 Good morning and welcome back to the Scottish Parliament. This morning we begin with culture and education and we will enjoy a series of presentations before adjourning for lunch. I would like to invite our first keynote speaker, Deirdre Cornstrom, to speak. Deirdre is the vice president of education for Microsoft Corporation and prior to a role at Microsoft, Deirdre was a pioneer of the use of the video game minecraft as part of the education of millions of students and their teachers across the world. Thank you. Good morning everyone. As I was preparing to speak to you, I was reminded of a conversation with a colleague. We were talking about the potential of the video game minecraft and how we should set our goals and our aspirations. He said something that I admit I responded to with more skepticism than curiosity but what he said was what if we set our goal that every country in the world has a minister of minecraft. Now what does that even mean? I thought it was kind of silly a little bit absurd but we talked more about it and really looked at and thought about the places where minecraft has significance and relevance. So is it possible could a video game have that kind of cultural and societal relevance and significance to warrant that sort of lofty aspiration. I should probably back up and talk a little bit about what minecraft is. Most of you, I imagine some of you in the room have played minecraft. Everyone has certainly heard of or seen it or had people in your families that have spent a lot of time. At the very sort of simplest sense, minecraft is about mining and crafting as the name suggests. It's about breaking and placing blocks, about building things. It can be about surviving the night. It's also a place where hundreds of millions of people have come together. Over 100 million players a month come together in minecraft. It's the source of billions of hours of YouTube content. So in terms of societal relevance, it's there. The game has been around for over 10 years. What we've actually seen that's been really interesting is how the game is used outside of the traditional entertainment sphere. One of the very first places that minecraft was used outside of gaming and entertainment was in education, and that was inspired and really started very grassroots by educators. There were teachers who played minecraft very early and saw the potential for this open world to be a platform for teaching and learning, to be a place for creative exploration. Today what is become minecraft education edition is used by millions of educators and students around the world across all grade levels, across all subjects in the curriculum, from very early learners using minecraft to learn about how to move around in virtual spaces all the way up through universities doing AI research using minecraft as the model for that. In Wales over 350,000 students have access to minecraft. One of the sort of showcase projects as they were rolling that out was students visited a local castle and they came back to the classroom and they built that in minecraft. Now it seems like a simple exercise. The students were having fun. They thought they were building, but they had also done some measurements and so they were working with scale and bringing math into it. They were bringing a history element. They were thinking about how tall to make those castle walls and why they needed to be that height. What were they trying to keep in? What were they trying to keep out? They were considering how much farmland they needed to support the community. In this way, by interacting in this virtual environment, they were very much putting themselves in a first person in a historical context or in a creative context, thinking much more deeply about the subject. One of the most interesting prompts I've heard with a teacher using minecraft is to create the home for a character in a piece of literature. If you think about that, what would that person's home look like? What would this setting be? Minecraft provides this very open accessible canvas to be able to do that, which inspires often deeper thinking in our students and young people than some of the traditional formats for teaching and learning. In New Zealand, an artist and creator challenged himself with thinking about ways to inspire an appreciation for Maori culture and language with young people. He ultimately created a minecraft world that had word games and representations of traditional housing and textile patterns in a minecraft world. That's now available to all students across New Zealand and, in fact, all students around the world. Again, in that way, the students are able to interact and play. They're learning the language through the games in minecraft. They're also able, in a way that's somewhat unique to minecraft, to be able to extend that experience and build on it. They might take this example, a representation of a traditional dwelling, and customize it to represent their family and their own personal heritage. They can take a walka or a boat out and explore in the world that's been created for them, and then they can modify that and make it their own. There's really interesting ways to take core curriculum and customize it and personalize it both to be locally relevant, but also personally and individually relevant. This also allows the students to apply their strengths. You might have one student in that example in Wales who's really interested in the math or architecture element. Another one might be interested in design and really deeply consider what kind of materials in this virtual minecraft world might best represent the natural elements of the landscape around where they live. Beyond education, traditional subject matter, we find that some of the skills like digital citizenship, considering bullying and online safety, well-being, mental health, social-emotional learning, all of these subjects actually are also very much represented in some of the traditional content that's covered, but also directly we have something that emerged from a hackathon, a tech company as we do these hackathons periodically to inspire creation among our technical leaders. Someone was interested in the topic of mental health and thinking about ways that she could engage with people around video games. They created a world a fantasy environment called the mindful night. It's night with a K. With that, the players go through and explore and do a series of quests. One of them is an underwater exploration and there's a short writing exercise. In that, it really becomes a meditation. There's another breathing exercise that has some fun interactions in the game. In this way, we're taking something that is designed as a video game purely for entertainment and we're extending that into other areas like creativity, mental health, social-emotional well-being. Beyond education, I've done work the last several years with an organization called the Block by Block Foundation. This is, I think, somewhat unique in the gaming world. It's a partnership between Mojang Studios, which is the game studio that created Minecraft, Microsoft, and UN Habitat, where we use Minecraft as a participatory tool for redesigning and developing urban environments in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the world. We've done over 100 projects. The way that works is we identify projects where people are looking to redevelop public spaces. It may be some city-owned property that's been abandoned. Often what happens, it becomes overgrown. It collects garbage and just isn't well used. We work with them by creating the space. If we were going to do a project together, we might create this debating chamber in Minecraft and build it, and then invite the people who use the space to come in and actually modify it and change it in the game. They're operating in the video game in this virtual 3D space in the first person. They're walking around as if they were in it and it increases incredibly immersive environment. It's also, we've found, much more accessible than traditional public input processes that might use renderings or 2D drawings. They're able to go into the space, we would come in and we might say, okay, I'd like to change the lighting, I'd like to move this entrance. We need to make this space more accessible for people with disabilities. What we often find in the projects we do is lighting is a big concern for safety. We've made sure in designing this process to make it inclusive, more inclusive than traditional public participation processes, which are typically the people in authority positions. And so we include young people. And by having a video game that absolutely brings the young people in, we also make an effort to include the elderly people with disabilities and the people who live in the immediate area and use the spaces. We've done a space in Pristina Kosovo where students designed a skate park and they created murals in the Minecraft world that are represented in the space. We've got a great video that followed up and we were able to identify and find those students five years later and show them using the space. We've done work in Kakuma and Calobea and the informal settlements in northwestern Kenya where typically when these settlements are created there's space between sort of the dwellings in space to use and as more people come those get become overwhelmed and there's less space to move around. And so with that we brought together people with different languages, religions, cultures and we're able to use this digital environment to make communication accessible. And with that created some central gathering spaces with designs that were inspired by some of the jewelry that the women created. It's been amazing. I visited so many of these sites and it really is quite surprising to think about a video game used in this context. One of the other projects that has really started again was just a seed of an idea by someone who was really impacted by the situation of Syrian refugees coming into Scotland. It's a Scottish creator named Stephen Reed and he was thinking about how could he sort of ease their experience and so he created a journey, interviewed people and created sort of a journey of a refugee family coming into Scotland and what that might be like and with that they were able to share that with their classmates and build empathy for what they're experiencing. Now the Minecraft, clearly I have a lot of passion for this Minecraft work and have seen this used across education curriculum for social impact, for increasing equity and accessibility. All of this is extended by the work that we do with Microsoft and Microsoft technology. A lot of my work is really focused on tools for teacher and student collaboration with focus on increasing equity and accessibility through learning tools. So we have things like reading progress which is a tool that encourages literacy. It was designed for early literacy but we found it's actually been a wonderful tool for adult literacy and for second language learners. With that you're able to select a paragraph and take what is a traditionally a sort of face-to-face reading assessment and use the technology and use a trained AI to actually do those evaluations through a video recording. So the way it works is teacher would identify a passage, the students would get that on their computer screen, they would record themselves reading it and then the AI would identify mispronunciations in their reading, their pacing, even the intonation if they were pausing in appropriate places and be able to give feedback to the learners. It's been really powerful in a couple of ways. One it reduces the stigma. So for anyone who's had to stand and do face-to-face assessment, particularly if you're challenged in that area or if it's not your native language can be really intimidating and so there's something about doing that through a video recording it almost becomes gamified and what we've found is the students are actually practicing and re-recording themselves where if it were that traditional assessment they would be so happy to walk away from that. We've also found it's really empowering for educators to be able to support people who have different languages on their own and so they're able to use the technology and the languages. There's other tools like live translation that are available to all of you that are in many Microsoft tools that again help you know in that situation of refugees coming into a country being able to create just an environment where people can communicate in the education space for communication with parents that might speak a different language. These live translation tools, things like reading progress, focus on literacy have been incredibly helpful in empowering. Now it's I will admit it's not all seamless for anyone who's tried to join a zoom call and present slides or a teams call. When it works it's amazing and then there's those times that it takes 15 minutes to start the call and someone asked me, yes it does occasionally happen at Microsoft as well. So there are still challenges with the technology. We've asked in particular our educators to do so much these last two years during the pandemic to adapt to remote and hybrid learning. As we look ahead to the future I will say hybrid learning is absolutely here to stay. I expect it to continue to evolve but in many ways the technology has been so empowering and leveling the playing field we have to figure out how to make it more accessible and available to all. So what are some of the things that that you can do? I talked about the block by block program. We have a free toolkit that's available to anyone and so if there's that's interesting to you those resources are available how to run that program and do that locally using Minecraft some guidelines and tips for running workshops. We also have loads of free content for Minecraft education edition that's available to be used. One place that we could really use help is in artists and creators creating content creating learning content that is diverse that is locally culturally relevant to people. And so looking at Minecraft what sort of started is this game about mining and crafting and considering it as an open canvas and a platform and accessible creative platform for bringing the wonderful content that you have the expertise the coaches to students and learners around the world. So coming back to this idea of minister of Minecraft I don't know that I'm convinced through that exercise we ended up landing on what seemed like a more achievable goal of building a better world through the power of play. It's something that continues to inspire the Minecraft team and their work and really that that community of hundreds of millions of players. I know that with tools like Minecraft that connect people around the world encourage this human connection with tools like Microsoft learning tools, Microsoft teams for education that we can enable and inspire the next generations of artists, creators, innovators and leaders. Thank you. Thank you Dirdra. I now call on Andreas Schleichert to speak. Andreas is director of education and skills at the organization for economic cooperation and development, OECD in Paris. He is best known as the champion of PISA, the programme for international student assessment. Andreas? Can I have my slides there? They are already. Thanks for inviting me and these are still difficult times for us. Our eyes are still very much focused on the pandemic that has disrupted our thinking, our ways of working also in the field of education. But the future is always going to surprise us. Climate change is going to disrupt our lives a lot more than this pandemic and artificial intelligence puts education to a real test. We know how to educate second-class robots. People are very good at repeating what we told them. But what's going to make us human in a world in which the kind of things that are easy to teach, maybe easy to test have also become easy to digitize, to automate? It's a really big question and then there are many other global trends that shape the future. In this moment, we shouldn't just think about the future that is most likely or maybe the future that we like most. We need to think harder about multiple versions of the future and become more agile, more adaptive. On the one hand, we should be proud of education. Everything that we see around us is the fruit of education. Science, technology, this building, the technology, everything came through education. But the kind of education that we produced has also left the world with a number of fundamental disconnects, the disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of our planet that we are all aware of these days. We have divorced the financial economy from the real economy, the wealthy and the poor, the idea of a gross domestic product through which we met a success and then the well-being of people. There's often quite disconnected from that. Between what is technologically possible and the social needs of people, between the way we run our countries and the voicelessness of people, that's the reality. And then if you look what drives our economies these days, the first view you might say, well, this is about technology, but actually technology is a tool. What makes those companies successful is that they deal with intangibles, ideas of people, they're very good at mobilising, sharing, spreading knowledge and ideas and that's what drives our economies. If you look at the traditional Fortune 500 companies, they were successful for centuries and they're still staggering along, but they're no longer the engines of our economies. It is really about intangibles. If you look at our labour markets, those with the right skills never had the left chances they have today. When I say the right skill, this is about the combination of cognitive, social emotions, but those who struggle with a good education never face the challenges they have today and there is this toxic coexistence. We have young people finishing university and having difficulties finding a good job and at the same time employers say we cannot find the people with the skills we need. That's the dilemma that we have to deal with education and everybody talks about the future of work. We never know whether technology is going to destroy more jobs or create more jobs, but the mechanisms actually are surprisingly simple. We are seeing a decline in the demand for routine cognitive skills. Once again, the things that are easy to teach are losing most rapidly in value. We're seeing a rise in technology intensive kind of skills. You put the two things together. Actually that is the future of work. It's not very, very difficult to comprehend, but it's going to command a very, very different set of skills. Another trend that is very hard to believe for many of you, but it's actually true. We work less these days. The share of time that we spend walking has declined. What does it mean? Are we preparing young people to do other things, to live with themselves, to live with people who are different from them, to live with the planet? It's going to become a more and more relevant question. Do we frame our lives around our work, or do we learn to live with ourselves, with other people? This is something that you have seen in many forms already. We live as if we could consume five planets in America and 1.7 on average across OECD countries. Our way of living has become completely unsustainable. Has that made our way in education? Actually, when we serve it in our PISA assessment, you know, principles, nine out of ten school leaders say, yeah, of course, climate change is something that we do in this good curriculum. It's all already incorporated. And the same is true, you know, for gender equality conflicts, poverty, migration and so on. But let me ask students, we've got a slightly different version of this. On the one hand, you can see on the top, you know, for students, the climate agenda has become urgent, important. This is a very personal agenda. It makes meaning to young people and the future of our planet. But when you ask them, you know, can you do something about it? Or do you believe that what you do is going to make a difference for people in other places to barsk it a lot shorter? And that's the crux of education today. We have made young people passive consumers of prefabricated content. But we don't give them that agency capacity to do things, to mobilize their cognitive, social, emotional resources to build that agency and that co-agency. You know, we never live in isolation. We always do things in interaction. And that collective agency that makes sure that, you know, the hole is always bigger than the sum of the parts. I have some data to, you know, support that. We, in our latest PISA assessment, where we typically look, you know, at mathematics science, that's what the OECD really puts a lot of emphasis on. But we also looked at something that we call the growth mindset of young people. And you can see that here on the horizontal axis. And you can see a country like Estonia where students are doing really well academically. It's also a country where students, you know, see the sky as the limit. And you can take country like Indonesia where students struggle academically. And most of them believe, you know, success is about the intelligence I was born with. That growth mindset is so important. And you can see actually, we're not talking about opposing spectrums. You know, some people say arts education and mathematics education is a zero sum game. Actually, it's not. There are two sides of the same coin. We need to see those interactions. And when you see this across countries, education systems that are very, very good in developing those human skills, that growth mindset, they also tend to be very good academically. It's not one taking away things from the other. It's about two sides of the same coin. We can also see that students with a growth mindset were more motivated to master difficult tasks. They had a greater sense of self-efficacy. They were less afraid of failure. If you want your children to be creative, imaginative, you have to give them space to do things, to experiment. If you experiment, you take risk. If you take risk, you make mistakes. Fire education systems do not help young people to learn from and with mistakes. Maybe young people are not going to be so creative. You suddenly see how those things are linked. This is one of the most disturbing findings from our survey. And I've put the chart the right way. You might think we measured creativity at age 15 and we measured creativity at age 10. And in every jurisdiction for which with data we saw that 15-year-olds are less creative than 10-year-olds. If I would tell you while your students do worse in mathematics when they are 15 than when they were 10, you'd probably say, well, maybe we should do something different than education. When it comes to creativity, we don't even notice this, but we don't think this is about education. Somehow we have come to believe that this is something that is outside the scope of education. And it's not so surprising. Children are born with an abundance of creativity. If you have a three-year-old son or daughter, they are going to question everything that you're going to tell them. They're going to experiment with anything that comes into their way. They're always willing to learn, always willing to unlearn, always willing to relearn when the context changes. And then we put them to school and they start to make them compliant with our ways of thinking, making them reproduce what you expect as a teacher. And then we get surprised that our education systems take something away from that energy that is the fuel of 21st century societies and economies. We need to think about this harder. Knowledge in the world grows exponentially. And it has so many facets and features around them. So many things we could be learning. But the important thing is it all comes with people. That's something that we often forget in education. Learning is not a transactional business. It's a social, it's a relational experience. The subjects that you like most when you were in primary school probably had a lot less to do with the content of what you learn than with the teacher who taught you. If you had a teacher who knew who you are, who understood who you wanted to become, who accompanied you on that journey, you loved the subjects that they taught. Learning is a social and relational experience. The education systems in the world that do best have understood this. As a teacher, you're not just an instructor, you're also a coach, a mentor, a facilitator, an evaluator. You make education a human experience. The world of the school curriculum is just a tiny box. And often we try to squeeze everything into this little box. But what happened is that the real and beautiful features of the world get very shallow shadows of themselves. That's true for science. You ask 10-year-olds about science, they love science. Science is about experimenting, it's about doing things, about understanding cause and effect and so on. You ask 15-year-olds about science, they hate science. It has become a boring school subject of formulas and equations. It has nothing to do with the nature of scientific inquiry. And then we squeeze more and more and more things into this little box. That's what we call education. What we lose and what we need in the 21st century are the human dimensions, the realm of human knowledge, the realm of ethics and judgment. Yeah, artificial intelligence is very, very important, but artificial intelligence is not a magic power. It's just an extraordinary amplifier, an accelerator. It accelerates good ideas and good practice in the same way it accelerates bad ideas and bad practice. That capacity of human judgment could become more important. The realm of creativity, aesthetics and design. And in a moment I'm going to show you more about the connections between academic skills and arts. Very, very closely connected. The realm of natural and physical health, the realm of economic life. Those are the human dimensions that are going to make a difference in the 21st century and the time of technology. And that really has moved arts and the arts education from the periphery to the centre. Many of us call arts education a kind of extracurricular activity. Something that we put on top of the school system. Actually, in the 21st century, it's the core of the school curriculum. And we can use mathematics and science and history, all of this, you know, as ways of exemplifying this, of those kinds of human experiences. Creativity, I talked about creativity, but if you look actually, creativity is an inspirator of many other important skills in the 21st century. Students who are more creative, imaginative, they're more curious, they're more persistent, they had greater trust, greater empathy. They were relating better to other people. You can think for yourself, if you can live with other people, you do lots of other things as well that become really, really important in the 21st century. And your creativity is easy to destroy, but it's not so easy to build. Actually, what was the single most important predictor of creative capacity of children? Arts education. Not so surprising to you. But still, we often don't find the time for that. Arts education, you know, when I was a student, I did music, I didn't do painting or drama, and so on, but I played the violin. That taught me how to listen to other people, how to interact with other people, how to listen to myself, to be persistent. So it's not so difficult to understand how those skills relate. But it's really, really important to see that actually in every jurisdictions for which we have data, number one predictor for us is really for the creative capacity, is the room that we give young people to express themselves. I mean, that's what arts education is about, because I should also say, you know, arts education is important. It can be taught very well, but it can also be taught very badly. It becomes also another misery of education. We have to be cautious about this as well. How much time do we devote to this? Well, you know, if you live in Italy or in Austria, actually there's a lot of time devoted to arts education. If you live in Poland, you know, the Flemish community of Belgium, it's just a tiny share of time. Contrast this with mathematics. That's where we put the bulk of our time on mathematics, languages, and so on. Why is that? Well, one explanation comes actually when you look at the economic utility. On the horizontal axis, you see the income of people over the life cycle, on the vertical axis, the share of people going into profession. You can see if you become an engineer, you're more likely actually to get a good salary than if you become an artist. That's basically what drives human behavior, parental choices. That's why we tell, you know, our children study science, don't become an artist. But that's a 20th century way of thinking. That's not a 21st century way of thinking. And I'll tell you why. When we looked at the 100 most innovative jobs in OECD economies, we asked ourselves, where do the people come from? Number one is engineering and computing. Clear. A lot of tech innovation today is about technological innovation. No surprise. But number two, the people who had studied the arts. The 100 most innovative jobs, the origin of the people, the pipeline, is people who have developed those creative skills, who can express themselves, who can think out of the box. We saw those data and we asked ourselves, why? And the answer is, when you ask the innovative people themselves, very, very clear. This is where you learn to develop original ideas. This is where you learn to assess the originality of your own thinking. This is where you learn to test the boundaries, to express yourself, to actually experience cultural diversity, cultural differences, different ways of thinking. Our societies, our communities have always been most successful when we were very, very good in building those kinds of interactions. People who have done that in their study just become very good at that and drive our futures. That's the 21st century way of looking at this question. This is again, you know, why arts and culture really need to get at the heart of a good education. And there's some data supporting for this. Once again, you know, we shouldn't look at this as a zero sum game. We can see actually arts education, science education is very important. And I should tell you, a few years ago, I was in the city of Chongqing in China. If you don't know Chongqing, that is most likely where your laptop or your mobile phone comes from. An incredibly successful kind of inner place, 30 million people, if there were skyscrapers and everything, building all of the technology. And the vice governor asked me, don't talk about, you know, maths and science. Talk about culture. Talk about arts. What can we do in education? And then I asked you, interesting, you know, you built all of those technologies. I thought you need a lot of engineers, but you know, you want to talk about culture and arts. And he said, well, you know, in 50 years time, none of what you see around yourself here is going to remain here. Time has moved on. The jobs will be gone. New things will be created. Our contribution to history, you know, none of what you see here will make a contribution to history. Our contribution to history will be what we contribute to global culture. People who understand that have a very different perspective on the future of education and people who just have that very narrow instrumental view about the future. But here's some data on this. Classroom drama. Strengths and swabble skills are some good evidence about it. You know, basically your capacity to express yourself and so on is a clear, not only a correlation. We've shown actually there's a causal link between those two. Music, dance. I'm sure failure will talk about this in a moment. You know, very, very powerful drivers of students' capacity to take initiative, to build agency, to express themselves, to interact with different people. So it's not really difficult. It's difficult to teach it well. I think that's a really important point. Once again, you can teach painting in the same boring way that you teach science. Teaching it well is hard, but actually the impact it made is very, very clearly visible. And then, you know, ultimately, arts is about the way we express ourselves as culture. So I know my time is up. I'm going to stop here, but again, the main message really is that we should really sort of make the transition in our way of thinking. To look at culture as the arts, you know, that is what our humanity in the 21st century is about. We see the clearest data and we can support and develop those skills in the same way as we can, you know, develop mathematics and science skills. But we need to have better tools to make them visible, to give also teachers better ways to actually see this, and then ultimately ensure that, you know, better skills translate into better jobs and better lives of people. Thank you very much. Thank you, Andreas. I would now like to invite the third and final keynote speaker this morning to address the summit. Ofelia Balogon is a young choreographer. She is known for her work in the DYR movement, Dance Your Roots. Ofelia. Thank you. Good morning. I would love to share with you some of reflection, maybe about the foundation of our thinking and consequently our society. This split among mind, body and spirit had influenced not only the western approach to medicine, but also to us. Our society does not consider these three elements, interconnected and communicative. As a movement artist, I have always perceived that dance education or education in general, the physical performance, live behind the development, the discipline and the connection with the intuitive and instinctive side of an individual. When even in us, a single structure or a single technique become dominant, it means that social and human dynamics have become violent and different and rigid. For many of us, including myself, the dance journey begins for healing, not for entertainment. For healing and reappropriation. A journey to recognise the existence of other tools for interpreting the surrounding reality. A journey to understand the complexity of languages that create a personal story in relation to the political and social history of a country. A journey to discover that healing through us is reconnecting with nature as the ancient and traditional form of dance categorised as indigenous are simply a beautiful and sophisticated manifestation of the rituality to homage and respect the balance of the planet that we live in. The responsibility to transform the narrative about ourselves is a chapter when we have the tools and the instrument to do so. Dance is supposed to be a safe space where we can experience uncomfortability. I am a dancer before what I do is what I am. I use the body to become infinite possibility to set myself free from the game of obsessive categorisation that is society likes to play so much. Again is the concept of separation that constantly repeats to us that we do not belong to the room or want to separate for what makes us whole. By the time in the society we apply the concept of separation to the arts we disconnect from the ability to perceive ourselves as part of something behind our understanding, something bigger, spirituality or simply humility. We disconnected from our physical body dance or a chapter and perception of our body images and our inner rhythm. We know how important inner rhythm is especially in our hyper society which is in fact. And disconnected from the practice of deep listening and make our voice heard. Music and active listening. And disconnecting with who through their efforts allow us to be here in this moment. Story talent, history and values. In our addictive human habit of creating boxes we forget that we are talking about artistic disciplines. Artists cannot think in terms of categories because they see and they need to see everything as one or in other words connected. It sounds as a spiritual or abstract concept but is actually a value practical fact. Creating boxes and categories on art form that advocate universal languages can simply take away voices and selfish theme and neglects the new global generation to be heard. Dance plus music plus story talent plus history plus spirituality plus tradition equals culture equals sense of belonging equals connection. In our present education this element are separated. If you want you have to go to like become a musician you go to music school, dance school, everything is separated but is actually the addition of this element that create culture. In order to have it back we need to inglobate not the concept of diversity but the content of diversity. Diverse body, diverse voices, diverse way of moving of thinking. With diversity I mean the respect of the culture universe that each of us carry inside ourselves, accepting that in a world of displaced humans the new generation of today now of tomorrow of today have more than one culture inside one body. I am myself the daughter of true strong culture. It means accepting that diversity is not just another category to trap an individual because we are afraid of their or her or his content because freedom means social mobility while I'm expressing my content of my inner cultural universe without being afraid of not ticking boxes. In 2022 a diverse body still need to ask permission to justify their presence in a space. We cannot just be dancers, we need to be activists, feeling uncomfortable in a safe space is becoming a privilege of few. We are forced to put on stage our trauma to force the war to lift them to shout that our playground becomes a battlefield to use dance as a tool for social change because up there they still thinking that we are entertainment. We are here to remind you of your value in the purest form, how you perceive your life is in your power, how you react to attacks in your power, how capable you want to be in your arts or in your craft is in your power, the way you decide to do anything is your free choice, how human you choose to be is in your power, how much you can learn from everyday situation is your choice, how conscious you want to be is in your power, how far you want to see is in your power, how far you want to go is in your power, how kind you want to be to yourself and others is your duty, how much time you need to improve is your right, connection is the first rule of interaction, forgotten where you come from teach you to discriminate the path of others, remembering who you are, how far you have gone and how far you want to go teach you to respect the path of others. We need a change of paradigm or formamentis if we wish the future generation to bloom because this is what is about am I correct? It's about a new generation that's why we are here for living our legacy then why we are making education about us if you want to be mentors, teachers, educators, facilitators or simply set an example we cannot put ourselves at the center because it's not about us it's about them so let's start to educate ourselves right now. How do we find a conscious separation creating bridge through intergenerational action or collaboration? A young person might not have your 20 years plus expertise but they embody innovation in their ignorance they might share with you some gifts. Children are an eternal example of that I don't need to explain that. We can come to you in our vulnerability and asking questions to be included because at the end of the day we are the one that we will pick up from what you will leave so don't keep us out of the conversation. The movement to overcome, thrashend, knockdown, the concept of categorisation already start. Academia and some institution organisations are behind just because they are still in the conversation instead of being in the action. A body requires dancing, a body requires action and you don't need to be a dancer to be in the action. Thank you. Thank you, Ophelia. We now move to ministerial and heads of delegations reflections and responses and I welcome via video link the vice minister of culture, sports and tourism of the Republic of South Korea, Hwang Hee. As minister of culture, sports and tourism of the Republic of Korea, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Honourable Chairperson Alison Johnson, Sir Jonathan Mills and this distinguished personnel who have endeavoured to successfully hold the 2022 Edinburgh International Culture Summit. I was hoping to attain the biggest culture and arts festival in person, but still grateful to be virtually with you today. We all observe COVID-19 pandemic is continuously slowing down at the same time the role of culture and arts education has become more important than ever. We should consult the COVID wounded hearts and recover broken relationships with culture and arts education just as the Edinburgh International Festival first started to console people who were devastated due to the Second World War. This is why we should underscore this occasion as a great opportunity to discuss the role and meaning of culture and arts education. Culture and arts education focuses on making people understand the reality of culture and arts education spaces and attractiveness and imagination and ultimately it tends to foster and stimulate creativity, sensitivity, experimenting spirit and the challenge spirit. The 2022 International Festival will be remarkable and effective educational venue itself. I hope we can agree that cultural diversity and eventually apply it to every culture. The Republic of Korea has endeavoured to flagship the field of culture and arts education. The Korean government has led to the adoption of the Seoul Agenda in 2010 as a product of UNESCO's World Conference on Arts Education and has made various policies for the field since then. In particular, the Republic of Korea hosted UNESCO international experts meeting on culture and arts education by inviting experts from more than 30 countries. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea will create policies to ensure all citizens' opportunities for sophisticated and interesting education in culture and arts fields regardless of their age, gender and social status. There will be nine groups of young artists who are leading the future of Korean performing arts field. I hope you enjoy diverse performances and distinctive Korean cultures in an artistic vibe, which is captivating the whole city of Edinburgh. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Minister. I now invite Ms Darcy Vilsoni, State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, to address us, Ms Vilsoni. Of education experience and let me share some thoughts on issue how culture and education together act as investment in the future of each child and whole society from the culture policy perspective. Culture and arts have huge impact on the vibrancy of the world and relation among people. It's different forms and influencing our perceptions, decisions and actions. So, if culture and arts are so important in all diverse forms, how do people starting from early age get to understand it? Do culture and education sectors cooperate? Do all students have access to arts to develop culture literacy? Survey conducted in Latvia in 2016 revealed that there are barriers for students to get culture experience. More than 80% cases, ticket prices were standing between and more than 60% cases distance. Culture and arts experience were privilege of large cities leaving behind rural areas. To respond to this challenge was creation of state finance culture education program Latvian school bag opportunity experience regularly arts and culture events going directly to each school age child in Latvia. Ministry of Culture took initiative and in partnership with educators, local municipalities, culture operators and other partners started great meeting point for education and culture bringing closer that ever pedagogical and artistic domain to contribute to the same goal to increase ability of young people to live happy and productive life in their challenging world of the 21st century. Program become a greatest present to Latvian citizens in celebrating 100 anniversary of the statehood of Latvia. More than 220,000 or 95% of students from the 1st grade up to the end of the secondary school directly benefit accessing culture events. At least once a semester young people meet classical or contemporary expression of performing arts, visual art, literature, architecture, design and film industry as well as culture heritage. Program shows ability to continue during pandemic becoming digital and respond on the war in Ukraine by starting conversation about complicated issues and promoting critical thinking in the language of arts. Our goal is to provide students access to culture experience that encourage individual freedom. By diversity of offers program provides starting point for discussions on topic triggered by the piece of art. Providing feedback is guided by the teacher to make sure that students go beyond emotional judgment like or dislike and reaches intellectual cognitive level recognizing and analyzing why there has been that reaction and what is the measures and what to do with it. The program promotes active forms or involvement and experience foster opportunities for expressing one's opinion. This program has considerably expanded the concept of culture and arts education and emphasizing that arts can be learning resource in many different curriculum areas including history, social studies and also STEM. The full coverage of students in elementary and secondary school is essential and it counteracts the risk of social exclusion and inequality. Programs start to show impact also on the cultural sector. Program acts as a driven force for developing new cultural products and boost work opportunities for creative professionals. The scope and diversity of cultural events for children is growing and collaboration between professionals from the spheres of culture and education is increasing. There are some final thoughts on importance of culture in schools we want to emphasize. Developing cultural literacy through direct cultural experience within teaching learning process and included in curricula for all students at all grade levels is crucial. It is important to develop students' knowledge, skills and attitudes to make informed choices and critical thinking, ability to read messages and distinguish from example patriotism from propaganda and sense of belonging from exclusion and segregation. By diversifying sources for learning through the language of arts the same curricula content can be presented in the different way providing new opportunities to support not only students with special learning needs but also creative non-conventional minds. Culture experiences are instrumental for self-expression and may lead to future employment in the creative industries and jobs not known yet. Having cultural experiences stops us from striving from one preset right answer. Holistic and fresh approach is needed to solve future problems and culture education is developing such mindset. Our commitment in Latvia is to continue expanding the program. This is our contribution for safe and sustainable future both locally and globally. Thank you for your attention. If you want to hear more about our program please contact our delegate, Mrs Ayatuna. She is the leader of the school bag programme. Thank you Ms Filswani. I would now like to invite the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage of New Zealand, the Honourable Carmel Sepuloni, to address the summit. Kia ora koutou. We are very excited to have travelled 32 hours from New Zealand to be here and excited that we are able to actually come together in person now given the challenges that we faced over the last couple of years. I am the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage. I am also the New Zealand Minister for Employment and I think it is really important that we do not underestimate the connection between those two portfolios. In our arts, culture and heritage portfolio, one of our priorities is certainly sustainable careers. It is with great interest that we listened to the speakers today because educational pathways are integral to ensuring that we can have meaningful and sustainable careers in the arts sector. Can I thank the speakers that presented? Can I also acknowledge that COVID has meant that many of the challenges that we already faced pre-pandemic really were exacerbated and I think the speakers have highlighted really well some of the educational challenges that have been exacerbated during the pandemic but have existed for us some time. I am really interested with the discussions around cultural content and I do want to acknowledge Deidre for mentioning the New Zealand content maker Fethu Patai and what he has done with Minecraft. It is really important that we use our digital platforms to provide cultural content that is relevant to our young people in our countries and even more so I think during the COVID experience given that we have been so increasingly reliant on using digital platforms so I do want to acknowledge Deidre the work that you are doing in that space and I want to recognise that as a country during our own response to COVID and with our own arts recovery package we had quite an intense focus on indigenous knowledge. It became very apparent to us that the risks of the pandemic would be largely ffought by potentially our indigenous population and we were acutely aware of the impact that that might have on the older generation of our indigenous population and the potential to lose that knowledge and so much of our investment went towards supporting innovation and initiatives that would enable online digital content to be created and to ensure that content that knowledge would not be lost in the worst case scenario that may have seen us lose the knowledge holders. That didn't end up being the case thankfully however it was work that was really important that it was undertaken. I want to acknowledge the discussions about ensuring that our young people see the arts sector as providing viable career options for them and I think Andreas mentioned the issues with remuneration or the sense that people have that the remuneration in the arts sector is not good and I want to acknowledge what you said Andreas about the reality that people with creative qualifications and creative minds can actually go on to earn a decent money but really what you were raising reflects some of the conversations that I've had whilst here with some of the festival directors with the head of Creative Scotland and others around technical expertise and how that is a challenge that we're facing globally. I had it raised with me that actually we share a lot of the same expertise and we perhaps need to be more deliberate about global collaboration and how we share that expertise and how we work together to ensure that we are collectively training the people that we need to fill those roles in sectors. So one of the things that I'll certainly be taking away is that thought and having conversations about what that might mean in terms of immigration pathways, how we create the opportunities for exchanges between our people so that they can learn the skills, bring them back and vice versa and have that type of reciprocal arrangement. Also acknowledging the discussions around equity and accessibility and the importance of that and the ability to be able to provide opportunities to overcome those challenges not only through digital platforms but Ophelia as you said through your creative content as well in the work that you do and that others do also. I think I will leave it there but we certainly are excited about the prospect of taking some ideas home and recognise as has been mentioned to us whilst here a number of time from the different people that we've met with that the COVID tale is quite long and the recovery for all of us is going to require the ability to be agile and a level of attention to ensure that we can respond to the needs of the sector and the people that are working in it and that's certainly what we're here for and I'm absolutely sure everyone in the room is here for as well and so looking forward to learning from the many of you that are here thank you. Thank you minister I'm delighted now to welcome via video link from Tokyo Keiko Nagaoka minister of education culture sports science and technology of Japan and we are honoured that this is the first international address by minister Nagaoka following appointment to this post thank you. Hello everyone I am Nagaoka Keiko minister of education culture sports science and technology of Japan. Congratulations to you all on holding this Edinburgh international culture summit and I'd like to express my sincere appreciation to Nadine Doris secretary of state for digital culture and sport Angus Robertson cabinet secretary for constitution external affairs and culture right honourable Alison Johnson presiding officer of the Scottish parliament Sir Jonathan Mills director of Edinburgh international culture summits and to everyone else who has devoted themselves to holding of this summit. I also wish to celebrate with you the 75th anniversary of the Edinburgh international festival. Your famed arts festival held annually at this time of year. I regret not being able to participate in the culture summit due to scheduling conflicts but I'm sending this video message under the theme of culture and education here I'd like to introduce some of the latest developments in this field in Japan. In Japan the ministry of education culture sports and science and technology next has jurisdiction over both cultural and artistic affairs in the past relevant education department in next were responsible for arts education at schools but as a result of legislative reforms the responsibility for arts education was shifted to the agency of cultural affairs ACA an outside agency under mext the ACA is a specialised organ for implementing cultural policy this enables the ACA to make optimal use of its expertise in measures for promoting the arts and culture and its networks of arts related persons for arts education in schools. The ACA is developing integrated initiatives for arts education from cultivating students' interest in the arts in school to fostering top-level artists next I'd like to talk about our initiatives for securing opportunities for children to come into contact with culture and the arts during the COVID pandemic because of the impact of COVID after 2020 the opportunities for children to appreciate and experience culture in the arts both inside and outside of school were sharply decreased. Fortunately now the situation has improved and it's still not the same as it was before the pandemic. We want to get back to those opportunities for children to appreciate and experience diverse environments of traditional culture performing arts and various other art forms and for that the government has taken measures for art groups to make performance tours of schools, artists, performers and others to be dispatched to schools and children to attend free performances at theatres and elsewhere. These measures are giving children opportunities to enjoy the arts at their own schools, community theatres and other venues to stimulate their imagination and creativity even during the so-called post COVID and with COVID periods. Japanese schools are utilising ICT in arts related subjects. As part of our GIGA school initiative the Japanese government has provided one computer for each student and prepared high speed internet networks at schools throughout Japan. The priority issue at this point is transitioning from the preparation of these devices and networks to their effective utilisation next is strongly supporting this initiative and particularly through especially established teams so that all schools across Japan will be able to provide education utilising ICT. Utilisation of ICT is also making rapid inroads in arts related subjects like music and art for example in some schools students can receive lessons from professional artists online and if other students can study and enjoy artworks kept at museums distant from their schools. Schools are often actively making efforts to broaden the range of students artistic expression through the use of photographs, video and so on by means of their computer terminals. Moreover, by taking photos and videos by tablet, cameras of student works and the process of their creation teachers and students can utilise them for effective assessment. To facilitate further reference to this environment for education next has been providing explanatory videos and materials on its website regarding this unique utilisation of ICT in arts related subjects. During global pandemic we have reaffirmed the power of culture and arts and culture and arts play a vital role for enriching children's sensibilities and imagination. Fostering creativity that in turn creates social value and nurturing a richness of humanity by children's learning together with their companions. Japan will resume continuing and develop these cultural and artistic activities while securing opportunities for children to experience the arts and culture and further enhancing education. I sincerely hope the discussion today at the culture summit will be an opportunity for showing a clear direction and guidelines for meeting the new challenges to culture around the world. In particular if a culture of education during the post-Covid and with Covid period. Thank you for your attention. To Minister Nagaoka, I would now like to invite Minister Emanuel M Tweetwa, Minister of Sports, Art and Culture from South Africa to speak. Thank you very much Presiding Officer and sorry for a little bit of view, which one has. Let me acknowledge you as Presiding Officers and create you and create the right Honourable Nadine Doris MP and the Secretary for Culture amongst others in the UK, Angus Robertson, the Secretary of Culture, the Government of Scottish Government. I've seen a few of my fellow Ministers of Culture here greetings to you excellencies. On this subject on culture and heritage we thought we needed to start from what we think is the beginning which is the culture and make the point that our understanding culture is founded on people's collective memory of rules and ways of interaction interpretation of everyday communicative events. It is therefore a way of life. It is power, always referred to as soft power. It is the foundation upon which a nation builds its vision for its future and its place in the global community. It is a glue that binds societies and its people together giving them a common set of shared values of beliefs, fashion, religion, lifestyles, food, sport and games, education and learning. Talking education and effective creative curriculum begins when our children are born and through early childhood development, parents, grandparents, guardians and extended family play critical role in how our children grow up and perceive their culture and heritage. It is said that they learn music even before they are born. Before they are toddlers they observe our customs and aspects of our culture such as what we eat and what we wear. With this deep appreciation the government of the Republic of South Africa through the overarching police of the national development plan 2030 affirms the department of sport arts and culture which I'm privileged to lead in my country and the department of basic education to partner in the promotion and implementation of arts education and training in the public schools. In response to that directive the department of sport arts and culture developed a program known as artists in schools. This is an initiative to position the community arts practitioners in schools to provide arts education throughout the country. Our partner on this initiative as I said the department of basic education in its curriculum assessment policy statement provides direction and guidance on the two main domains that is the visual arts and the performing arts. The two main creative domains are believed to be the invaluable resource and catalysts to the transformation of creative arts teaching experience in the public schools. The two domains can be broken into the following which is provided to not all the schools of South Africa but to some of them because not all schools teach arts education. Visual arts, drawing, painting, sculptor, crafts, design etc. Performing arts specifically music and African and indigenous music, western classical and opera, jazz, hip hop, African tradition, contemporary South African, universal, ballet and drama. Among others the arts in schools program does the following one it supports the promotion of the creative arts in the public schools by recruiting and appointing arts practitioners who are proficient in a variety of domains and their sub domains. Two this program can be viewed to be dealing with very critical areas of cross cutting themes that include teacher development, curriculum enrichment and implementation as well as social cohesion. Three the program does not only promote the creative arts but it is importantly geared towards an ethnic developing new and raw talent amongst learners for in addition to all the above mentioned factors the arts in schools creates sustainable job opportunities for the unemployed arts practitioners who are placed in the schools to assist creative arts subject teachers in the delivery of the curricula to the learners in the classrooms. The last point on this the program responds to capacity constraints that are highly prevalent amongst the majority of the creative arts teachers who have been assigned this subject. Somebody here in the keynote address did mention this that in some instances people see creative teaching and arts teaching as an add on or a nice to have. So these teachers also assigned this subject in addition to core areas like languages, science and mathematics. Appointment and placement of arts practitioners follows a rigorous process that includes amongst others placement of adverts in the newspapers and press in social media as well interviews, auditions, submission, portfolios et cetera. We want to see this program of ours expanding to all the schools because as we said as has been said also here that the future in the world is moving towards creative and creative as a subject and creative as a way of life is going to be dominant in everything human beings in every human endeavor. In conclusion Chairperson, as a society South Africa has a world of stories that must be told to the next generation to keep these stories alive. This program will contribute to the realization of this very objective and I want to thank you for your attention. Thank you minister and thank you all for sharing the many opportunities of the role of culture in education. Before we break for lunch I now invite Vinolia Velatze Mabelli, deputy chairperson of social cohesion in South Africa as well as Miss United Nations international 2019 to introduce a very special performance from Busgate, a remarkable ensemble of young musicians from Sweden. Thank you very much Presiding Officer and greetings to everyone today. I am very honoured and privileged to be standing before you all at this very prestigious occasion representing the many voices of South African youth. Just a little bit about what I do, culture plays a very major role in our lives and it gives us a sense of belonging and it makes and this is why it is very important at this point in time in our lives to amplify the idea of cultural exchange now more than ever as we become global citizens. Cultural exchange proves that we can thrive in a new environment. It also shows the importance of similarities rather than differences and it highlights the beauty of diversity which is an element that is very prominent and important in my country South Africa as we have many official languages. So one of the main topics that my minister has already mentioned is around the inclusion of culture in our curriculum and that is very important because it will address a lot of issues that we are facing globally such as racism, xenophobia, afrophobia and this now takes me to my programme which is African Ambassador. A programme that is focused on young people in Africa to promote pan-Africanism and for them to know what it means to be African and the way forward and we do this through social media conversations in higher learning institutions and of course at school level and we use the arts as a medium of communicating and addressing our issues and Africa is actually this programme is also it was born from the idea of Africa Day and having Africa Day as every day which is why our motto is make every day Africa Day and this is done through obviously our fashion because if we communicate being African and we communicate our heritage we do so through our behaviour this is what I'm dressing today making our culture fashionable and presenting it to the world every day because whenever you come across someone they will be asking you what are you wearing why do you look like this and this is how we are able to then embrace our heritage and preserve it going forward. As a young person who is a deputy chair of social cohesion I think it's very befitting as well to recognise that in South Africa we are celebrating women's month and as we are talking about culture we also need to embrace you know that culture is evolving and as it is evolving we are now getting away from the stereotypes such as gender equality that women's roles belong in the kitchen and this is something that we can look at with a very close example of the first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon who is the boss of Scotland and of course this has been done before it's not something that is new I can take it back to my country on Charlotte Matlake who was the first South African leader and political activist and she was the first black woman to graduate with a university degree in BSC at the University of Wilberforce in the US. So in order for us to know where we are going we need to know to know where we come from and this ladies and gentlemen now brings me to this special moment where I'm going to introduce a very incredible group of young artists. The Bascade Soweto String Ensemble is an extraordinary talented musical group from South Africa they are literally our pride. The project was established by Rosemary Nalden in January 1997 in response to the request from the local Deep Cliff community. Initially this project consisted of 15 members of the original Deep Cliff project and today they are boasting with 115 students ranging from the ages of six to 34 all of whom are drawn from underprivileged communities. So one of the missions of Bascade is to give children from underprivileged backgrounds in the townships the opportunity to learn classical instruments to the highest possible standards. This multi award winning group in 2015 was chosen to receive the 2015 art award from the Turquoise Harmony Institute. While in 2013 their founder Rosemary was awarded the honorary membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society. A rare and highly prestigious award which has been granted to fewer than 140 musicians in the past 200 years. Ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together for Bascade. Thank you to the incredible musicians of Bascade and to the well they were conducted by the inspirational Rosemary Nalden who I believe will contribute to the policy breakout session after lunch and I think we'd all agree it was very thoughtful that such vibrant musicians would consider performing the music of Edward Elgar as a bridge of understanding between the UK and South Africa and I can tell that we're all very grateful so thank you. We will now break for lunch and I think one of our parliament team will announce what's happening next but thank you all very much.