Dr. Aliya Khalid

Education systems worldwide are navigating a period of transition. Demographic change, technological transformation, deepening inequalities and shifting labour markets place new demands on institutions. These pressures ask us to consider not only how education systems respond, but whose aspirations shape that response, and what kinds of societies we hope education will help bring into being.

The Oxford Global Education Futures Forum is conceived as a space for serious and sustained dialogue across the boundaries that too often separate research, policy and practice. Global conversations about education can speak ‘from above’, reducing complex social realities to broad categories and linear assumptions about cause and effect. By bringing together education ministers and policymakers, scholars, practitioners and emerging leaders, we hope to engage with some of the most consequential questions facing education today while learning from the situated experiences of countries and communities, and from the plural knowledges that emerge from them.

A particular ambition of the Forum is to deepen engagement between African education leaders and the academic community at Oxford. This means creating opportunities not simply to discuss challenges, but to identify areas for sustained research collaboration, policy exchange, institutional partnership and the expansion of human capabilities. It also means taking seriously the perspectives and aspirations of young people, whose voices are too often absent from the decisions that will shape their futures. We see them not as recipients of policy, but as agents who imagine and work towards alternative futures.

Our hope is that the Forum becomes more than an annual gathering. We want it to lay the foundations for enduring relationships between universities, governments, researchers and practitioners, grounded in mutual respect and a willingness to learn across contexts. From these relationships, we hope, will come new ideas and collaborations that contribute meaningfully to education systems that are more equitable, more innovative and more responsive to the lives and aspirations of the people they serve.