6. Closing Remarks

Donald Hirsch: Normally, as a reporter of these kinds of events I am asked to make a synthesis of what has been very specific thoughts that knead the people altogether. This is a slightly unusual conference in the sense that everybody has made their own synthesis, and, in fact, many of the speakers throughout the conference have brought together many of the ideas. We have just had two quite interesting summaries. I was allocated 20 minutes for this, unless by popular claim you want me to read out the notes that I have made in my synthesis, I will rather offer you a Christmas present before the end. Before Christmas I will produce my report, my written report, and in the meantime I will let you catch your planes and have your lunch.

David Istance: I would like to say by summing up some words, but in terms of trying to summarise what has been said. First of all, I would like to say how pleased we are with the seminar. It is very good that an exercise undertaken in our “What works in innovation in education” series should be the source of reflection and development of ideas, and the seminar has done that very well. I was also very pleased that Dale Shuttleworth yesterday was able to not only reflect some of the key-conclusions of that but also to give some of the concrete flavour of what had come out of the fieldwork and the case studies. So it is from the point of view of developing work that has been done within the CERI programme that has been extremely useful.

Secondly it is a great pleasure and I think it is very valuable to work in a particular country, in a particular national setting, and as compared with sitting in the meeting rooms of Paris in OECD it gives the whole discussion a concrete and real sense of what is happening. I applaud Hungary greatly for taking the lead in this area and for bringing all sorts of concrete experiences and ideas – good ideas I should say – to bear for this.

We have talked about – and George Papadopoulos mentioned this yesterday – some of the difficulties of getting governance questions onto the agenda, and Gábor mentioned this, too, at the OECD. It has been extremely valuable, though we have had this seminar in order that these questions are now there, and I find that very valuable. I am very much hoping that it is a debate and a discussion that will continue. The seminar itself has given me all sorts of food for thought. You have got in your pack work that has come out of the Schooling for Tomorrow project in relation to scenarios and the discussion of governance of professional leadership, participation, decision-making, networks and the tensions and contradictions and so on, that have been raised are all very relevant to that strand of thought that we have developed and are continuing to develop in the centre. Increasingly, it has lead me over the last day and a half to think of a particular mix of the scenarios following on from things that Jan has said and from what someone said yesterday morning about the mix between re-schooling developments. Particularly in the very early years right from infancy through to, say, the age of 13 or 14 with a school system characterised by more resources, by developing learning systems, but also with diversity, but a very strong, quality opportunity and very high quality provision as characterising that provision, but mixed with then perhaps some radical de-schooling arrangements incorporated into a lifelong learning system.

So there are ideas that I shall be very interested in developing in my work. As far as the next steps are concerned, and fortunately I was engaged in deciding who spoke next when George was outlining ideas for follow up, but I can say certainly, firstly, as Donald has mentioned, there will be a report from Donald as the reporter, that we will let you all have when it is ready. The discussion here certainly helps us with the next stages in the analytical work on Schooling for Tomorrow in relation to the scenarios.

As I have just mentioned, there has been work on networks and innovation also: in the Schooling for Tomorrow program there was a conference in Lisbon on networks. A lot of the discussion at the Rotterdam Schooling for Tomorrow conference was on innovation and change, and this discussion here has added an extremely valuable further dimension to that. There will be a report based on this prepared for our – assuming that our director agrees with our proposal in CERI – for the next governing board meeting in the spring on this area. So this work actually has been extremely useful in feeding in, and that is a report that I shall be preparing.

As a major outcome from the next phase of the work on Schooling for Tomorrow, we are working on the idea of a toolbox, a toolbox for forward thinking, and this reflection that we have would be very useful in feeding into that idea of how you actually implement change and develop forward thinking approaches in education.

Finally, in terms of the areas of our work, this fits in and has been extremely useful, for the next “What works” study, the next ”What works in innovation in education” study in the CERI programme. As now they are on two years cycles it gives us more time to design the study, to develop it and to disseminate it than we had when they were on a one-year cycle. It is about individualisation, personalisation of learning, formative evaluation, how to tailor the learning to individual needs, and innovative examples across OECD countries, where there are some interesting things are going on in that area. There will be an outline of that also at our next March meeting of the Governing Board, but there are some aspects of the discussion we have had, particularly yesterday, that we will be using in developing that proposal.

As far as our work in OECD is concerned, it has been extremely useful. I would like to finish there, Gaby, before finishing by saying some thank yous. First of all I’d like to – expect all the other thank yous – but I would like to say some thank yous from us, in the OECD, I would like to thank all of you for coming, some of you from a really very long way away, some of you perhaps from just down the road, but all of you for coming and participating in the seminar and making it a success. A thank you to those of you who have taken a particular role as chairs or in making a presentation or preparing papers or being on the panel. Thank you very much. Thanks to the Ministry for your generous hospitality and your role in organising this work. On behalf of all of us, I would like to say thank you to the Youth Centre here that has accommodated us. I found the people that I had dealing with very friendly, very efficient and it made a difference to the friendliness and the success of our deliberations and discussions.

Although we as Anglophones have not had any cause to use them, but I would very much like to thank the interpreters and particularly to commiserate with having to interpret what Jan van Ravens calls “rapid fire deliberations” and thank you on behalf of those who have appreciated the work you have done, including trying to cope with Jan. I would like to say some particular thank yous, and I am sorry if by mentioning people by name that I would therefore leave one or two people out or many people out. I would like to thank from the Ministry very much István Kovács and Péter Hajtó, we worked together and communicated together and that has been a very enjoyable and fruitful cooperation. István is the Hungarian member of our Education Committee and we have taken those occasions as well to prepare. I would like to say a particular thank you to Gábor Halász, who has been the drive behind making sure that these ideas were not left but were developed and brought forward. I am sure that they will follow up and gain a great deal of value from this, as I think you are hoping that will be the case. And finally, I would like to say on behalf of all of us, a very particular thank you to Rózsa Juhász from all of us and what a pleasure it has been to have been dealing with you who are a successful conference organiser and I would like to ask you all to show your appreciation.

Gábor Halász: It is not easy to come back to content issues after this. In fact it was David’s idea that at the end of the seminar we should have a short reaction – he on behalf of OECD and I could give some specific Hungarian reactions. You know that this conference was initiated by the Hungarian Minister. Maybe you do not know that it was partly initiated because we were not very happy with the Hungarian chapter of the What works study because we had the impression that it did not give back the rich reality we have and what we could show somehow now. So we had a hidden agenda; we wanted to enrich your knowledge or information about what we are doing here. So what we, the Hungarians, received I would mention perhaps very shortly. There are six things.

The first is that now we are much more convinced than in the past that if we want to have high quality learning we have to look at the management and organisational dimension. And now we also have evidence, thanks to Bill on that. The second is that we can see that there is a more or less common agenda of educational management reform, as we could see especially from Dale’s presentation yesterday, behind this common agenda we have very different national programs and national issues. We can learn from that, but in order to learn, we need to be firm in our conviction that changes can’t be done anymore through overall reforms, but only incremental ways of changing are possible, and if we want to make changes incrementally we need new tools, new instruments, for instance horizontal learning, which was very strongly stressed yesterday in the panel discussion. And we also understood that horizontal learning takes place only if somebody, the state, for instance, is encouraging it deliberately.

Fourthly, this discussion on the learning system was very useful for us and also Ron’s last remark when he stressed that although learning is through trial and error, there is also a need for a democratic debate in setting goals and we have to look at both sides. The fifth is that – and I express special thanks for that to Bill – that we cannot lose sight of the learning child and his personal development when we are thinking about management. And that was especially enriched by the discussion on the assessment issue. That was particularly valuable for us because we are just introducing a national monitoring system.

And finally – this is linked to our original hidden agenda – we can be happy that we had the occasion to present as much as possible of our experiences – our successes and our failures as well. A last remark, which I am saying not as member of the Hungarian community but as a member of the CERI Governing Board from an OECD point of view, is that it is very important to keep the management and organisation dimension on the agenda of the discussion, and if we are doing that we cannot avoid having a look also at the macro, the system level things, so we can’t just limit it to the micro level.

I also have some very short, special thanks: first to OECD and especially David. The organisation of this seminar was really a cooperative action with a huge amount of communication and discussion, which had a value in itself. Even if we had not had the seminar at the end, that was already a valuable thing. I would like to thank the very rich input that we received from the participants, and I also have to say a personal thank to Rózsa. Thank you.

István Vilmos Kovács: Gábor was right that I will not have too much business after their final words. I only have to repeat some of the things that we have heard just now on behalf of the Hungarian authorities. I would like to thank you for your excellent, committed preparation and acts on top of the participation. It really has been enjoyable for myself and for most of the Hungarian colleagues that I could speak with about their feelings. We have got a lot of munitions to create a learning Hungary with that kind of carefulness that the future-driven scepticism of Professor Glatter shared with us. I think many of us are going to take home things for further consideration, and I hope that some written memories will remain or will be as a result of our work beyond the report of Mr. Hirsch, because many of the prepared documents are of great value. I would like to say one remark about the excellent dialogue of Mr. David Istance and Gábor Halász. Their exchange of e-mails was like two jazz-musicians in an answering duet, giving new melodies to the original theme and accepting their excellent musician friends for a joint playing. We were really excited about the common assembly, and I found our music very interesting, with the healthy equilibrium of the harmonies and dissonances. So thank you for this artistic experience, and I hope you will be able to see something of Budapest, and after I wish you a safe journey back home. Thank you very much.

Gaby Hostens: Thank you, I have a little to add as the chairman of this session. We are looking forward to a rich Christmas present and that will be Donald’s report. I would also wish everyone a safe trip home, especially those who have come from so far. And I would invite those who want to join us for dinner tonight in that local traditional restaurant to meet here after the meeting. Thank you very much.