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The skills we will need in the future will be, or at least look, different from those we've needed in the past. John Morgan, Senior Researcher at Futurelab, explores what form these new basics might take in the 21st century and looks at past and present changes to the curriculum.

In the 1980s one of the most influential books about education was called 'Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children'. The 15,000 hours was the average amount of time children spend in schools between the ages of 5 and 16. The background to this study was the widespread feeling in the 1970s and 1980s that schools weren't providing children with the basic skills needed to 'get on and get up' in our society. This was most famously expressed in the then Prime Minister James Callaghan's speech in 1976 that launched the 'Great Debate' in education, which focused on the extent to which schools were producing students with the skills needed in the economy: "I am concerned. to find complaints from industry that new recruits from schools sometimes do not have the basic tools to do the job that is required." He went on to stress his concern about the lack of school-industry cooperation, the anti-technological bias in the school curriculum and the standards of numeracy and literacy amongst school leavers. In other words, schools were not enough concerned with the 'basics'.

In the 1980s and 1990s educational policies seem largely to have been concerned with getting 'back to basics'. The National Curriculum was widely seen as restoring a focus on numeracy, literacy and the study of classic texts and national history. However, throughout this period there were also voices that argued for increased modernisation of the curriculum - one that was much more in line with the needs of children who will live and work in the so-called 'knowledge economy' of the 21st century.

This call for a modernised education system reached its peak following the election of Tony Blair's Labour Party in May 1997. The focus of the Government was to be 'education, education, education'. This policy was explained in a 1996 pamphlet entitled 'The Skills Revolution' which argued that: "If we are to face the challenge of creating a high tech, high added-value and high wage economy, we can only do so by skilling our people."

This is not just the view of one political party. This has become one of the accepted truths of our age; no political party seriously dissents from the view that better skilled students will result in higher Gross National Product (economic growth) and therefore a happier and better society.

In our changing world, it is not enough to focus on basic literacy and numeracy (though of course these are the bedrock for everything else). The new economy needs people who are innovative, flexible, creative and who have high levels of emotional and social intelligence. This requires a curriculum that allows these skills and abilities to develop. This is reflected in the recent QCA Futures programme, which seeks to stimulate debate about the aims and purposes of the school curriculum: "Employers consistently identify the kind of people they want in their workplaces. They want people who are literate and numerate and have information technology skills. They look for people who can build and maintain relationships, work productively in teams and communicate effectively. They look for problem-solvers, people who take responsibility and make decisions and are flexible, adaptable and willing to learn new skills."

There are signs that this type of thinking is becoming the 'new common sense' about curriculum, and is reflected in various initiatives to reform the school curriculum. An example is the RSA's curriculum Opening Minds: Education for the 21st Century (www.rsa.org.uk/newcurriculum). Opening Minds challenges current curriculum and teaching and learning practices, and makes suggestions about what an alternative school curriculum might look like. It starts from the assumption that there is a growing divide between the current school curriculum and the experiences and demands of the outside world - Opening Minds argues that it is not a matter of changing ways of teaching but about the content of the curriculum, which it argues is fundamentally out of date, slow to react, fragmented and ill-suited to children's needs.

The Opening Minds curriculum recommends the abandonment of subject areas and their replacement by a set of competences that students will acquire through a range of experiences. The focus is on understanding and doing rather than acquiring a body of knowledge. It makes use of new technologies to promote flexible learning and teaching styles and the release of creative energy - in other words, it promotes independent rather than 'receptive' learning.

The impetus for the Opening Minds curriculum was the RSA's report 'Redefining Work', which looked at how work and career patterns were likely to change over the next two decades. The report concluded: "It is already clear that in the knowledge economy and society of the future, people with a good education and high skill levels will be best placed to take advantage of the opportunities offered them and to handle successfully an increasingly complex world," adding that "we are still educating people for a world that is disappearing."

The message is clear: schools that concentrate on teaching a body of knowledge need to change their focus. Students still need access to knowledge, but the subject curriculum is not able to provide the skills necessary to do this. Opening Minds focuses on the competences which individuals require in order to adapt to the 21st century. They are:

• learning
• citizenship
• relating to people
• managing situations
• managing information.

Opening Minds has attracted a good deal of interest and comment. The signs are that many educators see it as an exciting and innovative attempt to re-imagine education because it focuses attention back on the learner and challenges a National Curriculum widely criticised for being weighed down with content. It is future-oriented and skills-based. As such, it's likely that we will see similar attempts to devise alternative curricula in the near future.

However, at this point, a note of caution needs to be introduced. Twenty years ago, in the midst of tumultuous social change, the RSA published a collection of essays called 'Education for Capability' which called for a radical restructuring of education, based on the acquisition of capability and competences. This would entail not only the "familiar basic skills, but also practical ability, the ability to get on with others, skill in solving real life problems" as well as calling for a "creative revolution in learning". Sound familiar? The failure of this 'manifesto' to take off, despite being signed by influential figures such as organisational behaviourist Charles Handy and military historian Corelli Barnett, raises some important questions about how schools and curriculum change (or not). One possible explanation is that reports like this and curriculum visions such as Opening Minds are simply ahead of their time. They can see what is coming, but schools, teachers and politicians are too slow to react to the forces that are reshaping the world. Another explanation is that these visions are the result of 'think-tanks' with an interest in promoting radical change - that is, after all, why they exist. Another response is to suggest that there is no simple connection between social and economic change (society) and what happens in schools (culture). That is to say, it's not a case of schools simply responding to external forces such as globalisation or new technologies.

This is not to say that we should forget all about the possibility of radical change in education systems and curricula, and it is certainly not meant as a criticism of the work of the RSA, which has produced some of the most provocative and innovative thinking regarding the direction of educational policy. It does, however, warn against the danger of thinking that schools will simply get swept along by large-scale forces such as globalisation and economic change. Instead, it suggests that a delicate balance needs to be struck between educational vision (where we want to go) and the altogether more piecemeal and unpredictable process of change in schools. By way of illustration, we might think back to the early 1980s, which in Britain at least was a time of optimism and excitement about the potential of information technology to restore economic growth and solve the problem of unemployment. There were moves to introduce 'computer literacy' in schools (the 1980s version of the new basics). However, such moves were not in line with the experience of many young people growing up in parts of the country where there was little sign of the emergence of the 'sunrise industries', in other words, those that are growing quickly and expected to be increasingly important in the future. This suggests that any curriculum needs to recognise people's current experience in addition to reflecting what life might be like in the future.

In spite of the complexity of curriculum change, we still need to think about what we mean by the 'new basics' in the 21st century and to imagine how education might be shaped in the future to support them. At the heart of these discussions is the challenging question of what we mean by the 'good society' (after all, all education systems are based on a view of what this difficult phrase means). To give a current example, just because the economy now needs fewer trained scientists does that mean that we shouldn't require young people to learn the technical aspects of science? Or should we suggest that a healthy democracy requires citizens who have an understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced? One thing is certain however. The question of what the 'new basics' are should be an open one - one that is debated and struggled over by as many people as possible.

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