The skills we will need in the future will be, or at least look, different from those we've needed in the past. John Morgan, Senior Researcher at Futurelab, explores what form these new basics might take in the 21st century and looks at past and present changes to the curriculum.

In the 1980s one of the most influential books about education was called 'Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children'. The 15,000 hours was the average amount of time children spend in schools between the ages of 5 and 16. The background to this study was the widespread feeling in the 1970s and 1980s that schools weren't providing children with the basic skills needed to 'get on and get up' in our society. This was most famously expressed in the then Prime Minister James Callaghan's speech in 1976 that launched the 'Great Debate' in education, which focused on the extent to which schools were producing students with the skills needed in the economy: "I am concerned. to find complaints from industry that new recruits from schools sometimes do not have the basic tools to do the job that is required." He went on to stress his concern about the lack of school-industry cooperation, the anti-technological bias in the school curriculum and the standards of numeracy and literacy amongst school leavers. In other words, schools were not enough concerned with the 'basics'.

In the 1980s and 1990s educational policies seem largely to have been concerned with getting 'back to basics'. The National Curriculum was widely seen as restoring a focus on numeracy, literacy and the study of classic texts and national history. However, throughout this period there were also voices that argued for increased modernisation of the curriculum - one that was much more in line with the needs of children who will live and work in the so-called 'knowledge economy' of the 21st century.

This call for a modernised education system reached its peak following the election of Tony Blair's Labour Party in May 1997. The focus of the Government was to be 'education, education, education'. This policy was explained in a 1996 pamphlet entitled 'The Skills Revolution' which argued that: "If we are to face the challenge of creating a high tech, high added-value and high wage economy, we can only do so by skilling our people."

This is not just the view of one political party. This has become one of the accepted truths of our age; no political party seriously dissents from the view that better skilled students will result in higher Gross National Product (economic growth) and therefore a happier and better society.

In our changing world, it is not enough to focus on basic literacy and numeracy (though of course these are the bedrock for everything else). The new economy needs people who are innovative, flexible, creative and who have high levels of emotional and social intelligence. This requires a curriculum that allows these skills and abilities to develop. This is reflected in the recent QCA Futures programme, which seeks to stimulate debate about the aims and purposes of the school curriculum: "Employers consistently identify the kind of people they want in their workplaces. They want people who are literate and numerate and have information technology skills. They look for people who can build and maintain relationships, work productively in teams and communicate effectively. They look for problem-solvers, people who take responsibility and make decisions and are flexible, adaptable and willing to learn new skills."

There are signs that this type of thinking is becoming the 'new common sense' about curriculum, and is reflected in various initiatives to reform the school curriculum. An example is the RSA's curriculum Opening Minds: Education for the 21st Century (www.rsa.org.uk/newcurriculum). Opening Minds challenges current curriculum and teaching and learning practices, and makes suggestions about what an alternative school curriculum might look like. It starts from the assumption that there is a growing divide between the current school curriculum and the experiences and demands of the outside world - Opening Minds argues that it is not a matter of changing ways of teaching but about the content of the curriculum, which it argues is fundamentally out of date, slow to react, fragmented and ill-suited to children's needs.

The Opening Minds curriculum recommends the abandonment of subject areas and their replacement by a set of competences that students will acquire through a range of experiences. The focus is on understanding and doing rather than acquiring a body of knowledge. It makes use of new technologies to promote flexible learning and teaching styles and the release of creative energy - in other words, it promotes independent rather than 'receptive' learning.

The impetus for the Opening Minds curriculum was the RSA's report 'Redefining Work', which looked at how work and career patterns were likely to change over the next two decades. The report concluded: "It is already clear that in the knowledge economy and society of the future, people with a good education and high skill levels will be best placed to take advantage of the opportunities offered them and to handle successfully an increasingly complex world," adding that "we are still educating people for a world that is disappearing."

The message is clear: schools that concentrate on teaching a body of knowledge need to change their focus. Students still need access to knowledge, but the subject curriculum is not able to provide the skills necessary to do this. Opening Minds focuses on the competences which individuals require in order to adapt to the 21st century. They are:

• learning
• citizenship
• relating to people
• managing situations
• managing information.