About This Report
Across the world, education systems are asking the same urgent question: what do young people actually need to navigate – and shape – the future they’re inheriting? Finland, for example, has its seven transversal competencies. The OECD has its Learning Compass 2030. Scotland, Australia, and UNESCO each have their own answer. The direction is strikingly consistent: a move away from siloed subject knowledge toward integrated, transferable capabilities that prepare young people for lives, not just exams.
Future-ready capabilities presents a new framework that emerged from the conversations of a group of educators, researchers and business leaders at the EdRising event held in Auckland in July, 2026. It comes from a starting point that is uniquely Aotearoa-New Zealand. Rather than adapting an international model, it was built from the ground up by people who brought their own professional knowledge and cultural contexts to the task. The result is six capabilities: ecological thinking, cultural fluency, digital wisdom, creative problem solving, collective agency and leadership, and adaptive resilience. They’re attentive to the obligations of this place – to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, to our Pacific identity, to the environmental realities we face – while still holding onto the familiar ground of critical thinking, self-management, and communication.
This isn’t a “replace knowledge with skills” framework. That’s a false choice. Knowledge-rich learning and capability development aren’t competing priorities – they’re mutually reinforcing. You can’t think ecologically without substantial knowledge of how systems actually work. You can’t reason creatively without deep content to reason with. The framework is designed to show how we can teach content in ways that simultaneously build these wider capacities – not as an add-on, but woven into the “both/and” of good learning design.
Each of the six capabilities in the paper is set out the same way: what it’s about, why it matters, and a set of reflection questions for groups to work through together because this is less as a finished answer and more as a provocation for the conversations schools and systems need to be having right now. There’s also a fuller set of guiding prompts in the appendix for anyone wanting to take this into a staff meeting or leadership team session.
This framework is provided as a starting point for further development in your own context, rather than another framework on a shelf. If you’re a school or system leader: where do you already see pockets of excellence in any of these six? Where are the gaps? And what’s one action you could take in the next term to start strengthening one of them? How might these be useful in the development of your own portrait of a graduate/graduate profile?
Preview and download the paper below…
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