely unrepresented (putting a few privileged women and "exotic" people onto boards is not going to lead to cultural change).

"An opportunity to bring diversity to bear that is often missed is to bring young people into positions of leadership" - younger people have a different attitude to risk, and will take risks that are often unnecessary.

"Jugaad innovation, jugaad being the Urdu and Hindi word for improvisation" - this is interesting, I have not heard this concept before.

"Innovation requires people with the right skills and attributes" - this seems to be a tautology, and rather a meaningless statement.

"Innovation requires... individuals selected and combined into effective teams... with diverse backgrounds and perspectives" - this sounds like an ideological statement rather than an explanation of how innovation happens.  Innovation is the result of new connections made between two attributes of the existing world (whether ideas, processes, products etc) and anyone can make these connections at any time, and anywhere.

"Organisations should be structured to be cross-functional and have fluid organisation roles" - this seems to be an argument against specialisation.

"Society must furnish a culture that is progressive and open to the transmission of new ideas, welcoming of diversity and rules-based" - again this sounds like wishy-washy ideology rather than anything practical.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 11

"Sometimes there will be flashes of light enabling a breakthrough - these will often occur when routines are broken" - this seems to be an argument for revolution, and yet Mao's "permanent revolution" sent China backwards.

"At other times it will be a matter of persistence and slog" - this is generally my experience.

"There's often no substitute for hard work" - this argues against the current culture of instant gratification.

"Creativity flourishes neither in complete chaos nor in complete order; it appears to require a combination of the two" - yes, but some examples would have been useful.

"Increasingly, scientific and technological breakthroughs are made by teams not individuals" - this may be true, but the reasons need not be logical, it might just be a case of contemporary society valuing teams rather than individuals.

"The days of Isaac Newton, who read literally everything there was to read about physics in a year before proceeding to develop his laws of motion, are long gone" - it is still possible to read "everything" in a particular sector, obviously not a whole branch of science, but certainly a sub-branch of a sub-branch.

"The breadth and depth of knowledge as well as the size and scope of experiments are simply beyond the compass of a single individual" - I cannot accept this, individuals can still change things.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 10

"The key (to Atlantic supremacy) has been politics and more especially political institutions" - can we ascribe the decline of the West in part because of the decline and corruption of political institutions?

"Niall Ferguson in Civilisation... competition is one of the six explanations Ferguson puts forward to explain the path of Atlantic dominance.  The others include science, property rights and the growth of consumerism..." - socialism repudiates all of these except for science.

"...inclusive, pluralistic institutions which allow extensive debate of ideas and possible ways forward combined with a consumer society whose demands are met by continuously competing and therefore innovative businesses whose property rights are protected in law.  The individual, therefore, is simultaneously consumer, worker and citizen" - I really like this definition, and it indicates why British society is sometimes faltering - public policy needs to encourage individuals to be simultaneously consuming, working and participating fully in issues of citizenship.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 9

"In many people's minds innovation, invention, and great creative achievements are both individual and momentary flashes of inspiration" - I think I subscribe to this view, the flashes of inspiration occurring when unexpected connections between disparate pieces of information are made in a well-educated mind.

"Analysis of the places where innovation has occurred and where it has not" - one thinks of the city states of ancient Greece where you had the diversity of the independent cities within the cultural homogeneity of Greek culture.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 8

"California public schools, which 40 years ago led the world, are now among the worst in the US, which itself compares unfavourably with much of Pacific Asia" - what happened to American schools, did they suffer the same modish corruption of education standards as the United Kingdom?

"Growth in the US economy, including California, has been sclerotic since 2008 and commentators there spend much of their time debating when, rather than whether, the US will lose its global leadership position" - every trajectory I have seen shows America and the USA ahead of every other country in per capita wealth, and although China and India will grow rich on a collective basis the average Western family will still be much richer than the average Chinese or Indian family in 2050.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 7

"Innovation requires iconoclasts" - iconoclasm is a British trait, particularly in the tabloid press.

"Loyalty to an extended family has been a powerful feature of Pacific Asia's rise, enabling governments to invest less than they might otherwise have done in welfare spending" - which makes me wonder whether in the West we can trace a correlation between increases in welfare spending and the decline of family structures.

"A combination of uniformity, deference, attachment to order and the strength of the family, each of which has contributed to success in the past, might stand in the way of Pacific Asia's success in the future" - I think the authors of the report ignore the examples of history as Victorian Britain valued uniformity, deference, attachment to order and the strength of the family and still managed to become a global power (arguably the greatest global power) and British decline is historically mirrored by a decline in uniformity, deference, attachment to order and the strength of the family.

"In Japan the major corporations remain remarkably innovative, producing 20 per cent of the world's patents" - here the authors undermine their own argument.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 6

"China's Hurun Report which track's the country's wealthy" - this is useful to know.

"Pacific Asian societies value order, respect for authority and submission of the individual to the group much more highly than Western societies" - presumably as Chinese funds buy British companies these values will become familiar in the United Kingdom.

"the solutions are worked out behind closed doors by experts working for the leader and then tested in the real world and refined as necessary; a rational process not inhibited realities of the Atlantic democracies" - but isn't that exactly what happens here, no-one can argue that public policy is under popular democratic control.

IPPR report Oceans of Innovation - 5

"Julia Gillard...accelerating the pace of innovation will require diverse cities, great universities, great new and established businesses and extensive interactions between them... individuals who are open to ideas and argument and who are part of teams in which vigorous debate, dissent and discomfort exist" - to my mind the Australian Prime Minister seems to be advocating control by an intellectual elite, and there is no mention of democracy driving the pace of change.

"Tony Blair... states which have predictable rules that are evenly enforced and do not have closed elite circles" - this sounds fine, but the Blair regime (one can hardly call it a democratic government) comprised a small circle sitting on sofas in Downing Street and lying to the electorate to sustain themselves in power.

"In press freedom, lack of corruption and the rule of law much, but not all, of Pacific Asia lags behind the Atlantic region.  The same is true of human rights" - but going forward will China and India copy the West, or will the West adopt the lower standards of Pacific Asia?

"Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, said:  we argue strongly that you can't build a high-end, very sophisticated economy with active censorship" - and yet Western society is saddled with the censorship of political correctness.

"Many of the cities in the region, Seoul and Tokyo among them, are some of the most homogenous cities on Earth" - and yet Japan and South Korea are incredibly innovative economies.