Sarah is the Director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing, University of Oxford. She continues her research into the social implications of demographic ageing, with particular emphases on late life work and flexible retirement and intergenerational relationships and the family. Formerly a professor in Public Policy at the University of Chicago, she has worked in age related issues in the US, Australia, China and Sweden.

Current research interests include late life work and flexible retirement among the self-employed, and among those working in the new technology industry; age discrimination and employment practises; and the impact of labour market replacement migration on intergenerational relationships in the EU.

Sarah is Global Advisor on Ageing Issues to HSBC, a Governor of the Pension’s Policy Institute, International Collaborator with the Australian Research Council/NHMRC Research Network, and a member of Help the Aged’s Research Strategy Advisory Board and Social Policy Committee. She is co-ordinator for Oxford University, of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) research programme on ageing. She is past co-editor of ‘Generations Review’, the Journal of the British Society of Gerontology, and is co-editor of ‘Journal of Population Ageing’, to be launched late 2008. Her latest books are ‘Families in Ageing Societies’, an international research volume (OUP, 2004), ‘Ageing Societies’, (Hodder Arnold, 2006), and ‘Ageing in Asia’ (Routledge 2008).

Helen is Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has a long record of research and publication in moral, social and political values, and on the interface of science and culture, including issues in gender and science. Her work includes research on culture and metaphor, on the public image of science particularly in the media, and on ethics and citizenship education. She is currently working on citizenship and education, and on the concept of ‘competence’.

She is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences. She was President of the International Society for Political Psychology in 2002. She received the Nevitt Sanford Award for lifetime contribution to political psychology, from the International Society of Political Psychology in 2005.

Helen Haste is the author or editor of five books, and numerous research reports. She has published in popular science journals and news media as well as extensively in the academic literature. She regularly broadcasts on radio and television. She also frequently gives public lectures, in addition to her university work. She has been involved for thirty years with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which she has been a Vice-President, and was Chair from 2004-5. She is on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals.

Carey is a Reader in Education and Technology and Deputy Director at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, in the University of London. Her research investigates the relationships between representation, technologies and teaching and learning as well as visual and multimodal research methods and theory. Carey is a founding editor of the journal ‘Visual Communication’. Her books include ‘Technology, Literacy, Learning: A Multimodality Approach’ (2006, Routledge); ‘English in Urban Classrooms’ (2005, Routledge) with Gunther Kress and colleagues; ‘Multimodal Literacy’ edited with Gunter Kress (2003, Peter Lang) and ‘A Handbook of Visual Analysis’ edited with Theo van Leeuwen (2001, Sage). She is currently editing ‘The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis’ (forthcoming, 2009).

Rob is Deputy Director of the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick in the UK. He leads the Institute’s labour assessment and market forecasting work. He has also researched and published on many other aspects of labour market behaviour, including the changing patterns of demand for and the supply of skills at national and international levels. 

Rob has played a leading role in developing quantitative approaches to anticipating changing skills needs at a national and international level. As well as producing ‘Working Futures’ for the LSC/SSDA, he has led the Cedefop Skillsnet project ‘Medium-term forecasts of occupational skill needs in Europe’. This, for the first time, has produced a consistent and comprehensive assessment of employment prospects for the whole of Europe. It is currently being extended to focus on the supply of skills.

He has written extensively on these and related topics, including books on ‘Employment Forecasting in the Construction Industry’; ‘The National Health Service and the Labour Market’; ‘Technical Change: The Role of Scientists and Engineers’; and ‘Research and Development Statistics’.

Amongst his professional responsibilities, Rob has been a member of the Medical Workforce Standing Advisory Committee and the Skills Task Force Research Group. He is currently a member of the Migration Advisory Committee set up to advise Home Office ministers about whether there are skill shortages that can be sensibly filled by the use of inward migrants to the UK.

Beyond Current Horizons is being conducted by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and education innovators Futurelab. It will investigate the range of ways in which education might need to change in the light of potential future changes in society and technology. Parents, teachers, employers and children should all take part – any child born today will be 17 in 2025; what will be the big issues and questions that will face them?

Beyond Current Horizons has introduced a ‘Future Challenges for Education’ Power League – a fun and easy way to rank which educational challenges concern or interest people the most. This Power League, which closes on 25 February 2008, is the first of many opportunities to engage in the research programme. It is free to vote and completely anonymous.

People vote for one question that they deem to pose the greatest challenge to education in a series of randomly generated pairs. The Future Challenges for Education Power League includes questions such as, ‘What will we need to know in 2025 and beyond?’ or ‘How will new technologies influence our understanding of identity and community?’

The Power League then ranks each of the questions voted for in order of preference. The order of the items changes each time someone casts a vote. The often-unexpected nature of the pairs being compared and the resulting leagues makes a good starting point for discussion. Why is this challenge more influential? Why is this issue more important than that?

The Beyond Current Horizons Expert Advisory Group, including leading researchers, thinkers and policy makers, will meet in February 2008. Based on public workshops, commissioned research papers and the results of the Power League and other online consultation, this group will set the direction for the programme by choosing five significant questions for education in the context of social and technological change. These questions will then form the basis for a 12 month programme of research, expert consultation and public discussion.

If people want to comment on the challenges or raise their own questions they can send an e-mail to: beyondcurrenthorizons@futurelab.org.uk.

Click here to view the Minister’s speech in full

Beyond Current Horizons is divided into four strands. Futurelab (www.futurelab.org.uk) will undertake the Scientific and Technical Programme of research with leading technology, scientific and social scientific experts to provide examples of future scenarios. The DCSF will elaborate on these possibilities through Thematic Research. In the third strand of the programme a series of public events for parents, children and teachers will enable Futurelab to examine the social and ethical implications of these scenarios. The DCSF will develop the findings into policy briefings and planning for the future provision of educational services.

A dedicated website at www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk will be available from January 2008 detailing the latest progress, with various consultation tools coming online starting from January2008.

For more information please contact Futurelab on 0117 915 8200 or beyondcurrenthorizons@futurelab.org.uk.

Professor Buckingham taught and lectured in more than 25 countries around the world, and his work has been published in over 15 languages. His key publications include Children Talking Television (Falmer 1993), Moving Images (Manchester UP 1996), The Making of Citizens (Routledge 2000), After the Death of Childhood (Polity 2000) and Media Education (Polity 2003). His most recent books include Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture (Polity, 2007) and Global Children, Global Media; Migration, Media and Childhood (with Liesbeth de Block, Palgrave, 2007). He has also conducted consultancy for a range of organisations including the MacArthur Foundation, the BBC, Ofcom, the DCSF (for the Byron Review on Children and New Technologies), The Institute for Public Policy Research, the European Commission, UNESCO and the United Nations.

He previously served in academic faculty jobs at the University of Sussex (UK), at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (USA), and at the University of Southampton (UK). From 1998-2005 Cliff worked as an industrial research scientist: formerly as a Department Scientist at the Hewlett-Packard Labs European Research Centre in Bristol, where he founded and led HP’s Complex Adaptive Systems research group; and latterly as a Director in Deutsche Bank’s Foreign Exchange (FX) Complex Risk Group, on Deutsche’s City of London FX trading floor.

In October 2005, Cliff was appointed Director of the UK national research and training initiative in the science and engineering of Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS). The LSCITS Initiative commenced formally in October 2007, is funded by almost £10m of UK public funds, and will involve more than 250 person-years of research effort over its first phase: full details are available at www.lscits.org. Cliff is author or co-author on over 70 academic publications, inventor or co-inventor on 15 patents; and he has undertaken advisory and consultancy work for a number of major companies and for the UK Government.  He has given well over 100 invited keynote lectures and seminars; and he and his work have frequently been featured both in the press and on TV and radio. He is a visiting professor at the University of Leeds, a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society, a member of EPSRC’s ICT Strategic Advisory Team, and a member of CPHC.