Slovakia will be hosting OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education and Skills (24. – 26. November 2025). Forum brings together experts, policy makers, and school leaders to work on curriculum design that aligns with the future of education and the evolving skill sets required in a rapidly changing world. As Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills what are the major challenges countries face in educating children and students today? How do these challenges vary across countries and regions?

Sometimes you see that still reflected in today’s classrooms. I have been in some classrooms where science was taught like religion. Where we try to make students believe in some scientific theory, then we give them lots of exercises to practice scientific routines and procedures, and in the end, test whether they remember the answers we taught them. This has actually little to do with science, which has never been about reproducing knowledge, but always about questioning the knowledge of our times.

Another challege we face in commen is to create a culture of lifelong and lifewide learning. When we could still assume that what we learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching subject-matter content knowledge and routine cognitive skills was rightly at the center of education. Today, when we can access content via search engines, and when routine cognitive tasks are being digitized and outsourced, the focus needs to shift to enabling people to become lifelong learners. We used to learn to do the work, now learning has become the work.

The Forum in Bratislava will focus on the ethical, effective, and safe use of AI in schools. Do you think that artificial intelligence will drive major changes in education systems, fundamentally transforming how teaching, learning, and school operations are designed and delivered?

AI can make learning fun, as visible in many game-based learning environments. AI-based simulations let students do things that are difficult or costly to do in the real world. Why would a student want to listen to their teacher explaining the results of a scientific experiment when they can now do that experiment in a virtual laboratory? Modern vocational education shows how AI-supported augmented reality can super-empower the real world for learners.

However, humans have always been better to invent new tools than to use them wisely, and we need to keep in mind that AI is not a magic power. AI is just an amazing accelerator and an incredible amplifier. It amplifies good ideas and good educational practice in the same way it can amplify bad ideas and bad practice. AI can help us make education more inclusive by making learning much more accessible and better adaptive to the different needs of learners, but the pandemic has also shown how technology can amplify almost any form of inequity in education.

That is why the role of public policy is so important. Good policy can help us cultivate a more innovation-friendly eco-system in schools, and to establish guidelines and guardrails for AI that provide well thought-out principles that lead us to transparent, explainable, bias-free, and socially-negotiated applications. Good policy can drive more strategic funding and procurement. And good policy can encourage the combination of professional autonomy and collaborative culture in our educational institutions that engages schools to co-create smart, user-friendly, open and interoperable, and most importantly pedagogically meaningful AI learning systems.

At the outset of the Forum, Slovakia will be hosting Meeting of Ministers of Education and welcoming delegations from over 50 countries. The meeting is organized in close cooperation with the OECD. What are your expectations from discussions in Bratislava? In other words: what should be, in your opinion, the focus of these discussions?

Despite the promises of AI that I highlighted, the reality is we often have a patchwork of digital solutions. Schools have to rely on proprietary and incompatible partial solutions, and as different schools make different choices, they can’t harness the data to help students learn better and teachers teach better.