In my many years discussing education research on social media, I have noticed that one of the areas that people are most vocal about is the extent to which several soft skills can be taught.
I’ve repeatedly seen reactions that amount to saying that they can’t. Interestingly, however, many of those saying this also often rush to say that they don’t mean soft skills aren’t important. They just think they should be obtained in a different way.
The critical omission here is that these people seldom present a mechanism that leads to the acquisition of such skills, except maybe a magical process that involves gaining a lot of knowledge.
Can soft skills be taught?
Sometimes the discussion becomes semantics, in that people mean that those soft skills can’t be directly instructed by a teacher.
This I understand. But, of course, the role of schooling is more than instruction; it’s also creating a classroom environment that nurtures both knowledge and socioemotional development.
Against this backdrop, it was interesting to read the recent Nuffield-funded study from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The report, , is part of The Skills Imperative 2035 programme, and it investigated cross-country differences in the cognitive, socioemotional and self-management skills of young people.
The study aimed to identify education system factors associated with higher performance and provide insights for England. It included analysis of data from international large-scale assessments, as well as a review of existing cross-country comparative studies and case studies of seven high-performing countries.
One part looked at cognitive skills. Young people in the UK and England typically have better maths, reading and science skills than the average for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but inequalities in these skills are marginally greater in the UK and England and they have not narrowed over the past decade.
While numeracy and literacy skill development in England between the ages of 15-16 and the early 20s used to be worse than the average across countries participating in the Survey of Adult Skills (produced by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies), this has improved over the past 10 to 15 years and is now above average.
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Another key focus of the NFER report was socioemotional skills. The researchers looked at this by calculating a socioemotional index score based on young people’s responses in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) 2022 to questions about their behaviours and feelings. Seven specific socioemotional domains were covered: assertiveness, cooperation, curiosity, emotional control, empathy, persistence and stress resistance.
Based on the index, England has low average levels of socioemotional skills and high inequalities in these domains relative to other OECD countries.
England’s average socioemotional skill levels were found to be well below the OECD average across all seven constituent skills. Inequalities in socioemotional skills in England were also higher than in any of the other 31 participating countries, largely driven by inequalities in emotional control, stress resistance, assertiveness and perseverance.
The seven case studies (Austria, Canada, Estonia, Japan, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland) highlight that high-performing countries often have coherent education systems underpinned by an implicit vision and set of values for education aligned with their socio-cultural and economic context.
Success in some areas of skill development often involves trade-offs and compromises in other areas, such as curriculum breadth or focus on socioemotional development.
The NFER’s study concludes that understanding the interdependencies within education systems and their wider context is crucial for drawing meaningful insights for policymakers in England seeking to improve skills development.
I interpret this as a need to consider all these factors together. We already knew from cognitive science that cognitive achievement is associated with several mediating factors like emotions. It is not enough to simply say “we do better in Pisa” and forget about socioemotional domains. But it’s also important not to focus most strongly on socioemotional elements, when knowledge and skills need to be strong as well. All of these need to be developed, and all of them can be nurtured by schooling.
Christian Bokhove is a professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
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