Educators need to be keen observers of change. This is the only way we can keep our teaching, and our schools, up to date and relevant. But, more than this, we must be agenda-setters and change-makers. We have the power to transform our classrooms and our schools. As we embark on these transformations, we also make our own contribution to the transformation of the broader society. Better learners will better contribute to the making of a better society.

If we were to choose a single word to characterise the agenda of the New Learning, it is to be ‘transformative’. New Learning, for us, is thus not simply based on a reading of change; it is also grounded in an optimistic agenda in which we educators can constructively contribute to change.

If knowledge is indeed as pivotal in contemporary society as the ‘new economy’ commentators and politicians claim, then educators should seize the agenda and position themselves as forces of change. Not only is the education of the near future likely to drift further away from its roots in the industrial era. So it should. And ‘should’ means that we have a professional responsibility to be change agents who design the education for the future.

After a century of progressivist attempts to improve on didactic education, the ‘New Learning’ needs to be authentic and more; it should also be ‘transformative’. Being authentic may produce a better it between education and society, but leaves society fundamentally the way it is. It sets out to reflect the realities of the world more than to change them. It does not necessarily move the learner in terms of intergenerational mobility or life trajectory. Transformative education builds on many of the insights of authentic pedagogy, to be sure, but ups the ante. Its aims are no less than to change the life chances of the learner and to change their world.

The transformative education that we identify is emergent. Nowhere are we there yet, but we can see many symptomatic signs of change. Transformative education is an idea that builds upon and extends the insights into the nature of learning and the role of education in society to be found at moments in both didactic and authentic education, while attempting to move beyond their main limitations. It is something that recognises the educational legacies of the past in order to design better educational futures. Transformative education is an act of imagination for the future of learning and an attempt to find practical ways to develop aspects of this future in the educational practices of the present. It is an open-ended struggle rather than a clear destination, a process rather than a formula for action. It is work-in-progress.