The ARC Story
The ARC Education Project is a self-funded international network of policymakers, scholars, and educators from national and state-level systems that share similar values for education reform.
The idea for the ARC Education project evolved over a period of time through explorations with interested systems, but it was fully born and founded in a Toronto restaurant in December 2013, and further developed at the 2014 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) congress in Glasgow, Scotland. Educational change specialist Andy Hargreaves and learning systems expert Yngve Lindvig addressed the need that several systems had started to identify for a global movement that would bring educational systems together to learn and take action to advance equity, broad excellence, inclusion, wellbeing, democracy and human rights in educational reform.
A partnership developed between Dr. Hargreaves, LearnLab , and the IMTEC foundation around the concept of the “Atlantic Rim Collaboratory,” now called ARC. Fusing “collaboration” and “laboratory,” they used the word “collaboratory” to describe the creative process of a group working across geographic divides, united by a commitment to solving complex problems. The ARC Project holds a yearly summit facilitated by Steve Munby, former CEO of England’s National College for School Leadership. Since 2019, the ARC Education Project has established its headquarters at the University of Ottawa, in Ontario, Canada.
