Centre for Key Competences and New Literacy

One of the most recently established IOE divisions, the Centre for Key Competencies and New Literacy is a dedicated team of multidisciplinary education professionals who seek to develop comprehensive best-practice roadmaps for integrating 21st century skills and new literacies into modern-day school curricular and learning environments at large.

In a globalized world of dashing digital move and transdisciplinary innovation, nations have been undergoing deep and accelerating changes that span virtually every domain of human life. The onset of knowledge-driven economy and information society has sparked a major turnaround in the labor market, with some jobs facing high risks of redundancy and others requiring largely revised or even brand-new personality features, functional skills and social attitudes.

Against the backdrop of these all-embracing transformations, securing a sufficient and steady supply of aptly skilled, future-proof human capital has been emphasized at all levels as a principal determiner in how well prepared communities and nations will be to survive into a sustainable future of integrity, equity and growth. Accordingly, building more cooperative and productive social landscapes through visionary and well-coordinated implementation of 21st century skill agendas across areas and levels of schooling is currently among top-priority imperatives in both national and global policymaking.    

Key Credentials

Sharing this high-impact goal of facilitating robust 21st century schooling, the Centre functions as a diversified R&D and administration hub carrying out, among other activities, ongoing supervision of the International Academic Consortium working as part of the landmark Key Competences and New Literacy project, a joint initiative between IOE and Sberbank’s Investment in Future foundation that has been under way since early 2017.

The Project seeks to answer the following main questions:

• What is the desirable list of domains that schools should take care of and provide a basic level of literacy in?
• How can the basic level of literacy be defined across different domains?
• What are the key competences and literacies that should be developed at school?
• How can such key competences and literacies be developed in practice (curriculum, instruction, ways to assess skill gains, etc.)?

The Project’s principal phase kicked off in mid-summer 2017 by an IOE-hosted introductory seminar on high-level national scenarios for incorporating the 21st century skills agenda. As part of the second seminar held in September 2017 at the University of Helsinki, the Consortium members sought to take deeper and broader perspectives on the participant nations’ experiences in implementing new competences and literacies across school curricular, so as to identify and comprehensively describe the most generic approaches and best practices.

The Project’s Academic Consortium, which closely cooperates with the OECD Education 2030 program, the UNESCO International Bureau of Education and the World Bank, is a superb cohort of more than 20 acclaimed social science & education experts from the world’s leading academic hubs, including: University College London (the UK), Boston College (the UK), the University of Helsinki (Finland), Peking University (China), Seoul National University (Korea), Toronto University (Canada), Evidence Institute (Poland), and Moscow City University (Russia).

As its key deliverable, the Project envisages a massive comparative report that will cover the following key areas: the global new skills & literacy framework in both formal and informal learning settings, its national implementation scenarios, implications and lessons to learn on a cross-country basis; socioeconomic impacts and inequality issues; psychoeducational facets, including instructional and moral & ethical areas; etc.

Learn more about the Key Competences and New Literacy project  

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