Over the last eight months, I’ve been excited to see the Skills Builder Partnership building real momentum. There are now more than 480 primary, secondary and special schools and colleges in the Partnership, alongside 130 employers and more than 40 other skills-building organisations.

All of these organisations work in different ways but towards a common mission: ensuring that all children and young people build the essential skills to thrive during their time in school and beyond it. The Skills Builder Framework provides the common language and shared outcomes that allow our individual efforts to add up to real impact.

We’re pleased to share that The Careers & Enterprise Company will be joining us as a strategic partner as we work towards that mission.

The Skills Builder Framework and Partnership

The Skills Builder Framework and the Partnership draw together the best thinking and experience around building employability skills from educators, employers and other skills-building organisations.

It turns skills that can often seem hazy into a consistent set of eight transferable skills: listening; presenting; problem-solving; creativity; aiming high; staying positive; teamwork; and leadership. It goes further by breaking each skill down into teachable, learnable and assessable chunks and putting them into an effective order.

This Framework and Partnership together present the opportunity of a shared language and common expectations around essential skills.

When it comes to building these skills, the challenge is not a lack of will or capacity. It is a challenge of coordination, and of knowing what works. This is exactly the challenge that the Careers & Enterprise Company was set up to address.

Joining this together with a shared language and outcomes, and common ways of assessing against them therefore have the potential to be transformative.

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The Careers & Enterprise Company

The Careers & Enterprise Company’s mission is to prepare and inspire young people for the fast-changing world of work. Their role is to link schools and colleges to employers and to help them deliver world class careers support for all young people by:

1. Building Networks: Linking schools and colleges to employers and other external careers providers through the Enterprise Adviser Network and Careers Hubs.

2. Supporting Careers Leaders: Providing training and support for Careers Leaders in schools and colleges.

3. Backing the Gatsby Benchmarks: Supporting implementation of a best practice standard for careers support, the Gatsby Benchmarks, with tools and targeted funding.

Central to this work is the measurement of impact. The new Future Skills Questionnaire enables The Careers & Enterprise Company to understand the impact on young people through measuring outputs.

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Focus of working together

We will be working closely to create and refine robust self-assessment tools that allow students to understand and track their progress against the Skills Builder Framework. This will be built into the Future Skills Questionnaire as it continues to be developed. This will support more consistent measurement and understanding of the development of the essential skills.

Supporting the development of this common language and shared outcomes will be helpful to everyone with a stake in ensuring all of our young people are equipped for the rest of their lives:

⦁ Schools and Colleges are equipped to build the employability skills of their students in an effective and consistent manner through the Skills Builder Framework and supporting tools

⦁ Providers can use the Framework and Future Skills Questionnaire to more tightly target their work and track its impact

⦁ Employers can use that same Framework to connect the worlds of education and employment and give the most helpful support in building those skills in schools and colleges

Working together will be valuable to every organisation in the Partnership – and another step towards ensuring that every child and young person builds the essential skills to thrive.

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