Hello! We hope you had a good June and are keeping safe.
We have lots to share this month, including an invitation for our third webinar focusing on the Skills Builder Universal Framework, which is on Tuesday 7th July - reserve your free place now!
The team have been busy here - we're delighted to announce that all the school and college places for the Skills Builder Accelerator for 2020-21 have been filled. We've also been running virtual summits with employer partners to help students understand the role of essential skills in the workplace, and the Partnership continues to grow with a wide range of impact organisations joining us.
Finally, we're proud to share a pair of awards we've won recently - one for our longstanding work with UBS, and another for our commitment to impact management. Check them out at the bottom of this newsletter.
See you next month!
- Tom Ravenscroft
Founder & CEO, Skills Builder Partnership
Explore the Universal Framework
Webinar: A spotlight on Listening and Speaking
In this webinar on Tuesday 7th July @ 4pm, Evelyn Haywood, Education Network Manager at the Skills Builder Partnership, will be joined by Emily Evans, Chief Executive and Founder of the Economist Education Foundation. They will give a short presentation on the importance of Speaking and Listening skills and how we can go about systematically building them in school and college. Then, there'll be a chance to delve a bit deeper into this topic with a Q&A with Evelyn and Emily.
Final deadline for the Skills Builder Accelerator
We're thrilled to have confirmed the schools and colleges we'll be working closely with in 2020-21 through our new Skills Builder Accelerator: an innovative approach to embedding high-quality essential skills teaching into your school or college. We're excited to work together to develop comprehensive strategies to train staff and equip everyone with the tools and resources they need to build essential skills effectively.
Due to huge demand for the Accelerator, we'll soon be announcing a new Digital Membership where schools and colleges who want to develop a joined-up approach to skills education can have access to Premium resources on the Skills Builder Hub and enhanced training.
Essential Skills Summits
This month we have been helping students in school and at home connect with volunteers from our network of employer partners including Accenture, Network Rail, Lloyds and Wates to understand the role the essential skills in the workplace. With support from their teachers, students asked their prepared questions directly to volunteers through virtual meetings.
One student said 'Thanks to you I will now know all these key skills when I have to get a job of my own, such as Teamwork, which I will use to work well with colleagues, and Speaking, which I will use to present my ideas when needed'.
One volunteer said: 'It reminded me that as adults we take this stuff for granted, and it's really hard for students to understand unless someone creates the opportunity to exchange.'
Learn about our work with employers
New organisations have joined the Partnership
We've been delighted to welcome a wide range of new organisations to the Skills Builder Partnership, including:
- Culture Mile Learning, a partnership of twenty-nine arts, heritage, and cultural venues promoting the value of cultural and creative experiences for developing young people's skills. They'll be using the Skills Builder Universal Framework to inform project design and delivery.
- Great Minds Together, who work with particularly with children and young people, particularly with social, emotional and mental health needs and/or special educational needs and disabilities. They aim to build essential skills into the interventions they deliver to young people, and into their training.
- 15billionebp, an careers education charity who will be aligning their primary and secondary work with schools to include the Skills Builder language and steps, highlighting how essential skills can help students for their successful future.
- Ambitious about Autism, who will be working to support young people with Autism to develop essential skills, as well as raising employers' awareness and providing meaningful opportunities for employment.
Learn about our work with organisations
10 Years of Partnership: UBS & Skills Builder
It’s great to announce that Skills Builder and UBS have received a Business Charity Award from Third Sector, recognising our collaborative work to close the skills gap for young people everywhere. Judges praised the clear impact our work has had, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the number of young people Skills Builder has been able to reach with UBS’s support. As one judge commented, 'the scaling up of the project is super impressive'.
Learn more about our work with UBS
Skills Builder wins Natwest SE100 Impact award
We're very proud to have recently won the NatWest SE100 Social Business Award for Impact Management. Now in its tenth year, the SE100 celebrates the growth, impact and resilience of the UK’s best social ventures. The SE100 judges praised the our strong stakeholder engagement and particularly highlighted how we use the data – both positive and negative – to improve our offering.
Explore the Universal Framework
Launched last month, after being developed over four years in collaboration with experts and organisations from across sectors, the Universal Framework is a huge step forward:
- The language is neutral - it can work for anyone, anywhere, and at any stage of life
- The progression is clearer - making it easier to track change and focus efforts
- There's a lot more detail - with lots more guidance to assess and build every step
Whether you are an educator, an employer, a skill-building organisation, a parent or carer, or an individual interested in building your own essential skills there's now something for everyone.
Get started right away, by downloading a toolkit and then exploring some of the skill steps in greater detail through the Universal Framework pages.
