'Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.' – Attributed to Albert Einstein

Are education systems focusing on developing the right skills at school and universities? Societies are ageing, workforces are shrinking, productivity is slowing, radicalism is growing, and young people are aspiring to jobs with maximum security. Is Europe losing its dynamism? Its innovative capacity? And if things continue on the same path, what will be the consequences for our way of living and position on the international stage?

In its new agenda for skills, the European Commission explicitly links human capital, employability and competitiveness. It suggests that everyone should be equipped with a broad range of skills for personal fulfilment and development, social inclusion, active citizenship and employment.

These skills include literacy, numeracy, science and foreign languages, which have long been embedded in education systems. However, the agenda also identifies a range of transversal skills and key competences less typically covered explicitly in education institutions, among which are digital competences, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, problem solving, learning to learn, and financial literacy. If these skills are critical for our future, why are they not already established in education curricula?

A recent Eurydice report on entrepreneurship education sheds some light on this question. It suggests that most education systems (29 out of 38) have a strategy in place for developing entrepreneurship education. However, it also identifies the lack of clear learning outcomes and the link to assessment as one of the main hindrances to the development of effective and high quality entrepreneurship education.

While many factors have an impact on entrepreneurial attitudes in society, the report shows that education could be playing a stronger role. For this to happen, competences such as risk-taking, initiative, planning and management, cooperation and resilience would need to be more highly valued in school and higher education. And herein lies the problem: without learning objectives and tests to assess qualities such as student initiative or resilience, how do we know if they are valued?

Indeed, another Eurydice report suggests that national testing of students has emerged as an important instrument of education policy in Europe. While national test results are only one type of performance data used in school evaluation, along with teacher assessment, information on progression rates, and many more, the use of performance data is often central to the external evaluation of school performance. It is also the basis for national and international policy discussions – the evidence component of our evidence-based policies.

But is this focus on assessment and learning outcomes the right way of approaching the development of transversal skills? And more generally, is it the right way to assess quality in education? According to Sir Ken Robinson, we are caught in the trap of conceiving education along an out-dated industrialisation model. We organise our schools like factories, with students harmonised by age groups, taught in specialised subjects according to a standardised curricula and then tested individually using standardised tests. And even when alternative approaches demonstrate superior outcomes – the work of Céline Alvarez in pre-primary education in France is but one high profile example – the idea of changing this model appears to be too challenging.

In the context of high youth unemployment, economic crisis and rapid changes to our knowledge-based economies, transversal skills such as entrepreneurship are essential not just to shape the mind-sets of young people, but also to provide the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are central to developing an entrepreneurial culture in Europe. More than ever before, there is a need for people to get us not only from A to B, but everywhere.

So can we postpone the development of these competences until standardised tests can measure risk taking, initiative, cooperation and resilience? Or should education systems empower educators to develop such competences, recognising that this will be designed and assessed locally, based on trust and not monitored through standardised tests? The first path would keep our education systems in familiar territory, but setting us back even further. Taking the second option would be a sign of the initiative and risk-taking that European policy seeks to encourage. But are policy-makers ready to lead by example?

Authors: Lars Bo Jakobsen and David Crosier