The ethos of start early matches the vision of our careers programme already embedded in school. It is a priority for our school to create a culture for our students of thinking about employability skills and their education. Essential skills are referenced in curriculum plans and a detailed scheme of learning has been merged with our current citizenship curriculum to incorporate teaching and monitoring of the skills throughout all KS3. We have also piloted introducing essential skill activities during our transition days with Year 6, this will support in setting our expectations when they join us in the September.

Essential skills have been mapped to the citizenship curriculum. During weekly lessons students receive teaching of the skills alongside the content of the citizenship curriculum and these are assessed and tracked by form tutors. We have also built in assessment and referencing of the skills to our work experience programmes. In our Year 9 Out to Work Day, students reflect on how they have observed and used the essential skills during their workplace visit. In Year 10, visiting staff and employers assess the students progress against each skill for the whole week. Our curriculum leader for citizenship uses Hub reports to check on progress of all tutor groups to ensure consistency across the curriculum. During our Year 6 transition, students are tasked to receive signatures on a card when they have displayed an essential skill.

Majority of staff regularly include the essential skills in their lessons with support of classroom displays and visuals on the work. In citizenship there is teaching of the skills and monitoring from tutors and the head of citizenship. Our autumn term teacher training sessions focussed on career champions across all curriculum areas to ensure that essential skills are being referenced in curriculum plans. Essential skills have been present and linked to many school events this year including a Year 8 drop down day, the school annual careers fair, Year 9 options evening and work-related learning opportunities. We have a Year 9 SEND careers focus group, which is operating in its second year, the whole focus for this group is to explore their interests, personal skills and how they measure against the essential skills.

Strategies embedded so far will continue and be driven by career champions across our school community. There have been examples within observations this year where essential skills have been present in learning. Career champions have set Skills Builder targets to measure progress in curriculum areas and give vision to our school priorities. Essential skills have been mapped and used in many extra-curricular activities and will continue to grow across all. The new reward system will raise and profile and celebrate the achievement of students against the essential skills. CPD in school this year has been allocated for Skills Builder; careers champions, tutors and whole school staff have received CPD on use of the essential skills, sharing of good practise, teaching and monitoring of the skills. Essential skills have already been linked to our chess, escape room, Warhammer and dance club. We will continue to roll this our across all extra-curricular clubs where staff will identify an essential skill focus.

We have linked the skills to many events this academic year. A particular strength was our Year 8 Enterprise day where all tasks were explicitly linked to a skill. We piloted an approach with our partnerships during our annual careers fair and included them in promoting and identifying essential skills in their industries. Assessing students against the essential skills for their work-related learning activities supports the importance and relevance of the skills that we celebrate in school. We have strong partnerships with a local care home and Port Vale Football Club, where students from different curriculum areas complete volunteering work linked to the essential skills.