Sustainability and the OECD ‘Trends Shaping Education 2025’

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) triennial assessment of the direction of all education has told universities and colleges that they must anticipate change in an uncertain world being transformed by generative AI, as they consider how to promote the global goal of sustainability.

The Trends Shaping Education 2025 report flags how advances in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other technology could transform teaching and learning.

These issues are impacting on how education – including higher education – is aiming to develop sustainability goals, said the OECD, which stressed that its analysis is “designed to inspire reflection and inform strategic thinking on how global trends might transform education and how education can shape a better future”.



At a launch event on Thursday 23 January, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, spoke extensively about the technological and environmental trends that are affecting education today.

He said the report should be viewed as a tool for educators and national education systems to enable a concept of ‘human flourishing’ amid the growing sense of uncertainty over the big disruptors of education – climate change, the pandemic and the advent of AI, among others.

“Climate change is going to disrupt our lives a lot more than the [COVID-19] pandemic and AI is putting into question almost everything that we take for granted in education,” he said.

The faster the world changes, the further we need to look into the future, and this is increasingly hard for people to do, Schleicher continued. “All we expect from this publication is to get people to think about what are the factors that could shape the future in different combinations?”

That includes how the world may be shaken to its societal core by technological change, and how young people are reacting to this. The report asked: “How radically will technological developments and sustainability imperatives impact the need for human labour and the way that humans interact with each other?”

Shifting priorities

“Shifting priorities indicate that, for increasing numbers of young people, work no longer constitutes a core component of their identity. AI is expanding the capacity of robots to work with humans in different fields, meaning that more of us will work collaboratively with intelligent machines in the years to come.

“And while human relationships remain central to caring for others, new technologies have the potential to transform social interactions. With less time spent in direct human contact, can education help maintain a sense of community and foster socio-emotional learning and well-being?”

AI will bring real transformation to the world, but “humans will remain at the centre”, Schleicher argued.

Thus, education systems of the future must help facilitate a skills transition and lifelong learning, equipping individuals with the ability to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn – skills that are essential for thriving in an unpredictable world, he explained.

“The work-life balance is clearly evolving, and with the rise of technology and AI, we can expect it to change even more. There will come a time when people will need to dedicate more of their time to other pursuits beyond just producing things for others,” he noted.

This shift demands that we prepare people not only with knowledge but with the ability to apply it in new ways and, therefore, underscores the need for education systems to help learners build critical thinking skills that go beyond simply processing information.

“Our world no longer rewards us for providing answers; it rewards us for asking the right questions,” said Schleicher.

This will require forward thinking and holistic higher education strategies. And education will need to anticipate the impact of upcoming technological change on how humans chart a course towards a sustainable future, said the report.

“The demand for green jobs is rising, but a skills mismatch could slow the transition and disrupt local labour markets. Similarly, the spread of recent technologies like artificial intelligence is set to automate many tasks and create new ones, requiring different skill sets.”

Higher education and sustainability

In this regard, the OECD report accepted that sustainability presents both challenges and opportunities for education systems.

Speaking to University World News on these issues after the report launch, Dr Debra Rowe, president of the US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development and an international advocate for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, said a key issue was equipping students to use technology such as AI as a tool to transform societies towards sustainability.

That includes shifting goals and prestige away from purely material and professional personal aims, towards community, voluntary and emotional fulfilment through roles as consumers, investors and civic actors for political systems, policies and programmes. Technology will increasingly take care of technical and administrative tasks formerly handled by trained humans.

“If there is not as much employment as in the past, human beings should not be punished for struggling to find work with economic insecurity related to food or housing or other basic needs.

“A core learning in sustainability needs to be how the pie of prosperity gets shared and how it can be redesigned with the fact-based understanding that there is enough on this planet to improve quality of life for all substantially while protecting the planet and its life sustaining ecosystems for both present and future generations,” said Rowe.

“Students and non-students can learn the opportunities for civic engagement and policy advocacy for human improvements. Stories of successful transitions to sustainability can be shared in learning materials in all academic areas.”

Solving the biggest problems of our time

Given that climate change “threatens the stability of economies and societies worldwide, highlighting the importance of international co-operation”, the OECD paper asked how education can foster understanding of the global, regional and local dimensions of these challenges.

Indeed, research collaborations are on the rise and more people will be working together to solve the biggest problems of our time, including finding solutions to the climate crisis, said Schleicher.

Developing skills needed to operate a sustainable economy and society is key, said the OECD, asking: “How can education systems best support the development of relevant skills and help people transition out of polluting sectors to ensure that no one is left behind?”

It added that education can develop skills and innovations supporting a diverse and greener energy sector, “while giving workers in the fossil fuel industry opportunities to upskill or reskill”.

And the jobs are there. According to OECD research, a sub-category of green ‘new and emerging’ occupations comprising 14% of sustainability-driven typically high-skilled jobs, such as managers, professionals and technicians, have “experienced the fastest growth in the past decade”, said the report.

Indeed, when examining the broader climate agenda, the world must recognise that significant progress has already been made in this area, Schleicher said.

He added: “The world is changing. We can see very clearly that employment in the clean energy sector has now surpassed employment in the brown energy sector – people are on the move; they have changed jobs and have deployed their skills in different ways. That is the reality and the positive kind of forces that we see.”

Education’s boost to sustainability

Also, education can influence consumers to boost sustainable practices through their purchasing choices by increasing environmental literacy and sustainable practices.

Said the report: “Education plays a crucial role in promoting sustainability and supporting healthier, environmentally friendly lifestyles. Can it also help reshape attitudes toward consumption, materialism and the value of sharing?”

Education can also indirectly encourage behavioural shifts by facilitating new forms of political participation and cultural expression, boosting innovative climate activism and advocacy, said the OECD. A key issue here is combating disinformation and political polarisation – often peddled by social media – which are “threatening constructive debate”.

The report concluded: “How can education foster trust in democratic institutions and responsible citizenship to help societies address complex, systemic challenges?”

Debra Rowe said: “Students are often asking for and need to be provided with assignments that provide the knowledge and skills to empower them to cope with the complexity of our societal problems with resilience and effective self and community care.”

She said they also need advice on being change agents “that can help scale up for systems change at societal levels, including how to build coalitions and find leverage points for societal change”.

That includes skills of working in groups to target goals and change, which require strong emotional interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, strategic thinking, future thinking, systems thinking and implementation capacities.

AI and education for sustainability

Speakers at the launch event underlined the potential of generative AI in such work, stressing the importance of taking an empirical, evidence-based approach to AI in education to mitigate risks including potential bias, the disproportionate impact it may have on certain demographics and the impact on students’ cognitive and social development.

Anita Lehikoinen, permanent secretary at Finland’s ministry of education and culture, said: “Something that we should be talking about regarding the use of AI is whether it empowers people from different socio-economic backgrounds in the same way or does it only empower those people who are empowered more because of their background?”

The deputy director general of the ministry of education in Singapore, Chern Wei Sng, said that his ministry had already begun experimenting with AI technology and its potential applications in educational settings.

“There are already AI tools that design lesson plans for teachers and facilitate personalised learning, so it’s a very powerful technology that could potentially improve teaching and learning,” said Sng. However, educators must assess the risks associated with AI, so it does not turn into a form of cognitive outsourcing for students, hurting their adaptive learning skills and resilience.

Sustainability investment, ethics, politics

As for sustainability-focused investment, the OECD said given that the “era of cheap energy is over, schools and other places of learning will face increasing demands on their budgets, with energy bills draining resources that could be used on staff or learning materials”.

So, energy conservation and efficiency does not just make environmental sense, it is sound financially: “Improving the energy efficiency of education buildings will help to reduce spending in the long-term and improve sustainability.”

Ethical guidance and political strategy in developing trading can also help boost sustainability – fuelled by sensitive and holistic education, noted the OECD: “While scientific collaboration has grown, geopolitical tensions and trade dependencies on critical raw materials pose risks to innovation and sustainability.”

Noting that while COVID-19 demonstrated the value of global science partnerships, with diplomatic competition intensifying amongst competing nation-based states, “concerns over research security are rising”.

Education could help deepen perspectives that a global approach to innovation and resource development can pay dividends in boosting sustainability, said the report: “In building ethical frameworks, shared goals, and skills to ensure scientific and technological progress benefits humanity and the planet while safeguarding collaboration and security.”

Finally, the OECD suggested that education should be oriented towards ensuring older adults gain sustainability insight and skills, not just young people.

“How can this be addressed in formal, non-formal and informal education and training? How can education and training impart good environmental literacy for all, and advance specialised skills for some?” asked the report.

‘Human flourishing’

When speaking at the launch event, Susan Acland-Hood, permanent secretary of the Department for Education in the United Kingdom, noted the importance of analysing current and changing demographic trends when thinking about the future of education.

“[In the UK] we spent quite a lot of time last year across the whole of government actually looking at demographic trends and the emphasis on learning for the whole of life,” she said.

Acland-Hood said that sustainability will go hand in hand with education in the future, when the next stage of human development – economical, ecological, social and cultural – should be centred on the concept of human flourishing.

“I believe the key addition to high-performing education systems, or systems designed for human flourishing, is the understanding that for humans to thrive, the planet must thrive as well. It’s about two simple things: humankind and the planet,” she concluded.

Rowe told University World News: “With the increasing rate of change with AI and perhaps the decreasing need for human work, lifelong learning could be and should be valued. This means new offerings for all ages. Students could learn how access to quality education can be increased.

“Skills in identifying mis- and dis-information should be a core skill. Understanding how we have structured economies so far and how we might restructure them in the future provides a creative and necessary area of inquiry for sustainability education for all students and for community partners.”