Increased professional trust is needed to support teachers in the global education community, a recent meeting in London co-hosted by the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has said.
The gathering discussed the necessity of professional confidence to support the inclusion of innovative and effective teaching methods in primary and secondary school systems. The meeting also marked the release of the revised WISE-RSA report entitled ‘Creative Public Leadership: How School System Leaders Can Create the Conditions for System-wide Innovation’.
The event was chaired by Stavros Yiannouka, CEO, WISE, who introduced the organisation as an initiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), under the leadership of its chairperson, HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, and discussed its commitment to innovation, action and partnership in education.
According to Yiannouka, “unprecedented challenges” were becoming “more diverse, more complex, less sustainable, and less equal,” making reforms to the international education system more crucial than ever.
He also emphasised the updated report’s focus on “how to create public education systems that are conducive to widespread innovation and possess the capacities to adopt and scale innovations that are shown to work.”  
The main authors of the report, Joe Hallgarten, director, Creative Learning and Development at the RSA, and Valerie Hannon, director and co-founder of the Innovation Unit, also attended the event and commented on their findings.
Hallgarten remarked that the current reform models undervalue teacher professionalism, and that international aid in developing countries has become linked to those countries’ ability to “successfully adopt the features of more Westernised schooling paradigms.”
He called for change to be “built on teacher empowerment” that “values the broader outcomes of creativity, agency, and well-being, and which works deeply with civil society as partners in learning.”
Hannon spoke about the need to make a case for change by engaging ‘edupreneurs’ and others in the business community, to become partners in building education systems “in much more profound ways.”
During the session, a panel of experts considered the challenges of leading impactful research for concrete action and change, discussing ways to more effectively communicate and interact with policy makers, school leaders, educators and communities.

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