Education is the key to economic, social and environmental progress, and governments around the world are looking to improve their education systems.

Equitable educational opportunities can help to promote long-lasting, inclusive economic growth and social cohesion. Successful education and skills policies can empower individuals to reach their full potential and enjoy the fruits of their labour, regardless of their circumstances at birth.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a forceful reminder that education plays an important role in delivering not just academic learning, but also in supporting physical and emotional well-being. Balancing traditional “book learning” with broader social and personal development means new roles for schools and education more generally.

How might digital technology and notably smart technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics, robotics, and others transform education? This book explores such question. It focuses on how smart technologies currently change education in the classroom and the management of educational organisations and systems.

This book brings together the lessons of research on both the nature of learning and different educational applications, and it summarises these as seven key concluding principles.

Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for complex, globalised and increasingly digitalised economies and societies. While teachers and education policy makers consider creativity and critical thinking as important learning goals, it is still unclear to many what it means to develop these skills in a school setting. To make it more visible and tangible to practitioners, the OECD worked with networks of schools and teachers in 11 countries to develop and trial a set of pedagogical resources that exemplify what it means to teach, learn and make progress in creativity and critical thinking in primary and secondary education.