The economy is changing and research by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) shows demand for lower-skilled workers will decrease, while jobs in professional occupations will grow. This creates opportunities for high-skilled young people.
However, it also carries a significant threat for young people who leave the education system without the skills and qualifications needed to enter growth areas.
Earlier , conducted by the NFER, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, from research programme, suggests it is vital that young people leave education with a solid base of transferable Essential Employment Skills, which will be in high demand across the labour market.
These include socioemotional skills like communication and collaboration, as well as cognitive skills such as problem solving, and self-management skills like planning, organising and prioritising.
Bottom of the league
Now, , under the Skills Imperative 2035 programme, draws on a range of data to provide international comparisons of young people’s socioemotional skills.
It finds that young people in England tend to have worse socioemotional skills at the end of secondary school than their peers in most comparator countries. This is based on data from the latest round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa 2022).
From this data, we calculated a composite measure of young people’s socioemotional skills, from scores of their curiosity, perseverance, emotional control, stress resistance, empathy and co-operation at age 15/16.
Our analysis also suggests inequalities in young people’s socioemotional skills are greater in England than in any of the 30 other countries in the Pisa 2022 data, due to largely greater variability in England in children’s ability to control their emotions and stress levels and in their assertiveness and perseverance.
Socioemotional skills are fundamental for developing positive relationships, managing emotions and navigating social situations effectively.
More international research
Lower socioemotional skills and high inequalities in these skills in England may be contributing to high disparities in health and wellbeing.
This is because that socioemotional skills in childhood have long-term effects on adult health and wellbeing. suggests that the UK ranks lowest in children’s wellbeing in Europe.
Furthermore, also indicate that socioemotional skills relate to other “essential skills”, which together predict success in school and the labour market.
This suggests that socioemotional skill deficiencies may be putting young people in England at a disadvantage when they come to enter the labour market, in comparison with their peers in other countries.
Positively, the recently published curriculum and assessment review’s interim report recognises the need for a cutting-edge curriculum that equips children and young people with the “essential knowledge and skills which will enable them to adapt and thrive in the world and workplace of the future”.
However, explicit references to children’s social and emotional skill development or wellbeing are .
This latest research from the NFER into high-performing education systems suggests that socioemotional skills don’t materialise organically.
Curriculum intent
The countries where young people have the highest socioemotional skills, like Portugal and Switzerland, tend to make the development of these skills an explicit priority in their curricula.
For example, the curriculum in each language region of Switzerland explicitly outlines socioemotional competencies that schools should seek to develop in pupils, such as persistence, emotion identification, regulation and self-reflection.
Features of education systems that are associated with higher socioemotional skills also appear to differ from the features associated with higher cognitive skills.
Socioemotional skills require focus to develop
This potentially indicates that socioemotional skills are unlikely to arise as a natural by-product of children’s cognitive development and require explicit focus and attention to develop.
The education system in England can play a bigger role in supporting young people’s social and emotional skill development, without this subtracting from children’s acquisition of core knowledge or the development of cognitive skills through the curriculum.
Policymakers should consider whether and how each phase of education can contribute to addressing the inequalities in children’s social and emotional development.
This can run right through from disparities in young people’s access to high-quality early childhood education and care to disparities in their post-16 education and opportunities to develop socioemotional skills across all post-16 pathways.
Without greater attention, young people in England may find that socioemotional skills are a greater barrier to their progression into the labour market than for their peers in other countries.
Luke Bocock is research director at the NFER
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