The Careers and Enterprise Company's 2023/24 report on Student Career Readiness revealed a concerning trend: a decline in skill development between primary and secondary education. The report also highlighted significant disparities among student groups, particularly among disadvantaged learners, in their ability to articulate and demonstrate their skills.This, combined with findings that high levels of essential skills can bring better academic outcomes, earnings, job and life satisfaction, demonstrates that in a rapidly changing world, the need for essential skills has never been greater. To build these skills effectively, explicit time should be set aside to teach them in a meaningful and structured way.
In this webinar:
This webinar was another opportunity to ‘Learn from Each Other’ with speakers from across the Skills Builder Partnership. Attendees heard from Skills Builder's Senior Education Associate, Helen Jones, who shared key considerations, strategies and resources for the effective teaching of essential skills. We also heard from Senior Associate Connor Llewellyn, who spotlighted an excited Skills Builder-accredited opportunity to build essential skills beyond the classroom, through the Young Green Briton Challenge. We were also joined by our two guest speakers, Hilary Wheeldon from the Mary Bassett Lower School and Becky Barber from Harrison College. Both guest speakers drew on their experience to provide practical tips and examples for teaching essential skills with impact.
Key questions to consider when teaching essential skills
What essential skill(s) are you going to focus on and how long for? How will you prioritise and select these? What stage and step will you focus on? The interactive Universal Framework should be your go-to for support and ideas.
Consider which resources you are going to use to teach essential skills. These could include short lessons or workshops, or extended opportunities to teach and apply essential skills through Premium Resources such as Extended Projects and Challenge Days.
When are you going to teach essential skills? Will this be an explicit slot or embedded within the curriculum? This could be a combination of a shorter slot for explicit teaching and an extended session for application of the essential skill. Whichever option you choose, ensure that explicit teaching is made a priority-the benefit will be felt in other areas if this is done effectively.
Where will learning take place-could this be beyond the classroom? Skills Builder Launchpad allows older learners to build essential skills independently through online modules. A workshop could be a great way to engage parents and carers in your school programme, and our Homezone provides a range of activities to build essential skills at home.
Why? How will you ensure that learners see the ‘why’ and know the importance of learning essential skills? Our guest speakers reflected that this is started by creating a shared language and culture around essential skills; helping learners to see their value beyond the classroom.
This could be through embedding essential skills within school values, displays, assemblies, cross curricular projects, educational visits and policies such as behaviour. Careers events such as National Careers Week and experiences such as internships and work experience, as well as accredited programmes such as the Young Green Briton Challenge, provide great opportunities to reinforce and apply essential skills.
How will you and your learners know that explicit teaching is having an impact? How will you assess them? This could be through the group measurement tool on the Skills Builder Hub, or through Skills Builder Benchmark, our self-assessment tool for older learners. Regular formative input from key stakeholders such as teachers or employers can also be a powerful tool in helping your learners identify their next steps.
By reflecting on and addressing these questions, you can help ensure that you are teaching essential skills with impact; setting your learners up to thrive and succeed in an ever-changing world. You can find a range of tips and examples on how to achieve this in the webinar recording below.
