Schooling for the future: Michelle Guthrie, managing director, ABC
The ABC’s managing director says we need to cultivate openness and a willingness to ask lots of questions
Australian educators are asking big questions about how schools need to adapt to educate the next generation. The Association of Independent Schools of New South Wales has commissioned a report titled “CEO Perspectives: The Future of Schooling in Australia”. Produced in partnership with Knowledge Society, the project involves interviews with leaders about their priorities and ideas for change. The Deal presents some edited extracts.
Michelle Guthrie, managing director, ABC
What sorts of education systems and opportunities will make the difference for an effective globalised workforce?
The thing for me is to make sure we are preparing our children for a very uncertain future – an optimistic future, but a future where in all likelihood you’re not going to have a career for life. I look at my own experience, and the fact that I graduated from law school and ended up running the ABC seems to be a big stretch. The key thing is understanding the kinds of capabilities that we’re really teaching, and most of that, I think, is around the skills of the future, and really around the kinds of skills that are less around particular knowledge points of view and more around things such as curiosity, adaptability, that sense of being able to pivot and able to take in new information and make decisions, of being able to problem solve and being able to collaborate.
How do you think schools can nurture more curiosity in students?
For most questions that come up in the workforce there is no right answer. It is more around what are our options, how do we think if we go in this direction? It’s really important to not have that sense of “Oh I know the answer; I’ve seen this before”. It is about interrogating and looking at different points of view, and having a team collaboration that looks at things in a different way and [has] people who can disagree.
How does having a solid base in a domain enhance your ability to be part of a multidisciplinary team?
One of the things I found when I was working at Google was that it was very clear that having a science, technology, engineering and maths background was incredibly important, but also understanding, almost from an anthropological perspective or from an arts and humanities perspective, how people use these tools and how they are useful in their daily lives. The key thing for me was having an openness to asking a lot of questions about how this technology works, what the likely consequences are of different paths around that technology. That doesn’t mean I need to know how to program but it does mean that understanding key technologies was really important.
- The Future of Work
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17 jobs across 5 industries
Young people will need to work up to 17 jobs across 5 industries to earn a living
The facts and stats
- The Future of Work
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70 per cent
70 per cent of 15-24-year-olds currently enter the workforce through jobs that are unlikely to exist in the next 10-15 years due to automation
The facts and stats
- The Future of Work
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The number one driver of economic growth is cognitive development, not years of school or education completed
The facts and stats
- The Future of Work
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500-700
Estimate of the number of new schools Australia will need to build in the next 10 years
The facts and stats
- The Future of Work
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60 per cent
Percentage of people entering university using means other than Australian Tertiary Admission Rank
The facts and stats
How in your career and in your education has your capacity to lead a team and make judgments been developed?
Leading an organisation of 4000 people, the thing that surprised me the most was realising that a lot of that is based on actually getting the most out of your people – really empowering everybody within that organisation to get the best out of them, and making sure that there is real alignment around the strategy, there’s real alignment about what we’re trying to get done. Also having that sense of what we are here for – that real sense of purpose and how do we make sure we are single-minded about that purpose.
Is that sense of teamwork and collegiality something we are developing within young people at school?
The way you are successful within the organisation is getting the most out of your teams and working together to solve a problem. I’m not so sure that’s the way our school system works. That is about being the best and beating everyone else, and that kind of mentality is not going to help you succeed in a modern workplace.
What else would you change about our current education?
Having a better knowledge of different points of view; having a real sense that just because you and your fellow students, who might come from a certain sort of socioeconomic background or from the same life experience, think that [way] it doesn’t mean you’re right. And I think the one thing I really learnt in operating in Asia, having very different markets, from Korea, Japan, India, China, is that everyone has a different perspective, and has a better sense of individual difference. I think in schools a lot of that is kind of beaten out of us. How do you actually disagree but try to get to a better place overall? I worry about not having enough different perspectives within a school environment.
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One third
of their time learning on the job (up 30%)
By 2030 workers will spend...
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12 hours
per week on problem solving (up 90%)
By 2030 workers will spend...
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15 hours
per week on critical thinking (up 40%)
By 2030 workers will spend...
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7 hours
per week on verbal communication (up 17%)
By 2030 workers will spend...
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7 hours
per week on interpersonal skills (listening, empathy etc) (up 17%)
By 2030 workers will spend...
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3 hours more
per week making decisions autonomously
By 2030 workers will spend...
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1 hour less
per week receiving instructions
By 2030 workers will spend...
From what you saw at Google about lifelong learning, how can you imagine education changing in the future?
When we would discuss what has changed in the past 100 years or 50 years about the way education works – it’s actually not that much, which is remarkable when you think about how much has changed in the world. It may be that you now submit your essays by laptop, but what’s really changed? For a lot of our students a lot hasn’t changed.
There is now a sense that most of the information that is being imparted you can get by searching Google. So you need to understand how to find facts and how to test facts and to be able to then say, what does that mean? How do I take data and analyse it, and how do I actually use that to have insights? I think that’s the critical piece that needs to change.
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Fact sources: How Young People Are Faring Report Card, FYA, 2015; New Work Order, FYA, 2015; Hanushek et al, Education and economic growth, 2008; Knowledge Society; Pilcher and Tori, Crunching the numbers, Mitchell Institute, 2018; New Work Smarts, FYA, 2017.
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