Our 2024 Essential Skills Tracker, a YouGov survey of over a thousand teachers across the UK, found that the teaching professionals see essential skills as a vital part of a successful approach to education:

• Only 3% of teaching professionals agree strongly that essential skills are currently being taught sufficiently in education. Less than a quarter (24%) agree that essential skills are currently being taught sufficiently in education.
• 92% view explicitly teaching essential skills as important in preparing learners for both life and work.
  

Our work within education supports schools to improve their provision for essential skills learning. Along with this, businesses have a critical role to play in supporting learners within our education system. By aligning outreach approaches to developing essential skills, employers can play a significant role in closing the gap in terms of what teachers want to see delivered in schools and the reality of our current provisions.

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Employer Excellence in Essential Skills Outreach

We are celebrating the excellence of our current employer partners and the outreach engagement programmes that they are delivering. This work saw our employer partners deliver meaningful opportunities for over 88,000 people to build their essential skills in 2022-23.  

This blog explores five partners and the impactful work that they are delivering within their communities. Spanning the industries of transport, law, energy, finance and technology, each of these partners has aligned their programmes to the Universal Framework to ensure young people are being supported to build the essential skills to succeed.

At Skills Builder Partnership, we celebrate the excellence of our employer partners work in our Impact Directory. Employer Partners can accredit multiple programmes through the Impact Level process: for example, they might impact accredit a Work Experience, an Insight Day and a set of learning materials that they share with schools.

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What are Impact Levels?

The Skills Builder Impact Levels recognise high-quality essential skills provision at four levels of impact: awareness, reflection, practice and progression. The Impact Level accreditation is awarded to individual provision/programmes/platforms which demonstrate best practice and meet the listed criteria.

Accreditation is validated in each year of a partner’s membership, and partners receive an annual kitemark and feature on our Impact Directory.

Heathrow Airport

Designed to inspire the next generation to pursue a career in engineering, Heathrow Airport, delivers an Engineering Insights experience for groups of up to 12 local young people aged 16-18 in education. Over the course of 5 days, participants will experience what it is like to deliver maintenance and engineering to over 500,000 assets across the airport. Essential Skills are used throughout the experience and students will have the opportunity to complete interview practice with the questions framed around the essential skills. To find out more about the brilliant programme, explore Heathrow’s Impact Directory page.

Simmons & Simmons

Simmons & Simmons, an international law firm aligned their new primary school lessons to the Universal Framework. Young Lawyers aims to inspire primary aged students to become lawyers by broadening their understanding of what a lawyer does, and begin thinking about the essential skills required for success in the world of law. Essential skills are integral to being an excellent lawyer and these lessons are grounded in starting the development of those skills early in life. Designed as an off-timetable or after-school activity, the resources are open-sourced and free to use for any primary school. You can find all the details about these fantastic resources to inspire young people here.

Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services goIT programme sets students on the path to becoming the Digital Innovators of the future. Harnessing them with the 21st century skills and confidence to pursue a career in STEM related industries. Exposing students to a diverse range of STEM careers and guidance from inspiring real-life computer scientists. The programme has a particular focus on the essential skills of Problem Solving, Creativity, Speaking and Teamwork. The flexible programme includes 2-6 hours of teacher training and up to 24 hours of deliverable content for students, completely free of charge. Check out the Impact Directory to learn more about their programme.

SSE

To inspire the future generation of  ‘Power Changers’ SSE developed a suite of online lessons for these young people who will be striving to achieve net-zero and provide long-term sustainable, secure energy supply. The suite of primary lessons  go beyond science, technology, engineering and mathematical concepts;  focusing on hands-on learning and real-world application, building the essential skills to effectively apply these concepts. Read more about Power Changers in the Impact Directory.

Lloyds Banking Group

The Lloyds Skills Experiences are career insight opportunities designed for pupils in KS2 right through to post-16 provision each lasting between 60 and 90 minutes.

Pupils have the chance to meet and interview Lloyds Banking Group volunteers based in their region, explore a range of careers, complete a group task such as designing their own Lloyds workspace - each task focused on an essential skill - which culminates in a persuasive pitch. Explore how Lloyds have embedded the Universal Framework.

Transitioning towards Essential Skills Outreach

All of our partners using essential skills to improve the impact of their outreach provisions see the partners see the professional value in these essential skills and that is why they are embedding them into their outreach approach.

Here’s five simple steps you can take towards developing an essential skills outreach approach:

1. Explore your current outreach provision - audit your existing provisions and approach to understand how it aligns with your current social impact aims as an organisation. This process will allow you to identify gaps in your current provision and the opportunities to embed a more robust approach to developing essential skills.
2. Speak to your team to understand organisational needs - discuss with colleagues how your outreach approach supports wider organisational objectives and goals. Establish a consensus on how your outreach strategy can support you to develop a skilled, future talent pipeline.
3. Explore the outreach needs in your local community - build your awareness of what support and provisions are needed in your local community to inform your outreach strategy going forward.
4. Partner with us to embed essential skills into your approach - join the Skills Builder Partnership on an employer programme and collaborate with us to design an impactful, essential skills led approach that will support the people you engage through outreach to develop the skills they need for success.
5. Launch your outreach strategy, get accredited and join our Impact Directory - join a wide partnership of employers who are working towards a shared approach to essential skills development and have your programme and provision accredited as part of our employer programme.

To learn more about aligning outreach programmes to the Universal Framework, meet an expert from our team to discuss how your organisation can build essential skills into your approach.