Critical attributes of future K-12 schooling to inform policy and practice: a scoping review

This scoping review synthesises research to answer the key question: ‘What are the key attributes of future-focused K-12 schools to serve the changing learning and education needs of students in the digital age?’ An iterative step-by-step thematic coding process and a series of analysis workshops led to the generation of four key attributes to inform policy and practice for future K-12 schools to serve the changing needs of students and communities. Attributes of future schools that emerged as seminal include: i) local and global community connections, ii) agentic leadership, iii) technology supported spaces, and iv) reconceptualising industrial-age education. A Bourdieusian lens was applied to understand school settings as fields or social domains, drawing on the key attributes to illustrate new directions for the design of future schools. The findings highlight complexity in redesigning schooling for the future due to institutional, political, and societal expectations that sustain existing traditional fields of schooling and inequitable access to capital, but also possibilities to inform policy and practice to develop innovative transformations of teaching and learning for new times.