The government’s review of curriculum and assessment should explore how more emphasis could be placed on schools developing skills essential for employment, according to a new report.
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) , published today, says these skills should be developed alongside knowledge acquisition, as part of the teaching of core curriculum subjects.
It says that providing sustained skills development from early childhood is key to meeting future workforce needs, which will change due to technological advances and demographic and environmental differences.
Learning employment skills in school
The report’s author says the government needs to adopt a “cradle to grave” approach to skills development, promoting a broad mix of cognitive, behavioural and technical-specific knowledge and skills, starting from the early years.
It urges the government to incentivise and support schools to develop the six essential employment skills (EES) - communication; collaboration; problem-solving; organising, planning and prioritising work; creative thinking; and information literacy - as part of a broad and balanced curriculum.
And it says schools should explicitly support the development of EES as a critical part of a good education, including socio-emotional skills, self-management skills and cognitive skills.
Balancing academic and vocational subjects
Julie McCulloch, director of strategy and policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said the study highlights the fact that it is vital to do more to close skills gaps that emerge early in life to ensure that children and the wider economy thrive.
“Schools and colleges already do a lot to try to make that happen, but they are operating within very constrained financial circumstances and severe staffing shortages,” she said.
“We also hope the ongoing curriculum and assessment review will better balance the previous government’s excessive focus on a small number of academic subjects with more room for vocational, digital and creative subjects, which nurture many of the skills sought by employers.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the report shows that investment in early years education can making a lasting difference to children’s life chances.
“Gaps that develop during the early years are often harder and require more costly intervention to try to address later on,” he said.
“We have welcomed the new government’s moves to prioritise the early years with initiatives including expanding nursery provision in schools and increasing the early years pupil premium. It is vital that this focus continues.”
The NFER report says ministers should consider how to widen access to effective family support programmes for disadvantaged families.
It says disadvantaged children and young people should get more support to participate in extracurricular activities more frequently between the ages of 7 to 8 and 16 to 17.
This could involve providing additional funding to schools with disadvantaged intakes to extend the school day or introducing a national extracurricular bursary scheme.
A ‘cradle to grave’ approach
The report is the latest from research programme , which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation and is looking at how new technologies and major demographic and environmental changes will transform employment.
Previous NFER research predicted that workers will need to utilise EES more intensively in jobs by 2035, and that up to 7 million workers could lack the required EES skills to carry out these roles.
Calling for a “cradle to grave” approach to skills development, Jude Hillary, the programme’s principal investigator and NFER’s co-head of UK policy and practice, said the “consequence of inaction could see increasing numbers of young people leaving education without the skills and qualifications they need to enter growing occupations, which are predominantly professional roles requiring higher skills, particularly EES”.
For the latest education news and analysis delivered every weekday morning, sign up for the Tes Daily newsletter
