Investigating the Impact of Supportive Programmes to Enhance the Learning Transfer of Teachers

Recently, in the report titled “What students learn matters”, the OECD project named ‘Future of Education and Skills 2030’ has defined the ‘Time Lag" in education as the phenomenon that occurs when the contents, abilities, and key competencies the students are expected to master at the end of their school journey lie behind what jobs and real-life situations request them to know and to do1 . What are the driving factors that may lead to this skill mismatch? More than ever, against the backdrop of global environmental problems and social inequality that are worsening, the world is facing even greater change due to rapidly advancing innovations such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, robotics, and biotechnology2 . In addition to digital and green transformation, the COVID-19 pandemic has posed enormous challenges to the global economy, society, and people's lives. UNESCO says that 1.6 billion students, including more than 200 million in higher education, were affected by school closures. Despite being unprepared for such a sudden change, educational institutions might have to move to emergency remote teaching overnight, shifting online to give lectures and adjusting to remote learning3 . This is just a demonstration of the fact that not only is innovation driven by cutting-edge research, where new discoveries are often used in ways that change the way we usually do things, but it is also affected by the consequent modification of social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. We look for and use new approaches to cope with the changing needs and realities of society, thus influencing the context we live in2 . The immense challenges we face may have sparked a societal shift toward “Society 5.0”, in which infrastructures and technology assist people in resolving social and environmental issues with an emphasis on sustainability, human worth, and resilience4 . People would be interested in how technologies, discoveries, and ideas can improve business processes and results and how their application will affect organizations, institutions, and societies, making human progress more sustainable and humane. In addition to basic skills, more and more personal skills are becoming important. Beside numeracy, scientific literacy, cultural literacy, citizenship, and digital literacy, soft skills such as effective communication, creativity, and critical thinking will also be increasingly in demand5 . To thrive in a post-COVID world, youth and adults need to be able to learn a wide range of essential skills, and institutions have a responsibility to prioritise development to open up more diverse entry points into the world of work and boost countries’ economies6 . Education systems significantly influence the extent to which individuals and societies pursue success opportunities. The capacity of education systems to either ameliorate or perpetuate social and economic inequality is one of the most fundamental global issues of our time7 . The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a broad set of targets for the European Union's commitment to education. Sustainable Development Goal 4, providing inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all, inspires the EU's policy, which considers education as a fundamental human right, vital to addressing global challenges and achieving long- term development. Meeting the other SDGs, which include goals and targets for human development, environmental protection, prosperity, justice, and peace, is also strongly correlated with high-impact school education. Improving long-term educational outcomes is a top priority of the EU's strategy, which considers strengthening education systems. They serve as a flywheel for productivity, innovation and resilience and contribute to more inclusive communities8 . Important EU policies are based on the idea that skills acquired through education, training and lifelong learning are at the heart of fair and well-functioning labour markets. The European Pillar of Social Rights and the Council Recommendation on Vocational Education and Training (VET) for Sustainable Competitiveness, Social Fairness, and Resilience are the primary initiatives to establish the principles and define the road map for the recovery and a just transition to a digital and green economy8 . The European Skills Agenda 2020 emphasizes the importance of enhancing understanding of skills and bolstering national initiatives. The European Skills Index (ESI) of Cedefop serves as both a tool for mapping performance and a report on the evolution of national skills systems. Learning the necessary skills and competencies for the future is therefore the task of the educational world9 . According to recent studies, the curriculum design and review process can be significantly enhanced by basing curriculum refinement on past and present facts that anticipate the future needs of society10 and by considering the opinions of stakeholders to improve the level of its implementation11. Creating a unified vision for the student profile as intended student outcomes can also provide useful information when determining what must be modified to achieve the desired result12 . While countries and schools have made significant strides in recent years towards a 21st-century curriculum that incorporates new goals such as digital literacy, sustainable development, cross-curricular content, and competency-based curricula, the results of such reforms are taking longer than expected to become visible, thus pointing out one of the four dimensions of time lag, the one depending on classroom implementation. The size of the time lag is actually characterized by four dimensions: 'recognition time lag,' which is the time required to recognize the need for a curriculum change, 'decision time lag,' which depends on how long the entire process of formalizing the change takes, 'implementation time lag,' which occurs when curriculum reforms are not quickly or thoroughly adopted into classroom practice due to factors inhibiting or delaying their implementation, and, finally, 'impact time lag' which depends on the time needed for the results to become visible13 . Since teachers are the primary curriculum implementers and their engagement with the curriculum directly affects the outcome of the reform, a sizable portion of the literature on curriculum implementation focuses on them. If they don't have the necessary skills, change won't happen, claims Fullan (2015) 14. Kisa and Correnti expanded on the notion that teachers' limited knowledge or pre-existing beliefs and practices would obstruct a seamless implementation of the curriculum, contending that smart policy design takes into account stakeholders' capacity today as well as the aspirations to shape it in the future.