Harry Patrinos’ speech, World Bank Global Education Practice Manager for Europe and Central Asia, concluded the program of READ conference. It was devoted to sharing a vision of the contribution of READ (Russia Education Aid for Development) program to improving education in the world and trends affecting its future. According to him, the READ program was developing instruments of education quality assessment and helped fighting “learning crisis” and “learning poverty” long before they were formally discovered. Nowadays assessment of education quality has become a core part of the global education agenda, and READ program makes a great contribution to its development. Tools developed in frames of READ, will help close “measurement gap” as there is no such data from many countries.
The need for improvement of education quality and the development of 21st Century Skills – that’s what we can learn from the review of education development trends made by the speaker. It’s a tremendous growth in higher education – demand for it tripled since 60’s. It should have been an inevitable decline in the price of education and graduates’ wages, but there is a slight increase. This suggests that today a higher level of skills is required and their fostering is impossible without providing quality education at every stage of the learning process. In addition, the transition to personalized purpose-oriented education was stated as a guideline for the development of education, and it was noted that READ instruments should support and contribute to the implementation of this concept. In conclusion, Harry Patrinos thanked organizers and participants of the conference and said that READ has accomplished a lot he is looking forward to the next stage of development and further good work at the next phase of READ program.
