TTR0059
Written evidence submitted by the Skills Builder Partnership
Introduction
The Skills Builder Partnership leads a global movement of 850+ employers, educators and social impact organisations all working to ensure that one day everyone builds the essential skills to succeed.
Essential skills are those highly transferable skills that almost anyone needs to do almost any job and which support technical skills and knowledge. These highly transferable skills include communication, interpersonal, problem solving and self-management skills. We approach them as eight skills: Listening and Speaking; Problem solving and Creativity; Staying Positive and Aiming High; and Leadership and Teamwork. They act as a scaffold, enabling people to unlock the potential of other skills and expertise.
Tom Ravenscroft founded Skills Builder working as a teacher in Hackney, after seeing there was something fundamental missing in education. Students were leaving school completely unprepared for life or work, without basic self-management and communication skills.
Fast forward to 2023 and the Skills Builder Partnership delivered 2.4 million high quality opportunities to build essential skills in the last year alone. In the UK, 87% of secondary schools and colleges have a touchpoint with the framework. In 2022 alone, 517 schools and colleges worked in partnership with Skills Builder and we trained 15,669 teachers.
What are the main factors leading to difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified teachers?
The Department for Education's research report: Factors affecting teacher retention: qualitative investigation (March 2018) found that two-thirds of teachers from phase two felt that the level of work a teaching role required was unsustainable, reporting they had felt ‘overwhelmed’ by the amount of marking, planning and data tracking. However, this is only part of the story with the report also identifying other factors:
In 2021 Skills Builder Partnership published Essential skills: Teachers’ perspectives on opportunities and barriers (Emma Crighton, Tom Ravenscroft, June 2021). The research gathered the views from teachers within the Skills Builder network via focus groups, applications to in the Skills Builder flagship education programme; the Accelerator and validated by quantitative data provided by the Skills Builderteacher survey. To capture the response from teachers beyond the Skills Builder network, a qualitative survey was shared more widely, including through the Careers and Enterprise Company Regional Leads’ network. Finally, seven leaders within the education sector were interviewed to understand their perspectives on why essential skills education is important and what they believe motivates and prevents teachers from delivering it, with a particular focus on wider policy.
The research found five key motivators for teachers.
1) Teaching essential skills to prepare students for life was the strongest motive for teachers by a significant margin. This was felt strongly by all phases of education both within the Skills Builder educator network and beyond it.
2) Supporting students’ career development and employability came out as the second strongest motivator for teachers, with essential skills building foundations to many career strategies. There is also recognition among teachers, particularly at a secondary and college level, of the value employers place on these skills too.
3) Teachers are motivated to teach essential skills to unlock learning in the classroom and ensure all students have access to equal opportunities. Teachers of special educational needs feel this particularly strongly.
4) There was also a motive for teachers to deliver essential skills education because it supports school or college priorities. Where this is the case, the essential skills are part of school improvement plans and can also be linked to their school values to bring them to life.
5) Raising aspirations also motivated teachers, especially for those who work in areas of social deprivation. The benefits of essential skills were recognised for students with lower attainment and self-esteem.
Evidence from the Sutton Trust report, Life Lessons (2017), shows there is wide recognition of the importance of essential skills, with 88% of young people, 94% of employers and 97% of teachers saying that they are as or more important than academic qualifications. In fact, more than half of teachers (53%) believe that life skills are more important than academic qualifications to young people's success and 72% believe their school should increase their focus on teaching life skills. However, they reported that only half of schools had a shared approach or policy on the issue, and just 13% knew where to get information to support the development of those skills in their pupils.
Teaching essential skills in a positive way can help give teachers more meaning and satisfaction, driving retention.
Barriers teachers face to building essential skills
Though it is apparent that there are clear drivers felt by teachers to deliver essential skills education to their learners, our research identified lack of time, training and a consistent approach were barriers felt by teachers. This was largely due to a full curriculum leaving little space to focus on other areas as well as a lack of confidence in their ability to teach the skills.
How we work with educators
The product of five years’ cutting-edge research and design, the Skills Builder Universal Framework makes it possible for everyone to teach, learn, and measure essential skills at any stage of their lives and careers. The Framework breaks each of the eight essential skills down into a sequence of 16 measurable, teachable steps, taking individuals from being an absolute beginner through to mastery. It takes essential skills and puts rigour behind them.
Skills Builder also defines six principles to guide schools and colleges in creating a complete strategy when it comes to delivering essential skills. This provides clarity on what best practice looks like:
• Keep it simple: Using a consistent language, and focusing on tangible steps
• Start early, keep going: Working with individuals at each stage of education
• Measure it: Understanding existing skills strengths and development areas
• Focus Tightly: Building essential skills explicitly and deliberately
• Keep Practising: Apply the skills in lots of settings and reflect on their use
• Bring it to life: Link the essential skills to different elements of wider life
We work with educators in a full range of settings: primary and secondary schools, special schools, alternative provision settings, colleges and universities. Our free online course, Teaching and Assessing Core Skills, supports teachers and school leaders to develop their ability to teach skills and learn how to measure their students’ skills development. It is available to teachers and school leaders around the world. In 2021-22 we trained 15,669 teachers.
What action should the Department take to address the challenges in teacher recruitment and retention?
The evidence shows that teaching essential skills in a positive way can help give teachers more meaning and satisfaction, boosting teacher retention and tackling many of the issues the Department for Education, Sutton Trust and Skills Builder research identified. There are several areas of action the Department for Education could take to boost the teaching of essential skills:
Conclusion
Teachers have a critical role in creating a future where every young person has the opportunity to succeed. There is strong evidence of frustration from teachers that they are not always able to provide this. This is a factor in teachers wanting to leave the profession.
Essential skills are a vital component of a young person’s education and there is a wealth of evidence proving the value of building essential skills, including on academic attainment, career aspirations, wellbeing and earnings.
The Department for Education can take steps to facilitate a shared language of essential skills, and space in the educational journey of young people to build their essential skills. The free to use Skills Builder Universal Framework makes it possible for everyone to teach, learn and measure essential skills at any stage of their lives and careers.
April 2023