This month’s NAPLAN tests will be viewed as a benchmark for Australian education performance when results are released.
Have Australian students improved? Are they keeping up globally and what do the results mean for the billions of dollars invested in schooling?
But is standardised testing providing an insight into preparing our young people for future employment and a life of thriving?
Since 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has published The Future of Jobs Report. The report summarises the perspective of over 1000 leading global employers collectively representing more than 14 million workers.
This year’s report noted: “Technological change, geo-economic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and the green transition are among the major drivers expected to shape and transform the global labour market by 2030.”
Central to the WEF’s report is a list of key skills employers are seeking in their workforce. In the 2023 report, creative thinking was the number one in-demand skill, followed by: analytical thinking; technological literacy; curiosity and life-long-learning, and resilience; and flexibility and agility. In this year’s report analytical thinking has edged out creative thinking for the top spot.
While there have been changes to the top five skills between 2023 and 2025, the WEF suggest that the “skill instability” highlighted in previous reports may have settled.
Creative thinking will remain amongst the top in-demand skills for employers. And this is an area that deserves more focus in Australia’s education system.
The importance of creative thinking triggered the creation of a new Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) by the OECD, an assessment for critical and creative thinking capacities.
Australia did well, relative to other countries, on the first critical and creative thinking test in 2022, but this was a result of good fortune rather than any direct and intentional design.
Just because Australia performed well doesn’t mean that that our schools are doing well teaching complex skills. The absence of any metric for complex skills on school reports or exit qualifications highlights their perceived lack of importance in our education system.
The author of the first PISA report into critical and creative thinking wrote: “In today's evolving landscape, where Artificial Intelligence advances rapidly, the ability to think creatively is key to a young person’s engagement, learning, navigation of challenges and employability. But creative thinking also acts as a powerful stimulus to learning itself, deepening students’ engagement, activating higher-order cognitive skills and stimulating emotional development and resilience and wellbeing.”
Teaching for creativity opens the door to the other complex skills employers are demanding and can improve measures like NAPLAN.
What does this mean for our young people?
If they want to be competitive in the job market, they need the skills employers are demanding. The question therefore is: who is teaching them these skills?
The WEF’s analysis goes deeper. The industry with the second greatest growth in demand for creative thinking, at 79 per cent, is education and training.
Creative thinking isn’t just critically important for our young people’s future employment prospects, it is vital for our current teachers.
The data from the WEF, and the shift in focus from the OECD, should have far reaching implications for education but sadly it is yet to filter down to practice in classrooms. We remain stubbornly focused on narrow measures like NAPLAN.
Australia’s Mparntwe Education Declaration, published in 2020, has aspirational goals for our education system.
The Declaration outlines two interconnected goals: promoting excellence and equity in education; and ensuring that all young Australians become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active, informed citizens.
However, there is a real risk that we have focused too heavily on the first goal – equity and excellence – without fully realising the second.
Australia isn’t the only jurisdiction to recognise the importance of key skills like creative thinking in their curriculum.
Professor Bill Lucas of the University of Winchester, reviewed the curriculum documents of 76 jurisdictions including Australia and found that creative thinking, and other key skills, are embedded as an aspirational goal.
But Lucas says schools and teachers unintentionally sideline creative thinking because there are no prescribed approaches to teach for the skill and we don’t assess it as part of our school reporting practices.
While we say creative thinking is important, it’s value is not demonstrated any further than motherhood statements.
Circling back to the opening question: what is the purpose of education if it isn’t about preparing young people for future employment and a life of thriving?
Yes, education should be, and is about teaching young people to read, write and add and acquiring knowledge.
But in this new era, the Age of AI, that isn’t going to be enough to help secure a young person a job and keep Australia’s economy competitive.
What is needed, in the words of the WEF, is the reskilling of our teachers and the development of assessment tools so schools are not just delivering and reporting on core skills (NAPLAN) and knowledge transfer (ATAR), but also teaching for complex, higher-order cognitive skills, like analytical and creative thinking.
Only then will our education system be fit for purpose.
Dr Paul Browning OAM was school principal for more than 20 years and is now the Managing Director of Vivedus, a Learning Activation company that provides schools and teachers with the tools and resources to teach for creative thinking and deepen learning.