CLA has worked with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the past – you can see a presentation by Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate of Education and Skills on our website here. In a think piece published in advance of the Arts in Schools: Foundations for the future report in 2023, it was noted that the OECD described the arts as contributing to pupils’ social and emotional development, as well as to innovation and critical thinking.
In June 2025 the OECD released a report which has interesting connections with and implications for expressive Arts education. Professor Pat Thomson examines “Education for human flourishing: A conceptual framework”
Part 1: Summary of the OECD Education for Human Flourishing Framework
The OECD’s “Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework” is a significant re-conceptualisation of educational purposes beyond the dominant human capital theory that has shaped international education policies for a long time.
The report argues that while preparing young people for employment remains important, flatlining PISA results and persistent equity gaps demonstrate that this narrow focus is insufficient. Modern education systems face three critical challenges: environmental destruction and social fragmentation caused by unchecked economic growth, meritocratic sorting that creates divisive winners and losers, and a widespread crisis of meaning among young people who lack purpose despite material prosperity.
In response, the Framework proposes that education should enable young people to flourish across multiple dimensions. Drawing on Aristotelian philosophy and contemporary positive psychology, the Framework defines human flourishing through four interconnected dimensions: happiness, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Education for human flourishing differs from student well-being initiatives by emphasising flourishing over a lifetime rather than merely subjective happiness during schooling, though both are important.
The Framework incorporates non-Western perspectives, particularly Ubuntu, Confucianism, and Buddhism, which see individual flourishing as inherently relational and interconnected with the flourishing of others. This extends to responsibilities toward other species and future generations, making sustainability and collective well-being central educational concerns. The Framework explicitly acknowledges the challenge and opportunity presented by artificial intelligence, suggesting that broadening human capabilities, restoring meaning, and creating fair sustainable models may be humanity’s best defence against AI’s potential threats to agency, security, and meaning.
Five Core Competencies
The Framework’s architecture rests on five interrelated competencies designed to promote human meaning, agency, and security:
- Adaptive Problem-Solving involves varying behaviours and understanding to address novel, complex challenges where routine solutions fail. It combines problem-solving processes (identifying problems, searching information, exploring solutions, implementing actions) with self-regulated learning (planning, adapting to feedback, maintaining engagement). This competency is essential for designing and building future societies, economies, and organisations.
- Ethical Competence equips individuals to evaluate and respond to others’ claims, combat prejudice, and balance needs with the rights of other species and the planet. The curriculum model distinguishes five sub-competencies: perceiving situations ethically, reasoning ethically, making ethical judgments, making ethical decisions, and acting ethically. This competency combines intellectual humility, the ability to balance diverse viewpoints, and orientation toward the common good.
- Understanding the World builds on global competence frameworks but goes deeper, proposing that young people must synthesise four major worldviews: indigenous (tribe, myth, integration with nature), pre-modern (religious and community norms), modern (science, democracy, individual-society balance), and post-modern (critique without replacement). This synthesis, termed “meta-modernity,” helps young people navigate complexity and restore meaning by reconciling competing perspectives.
- Appreciating the World relates to aesthetic perception and the experience of beauty in nature and the arts. The provision of experiences that are interesting, memorable, and worthy of revisiting are thus important. The Framework highlights aesthetic appreciation beyond one’s local cultures, arguing that engaging with beauty across cultures develops better humans and citizens who value the world, remain open-minded, and understand multidimensionality.
- Acting in the World sits at the apex as the central competency, defined as the ability to develop and deploy agency by identifying purpose, developing intent, and undertaking activities. This addresses the widespread inability among young people to locate purpose. Acting on the world requires moving from awareness and intent to specific actions, whether in arts, design, sports, volunteering, or other chosen activities.
These five competencies have considerable overlap with the CLA Capabilities Framework.
The Framework Architecture
These five competencies rest on an integrated foundation of three building blocks: core literacies (Mathematics, Science, Reading), social and emotional skills (task performance, emotional regulation, engaging with others, open-mindedness, collaboration), and student well-being domains (psychological well-being, agency, belonging). The competencies are not substitutive or additional but are emergent properties of the curriculum as a whole.
The Framework concludes with implications for learning environments (respecting disciplinary knowledge while allowing student-directed learning), professional development (reframing purpose, orchestrating ecosystems, championing equity), and system design (centring purpose as key to system shift, ecosystems for integrating formal and non-formal learning, and transformation through aligned purpose and awareness).
Education for human flourishing advocates a paradigm shift from sorting students for yesterday’s economy to nurturing distinctive human capacities that enable individuals to flourish while contributing to flourishing societies and economies in harmony with the planet.
Part 2: Education for Human Flourishing and Arts Education
“Education for human flourishing: A Conceptual Framework” positions arts education as far more than a curricular nicety or cultural enrichment. The expressive Arts are explained as fundamental to developing fully human capacities in an age increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. The Framework’s explicit inclusion of “Appreciating the World” as one of five core competencies signals a profound recognition that aesthetic perception is not peripheral to human flourishing but central to meaning-making, agency, and our capacity to envision alternative futures.
Aesthetic Competence as Meaning-Making
The Framework identifies a widespread crisis of meaning among young people, with many unable to articulate what their lives are for. Arts education addresses this directly by offering pathways to meaning beyond economic productivity. When the Framework defines aesthetic appreciation as experiencing what is “interesting, memorable, and worthy of revisiting,” it describes precisely what powerful encounters with art enable. This isn’t passive consumption but active engagement that interrogates one’s responses and challenges existing frameworks for understanding the world.
Crucially, the Framework states that aesthetic education extends beyond traditional “high” arts to include diverse forms across cultures. This democratisation acknowledges that meaning making through beauty occurs across cultural boundaries and in emerging forms that young people themselves create and value. For arts educators, this validates pedagogical approaches that respect and value students’ aesthetic choices while expanding their horizons through exposure to global artistic genres, traditions and media.
Arts as Embodied Knowledge
The Framework’s distinction between epistemic (scientific), technical, and phronetic (practical wisdom) knowledge positions arts in the experiential realm. The report explicitly states that aesthetic appreciation “should not come by passively looking at what is deemed beautiful, but through making and performing art pieces.” This challenges transmission models of arts education that focus on appreciation without creation, or technical skills without meaning.
When the Framework discusses knowledge that is “subjective, embodied, and requires human interpretation,” it describes exactly what arts education uniquely offers. Unlike domains where AI can match or exceed human performance, the arts remain distinctively human precisely because they integrate cognitive, emotional, and embodied ways of knowing. Students developing artistic competence learn to navigate ambiguity, tolerate multiple valid interpretations, and synthesise diverse elements into coherent wholes. These are capacities essential for adaptive problem-solving and understanding the world.
Arts and the Integration of Competencies
The Framework’s architecture reveals how arts education supports multiple competencies simultaneously. “Appreciating the World” explicitly mobilises creativity (making novel art while applying ideas to meet constraints), communication (describing artworks and aesthetic experiences), collaboration (collective performances and creations), and openness (exposure to different aesthetic perspectives). These social-emotional practices overlap substantially with those required for acting in the world, understanding the world, and ethical competence. For example, creating visual art about environmental change integrates adaptive problem-solving (representing complex systems), ethical competence (considering impacts on others and nature), understanding the world (combining scientific and cultural perspectives), appreciating beauty (in natural forms worth preserving), and acting in the world (communicating urgency through aesthetic choices). Arts education uniquely enables this holistic integration because artistic creation involves multiple ways of knowing.
Arts Education and AI
The Framework’s emphasis on AI as both threat and opportunity has profound implications for arts education. If AI increasingly performs cognitive and even creative tasks, education must develop distinctively human capacities. The Framework suggests this involves not avoiding AI but questioning technology’s role in society and understanding when human judgment should override algorithmic outputs.
Arts education models this critical relationship with technology. Digital art tools amplify human creativity without replacing it; they’re “intention amplifiers” requiring human purpose. When students create with technology, whether digital photography, music production, or game design, they learn that technological outputs reflect human choices about what matters. This positions arts as essential preparation for a world where humans must direct increasingly powerful technologies toward flourishing rather than harm.
Redefining Educational Success
Perhaps most radically, the Framework challenges education systems to measure success differently. If current metrics privilege narrow cognitive skills, addressing and assessing aesthetic competences requires valuing different forms of accomplishment and expression. The report notes that many students lack access to arts opportunities because of their lower perceived economic value; yet acknowledges that creative industries represent significant economic sectors. More importantly, the Framework argues that flourishing requires “a broader range of capabilities, spanning the academic, the caring and the creative.” This isn’t about adding arts to an already crowded curriculum, but reconceiving what education is for. When meaning, not just employment, becomes central to educational purpose, arts education shifts from enrichment to necessity.
The OECD Framework could provide Arts educators with powerful arguments: that aesthetic competence is foundational to human flourishing; that arts uniquely develop capacities AI cannot replicate; that creativity enables agency and purpose; and that appreciation of beauty connects us to others across cultures and to the natural world we must sustain.
As the CLA continues to argue, in an age of AI and existential challenges, the Arts are not luxuries but essential skills for human flourishing and sustainability.
