Education not only needs to be more practical, it needs to be more holistic. Valuing high marks and exam success over practical skills – and skills in entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation – is an antiquated model that turns out unenthusiastic, uncreative, outcome-focused students who lack the necessary qualities to be well-rounded members of the workforce, and of society.

“Learning is not a competition,” states Ong Ye Kung, Singapore’s Education Minister. The Ministry of Education (MOE) is planning a series of changes aimed at discouraging comparisons between student performance and encourage individuals to concentrate on their own learning development.

We need to move towards an assessment model that promotes mastery; a model that is about what kids can, and do, achieve, rather than having them move on to another learning area without fully mastering the first.

Software is now available that uses virtually reality to step into a beautiful and authentic location to learn a language, so that when you travel to these wonderful places in real-life, you’ll be prepared!

Big Picture is exciting because it’s meeting kids where they are – at the upper and lower ends of academic success. It isn’t for kids who are disengaged because they’re disadvantaged: it’s for kids who are disengaged from schooling as it exists across the academic spectrum. It’s raising the floor and the ceiling.” I hope this article makes you think how again change can be accomplished.