Transforming the essential skills
of more than 200,000 learners.

Schools

We support schools to build the essential skills of every learner through the training of staff, a comprehensive curriculum, and links to employers.

See how it works

Teachers

We provide a suite of tools for teachers to build essential skills in the classroom, including learning activities, classroom resources and assessment tools.

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Employers

We partner with employers across all industries and sectors to engage effectively with children and young people through trips and workshops.

Find out more

Organisations

We collaborate with youth organisations to drive collective impact through the Skills Builder Framework, supporting assessment and impact.

Get involved

We build essential skills with a complete framework that goes step by step.

We work to ensure that one day, everyone will build the essential skills, experiences and aspirations to succeed. So we created the Skills Builder Framework, which underpins our programmes. It takes each of the eight skills and breaks them down into teachable and learnable nuggets - from the age of three through to adulthood.

Explore the Framework

Six principles for building skills

We’ve developed and refined our approach to make it easy for teachers, youth workers and students to build essential skills. We have six simple principles - our approach in a nutshell.

Discover our approach

Download your free toolkit.

We've created toolkits for schools, teachers, employers and organisations that offer advice for embedding the essential skills, the Framework and the principles into their everyday work with children and young people. You can download it for free.

Download for free

Everything we've learned.

The Missing Piece: The Essential Skills Education Forgot details the rationale for building essential skills, in the light of a decade of practice with over 150,000 children and young people. It rigorously examines the arguments for and evidence behind the six principles, as well as discussing the thinking behind the development of the Skills Builder Framework. The book also looks to the future, outlining a roadmap for the changes we must make to our education system so that every student can be equipped with the skills, experiences and aspirations that will empower them to succeed in life.

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Download introduction for free

Explore our other publications

External Press

Profile: Tom Ravenscroft

Tom Ravenscroft is perhaps the most quietly passionate proponent of a “skills” curriculum in education today – and if that rings alarm bells, keep reading.

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Education must transform to make people ready for AI

We are doubling down on the idea that if we get children to know things and regurgitate them in a certain way in an exam, then we are setting them up...

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Education’s missing piece

Tom Ravenscroft, Founder and CEO of Enabling Enterprise, explains how he is trying to reduce the skills gap. There is something fundamental missing in education. I saw it first hand a decade...

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School reports miss the talents that matter - just look at Alan Turing

The education system can sometimes struggle to cope with lateral thinkers. Learning has become formulaic – a case of regurgitating knowledge in...

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‘The Missing Piece’ book review - Dr. Mary Bousted

Ravenscroft has not only done his research – the sources in his book are wide and varied – but he also wears his learning lightly. The result is a very...

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Start-up success: six lessons for aspiring social entrepreneurs

While it may sound poetic, Enabling Enterprise was not born in a flash of inspiration. Rather it emerged from my desperate attempts as a naïve new business studies teacher to engage...