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Bexhill College is a Sixth Form College which operates in the eastern side of East Sussex. The College offers a broad range of courses to meet the needs of the local community. The core focus of the College work is with the 16-19 age group, offering a broad range of academic and vocational courses across foundation, intermediate and advanced level including T levels. The College attracts approximately 2200 full time, 16-19 yearold students of which approximately 90% are studying advanced programmes and the remaining 10% at intermediate/foundation level. The College has always placed priority on preparing students for their next steps, whether higher education or employment. We are also mindful of the Skills Act and our statutory duty to ensure our curriculum contributes towards meeting local, regional, and national skills needs. The College participates in a number of networks which relate to the Skills Agenda. We continue to develop a range of employer networks from which we gather strategic information on employment needs which influences curriculum design and delivery. This process leads to the provision of work-related learning projects that allow our students to develop the eight essential skills, which we present as the four subcategories of: communication skills; creative problem-solving skills; collaborative working skills; and self-management skills. We got involved in the Skills Builder Accelerator as way of introducing the vocabulary of the eight essential skills into our pastoral provision. We had been using Skills Builder terminology across our curriculum with a range of skills development activities for a number of years. The resources provided on the various Skills Builder platforms enabled us to provide a consistent message in our weekly tutorial sessions to complement the provision our students were receiving in their subject-specific lessons.
Overall impact
The prompt to use a common language, either the eight essential skills or the four subcategories, has provided a degree of clarity when communicating to stakeholders on the topic of skill development. We distribute employer newsletters twice a year, which refer to the four subcategories of skills, which helps to provide a clear understanding of our intention to develop the skills of our students. It has been rewarding to receive the multitude of employer feedback commenting on how the work-related learning projects have developed our students' essential skills. It has also been encouraging to monitor the students self-assessments and realise they believe they are making progress in developing their skills. Our participation in the Accelerator programme coincided with our Ofsted inspection and our reassessment of the Quality in Careers Standard, which we maintained. The assessor for the latter noted that work-related learning is embedded in all elements of the College's work. In addition to the achievement of being graded as Outstanding in our January 2024 Ofsted inspection, the college was also confirmed as making a strong contribution to meeting skills needs; the highest descriptor a college can achieve in this area.
Keep it simple
We built awareness with teachers by communicating the need for them to develop their students' employability skills, in addition to the need for them to develop subject knowledge and academic skills. We made it a formal requirement that every subject should provide a range of activities and evidence these by following cross-college procedures such as completing a scheme of work template, which references skill development. We found that using the vocabulary of Skills Builder's eight essential skills was an accessible way of communicating what we collectively understood to be 'employability skills'. In addition, the branded skills icons have been incorporated into slides that are used to deliver lessons and tutorial sessions. Parents can see our commitment to developing the essential skills when they visit the College, as we have installed a wide range of branded posters across the campus.
Start early, keep going
We made it a formal requirement that every subject across the College should provide their cohorts with a minimum of one work-related learning project, one work placement and one employer encounter. The objective of each work-related learning project is for students to develop at least one of the four subcategories of the essential skills, with most projects developing all four. Student are informed of the objective at the start of the project and receive a certificate detailing the skills they have developed upon completion. Students are also given the same objective when arranging their work placements, and upon completion they are required to complete a self-assessment where they reflect upon how far they have developed the essential skills.
Measure it
We developed our own intranet audit tools. This allows class teachers to register participation in various activities such as work-related learning projects and employer encounters, as well as identifying which of the four subcategories of the essential skills their students have been developing in these activities. These tools allow middle managers to monitor the participation rates throughout the academic year and report on a termly basis to the Senior Leadership Team. The audit tools are also used by an Assistant Principal during the monthly skills meetings that are held with each curriculum middle manager. In addition, during our involvement with the Accelerator programme we trialled both the Benchmark and Launchpad platforms as additional means of collecting data to measure the development of the students? skills.
Focus tightly
As part of our of wider learning, teaching and assessment ethos, teachers deliver lessons that have ample opportunities for students to participate in active learning. One of our Accelerator initiatives was to instruct teachers to make their students explicitly aware when a particular classroom activity presented an opportunity to develop an essential skill. As an example, when a media teacher would ask the class to determine how a media production crew could add value to a range of local businesses, this was framed as an opportunity to develop their creativity skills. To reinforce the teacher's verbal message, the branded skills icons were placed on the corresponding slide that was projected onto the interactive whiteboard. To complement these subject-specific opportunities, students were also provided with discreet Skills Builder sessions as part of their weekly tutorial programme. These sessions were delivered using the resources from the Benchmark, Launchpad and Hub platforms.
Keep practising
Each subject has been given a target to have a minimum of two employer links. These employers then work with the teaching staff to develop opportunities for skills development to be embedded within the curriculum. A Level Business students were set an enterprise project by a local entrepreneur with the intention of developing their teamwork skills. They were organised into small groups, provided with seed capital and then tasked with creating a profit within a specified time frame. Level 3 Applied Science students were set a project by staff at the local aquarium to develop their problem-solving skills. The Senior Aquarist instructed them to produce a calibration curve for some conductivity data and then determine the ion concentration in 3 samples of tank water. Extended Diploma IT students participated in a project aimed at developing their creativity skills. A local web design agency set them a task to develop a website for a local gardening business.
Bring it to life
In addition to our work-related learning tasks we use employer encounters as a method of reinforcing the need to develop essential skills. Our programme of employer encounters allows students to receive advice and guidance from someone employed in a particular job role or sector of the economy. Each subject has been given the formal requirement to ensure that they provide their cohorts with at least one employer encounter. Therefore, an A Level student would receive a minimum of three separate presentations, with employers reinforcing the importance of developing essential skills, using their personal experience as the context. In addition, we also provide numerous progression fairs throughout the year to provide students with opportunities to interact with employers. As well as providing students with the opportunity to engage in career research, these events allow students to develop their communication and networking skills.
What's next
We will continue to reinforce the Skills Builder principles across both the subject-specific curriculum and our pastoral provision. We have started to produce alumni video case studies, which focus on the link between essential skills and career progression. The first batch of these videos have been included in our electronic employer newsletters and made available on our website. The aim is to produce the next series to reinforce the importance of developing essential skills. Furthermore, we will continue to prompt all stakeholders to maintain the use of the common vocabulary in communication related to skill development.
