It was an absolute pleasure to welcome so many of our 900 partners and supporters to UBS in London at our recent Partnership Day and celebration event. 

Workshops and the evening celebration were a fantastic way to celebrate the collective impact of the last 15 years, with inspiring sessions from partners sharing how they are using and building on the Skills Builder approach in their contexts in education, impact organisations and in employment. 

In celebrating 15 years of building essential skills we were humbled to hear so many experiences along the way, illustrating just how far we’ve come –  with the Skills Builder Partnership now incorporating 900 partners across 20 countries – and boosting the essential skills of more than 2.65 million programme participants last year. It also served as a timely boost to get excited about scaling the systemic change already underway. 

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The case for building essential skills has moved from intuitive to robust – with strong evidence now that higher essential skills boost earnings, halve the likelihood of being out of work or education, and improve job and life satisfaction.

Through structured programmes, following best practice, we can accelerate the pace at which children and young people acquire these skills by 2.7 times – putting them on a completely different trajectory. And our employer and impact organisation partners are joining up the journey of essential skills development across individuals’ lives and careers.

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Three inspiring workshops delved into the impact of the Skills Builder approach across such varied contexts – from special education, colleges, law firms, and outdoor learning organisations. 

In our education workshop we heard from Ronnie Burn of Newcastle College, Leilah Sheridan of Undershaw Education, and Sophie Gavalda of William Tyndale Primary School, who came together to share their best practices, and ideas for building essential skills at systemic level into their educational settings. 

All three emphasised the importance of being skills champions and the need to persistently encourage skill development at all levels of education – from using essential skills to develop and create confectionery products, to incorporating them into the fabric of everyday school life, through posters, newsletters and in conversations with parents, to linking up with the wider community and organisational allies. The panellists were unified in their call for essential skills to be a constant throughout education and into employment to create a real lifelong learning journey, urging educators at all levels to engage in meaningful conversations to spark new ideas and change the system.

We were delighted to welcome so many of our partners to share their diverse perspectives on the transformative power of Skills Builder across such varied impact organisation contexts - with a focus on tools and resources. 

Jonas from Young People’s Action Group (YPAG) shared his personal journey of getting familiar with his own essential skills and growth, since a humbling experience of using Skills Builder Benchmark. Chris highlighted the Navigate’s intentional choice to use Skills Builder, rather than the need – for its benefits in assessing student progress, linking with existing frameworks, and aligning with T-levels and Gatsby benchmarks. Pat from Active Learning Centres showcased how teachers utilise the Hub to assess students before activity centres, facilitating targeted skill development. Jo from Morrisby explained the practicality of the Skills Builder Career Explorer, mapping essential skills to SOC codes. Chris from People Unlimited explained how using Skills Builder for self-assessment, reflection using logs, and skill development has positively impacted employment for individuals with lived experience of mental illness. Finally, Ben from Spiral presented a successful pilot of the Impact Calculator, showing how simple and statistical outcomes based on research and evidence can be used in impact reports and funding bids. More on the Impact Calculator will be coming soon.

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Our employers team took us through an insightful workshop to understand and explore how the Universal Framework and Skills Builder approach can add value across a whole business, practical examples and success stories and how to be an essential skills advocate inside and outside of your workplace.

Honing in on some of the issues raised by poorly defined skills in a business, we were able to illustrate the impact getting it right can have on people across a lifetime, from 15, starting to think about work, to 30, a career changer, and at 45, as an accidental manager – and how these essential skills benefit an organisation because of a consistent language for essential skills. The session drew to a close after an interesting panel discussion with Rob Powell – Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Poorvi Patel – Heathrow Airport, and Charlotte Jones – Amey sharing how they have successfully embedded the essential skills in their internal contexts as well as beyond their organisations. 

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A rousing panel discussion 

For the evening reception we heard from an inspiring panel including Tom Ravenscroft, Dame Julia Cleverdon, Peter Cheese, Brett Wigdortz, and Ashley Nyamhunga, who shared the impact the partnership is having across the globe and in the UK, the critical nature of employer partnerships to scale and achieve systemic change.

Reflecting on her experience of building essential skills within the City Year Leadership & Development programme, Ashley said “throughout the year, we have the support of our impact officers and we use Skills Builder Benchmark across all the skills, then every half term we reassess ourselves, meeting with our impact officers to share evidence and how we’ve been working on the skills, and justify the ranking we’ve given ourselves. Seeing the progress that I’ve made [...] in the space of one year I was really proud of myself. I’m 24 now, I’ve gone through high school, college, I’ve got a degree in Law, but probably the essential skills and the stuff that I learnt in the space of a year was probably more than I had done in those years of education”. 

Peter Cheese of CIPD spoke about the need for a Universal Framework across education and into work: “We’ve been having this debate for a long time about employability skills but no one had been able to properly define them. So I was really keen to define these in simple language, and what really struck me was that if we could use the same language as the schools were using then it would support that natural transition and I think that was very much the genesis of it. But it was also recognition that actually these skills are not just the ones you need to enter work but that you need throughout work. The reality is that the world of work has been dictated by my technical and job skills and not enough by my ability to communicate, listen, collaborate and teamwork – all of those things that you describe so well in the Framework.”

Julia Cleverdon considered how building connections and the sense of transition and consistency is required for success: “Unless people work across sectors they haven't got a hope. For me, the key thing is - how do you get reinforcement all over society about the same language? How do you get young people in a football team in a secondary school recognising that what they’re doing is building teamwork, and then they go on into possibly a pupil referral unit, and discover that on and off what they’re doing with a social enterprise is about building the next level of teamwork. And then they go on, get on the right track, and come through Heathrow as an apprentice, and there they realise that what they’re building is teamwork.”

On the topic of collective impact, Brett emphasised the role of building commonality: “What Skills Builder has done so amazingly is brought this common vocabulary and common language and this collective impact idea – you can’t just make impact on your own, real impact comes together. One of the founding principles of that is you have to speak that common terminology, that common language, know that you’re going in the same direction, that you understand each other.”

Looking ahead, our panellists shared where they hope to see Skills Builder in the next five years:

“Sometimes I think, what if I’d learned about Skills Builder before, what if it was introduced to me younger, what would have been the impact? So I would want to see it rolled out on a national level across schools so that kids can work on Skills Builder and it’s just as important as English or maths or science”, commented Ashley.

Peter considered the pace of change and how Skills Builder’s role will become increasingly important: “We’re going to see a lot of change in the next 5 years, and the things that are really striking now is that with all the debate about artificial intelligence is the reinforcing the need for these very human skills, these soft skills, so I think the need is just going to continue to grow in the next five years. The other very important area is inclusion – we’ve still got a lot of work to do on inclusion and we need to see the essential skills as one of those credible levers whereby we can make it happen. The situation we are already in is just going to accelerate. I would like to see it truly embedded into apprenticeship frameworks and traineeships, and obviously core education in schools. Then it’s about pushing policy because education is going to have to change in the next five years. At the very heart of these changes will be the essential skills.”

Brett considered the further opportunities in early years settings: “The more I look at educational disadvantage, I think, if kids don’t start school at an even place then it’s almost impossible for them to close the gap as they get older. So if you can get them at age 4 and 5 to have some sort of common framework, you have a much better shot of ending educational disadvantage. I think there’s so much potential for Skills Builder to work with educational foundation years, nurseries or childminders – they are calling out for this sort of support”

We also heard from our team on their plans for the next five years as we strive towards our mission of achieving 10 million opportunities to boost essential skills by 2025.

"Meaningful systemic change typically takes 20 to 30 years. Some things will change over that time, but what stays constant is the need for a shared approach so that we are all more than the sum of our parts.” - Robert Craig. 

“Building essential skills doesn’t just happen in classrooms and is not a problem for teachers to solve alone. Through a partnership of impact organisations, educators, employers - using a shared language and common approach - we can chip away at this together and help learners make meaningful progress." -Evelyn Haywood. 

The event was a fantastic way to celebrate the 15 year journey and showcase the innovation that all our partners show in their application of the Skills Builder approach to effect real-world impact of essential skills development across education, impact organisations, and in employment. 

Thanks to everyone who supports us – the organisers, presenters, and all our attendees – for contributing to a meaningful event, and making it such a collaborative, inspiring day for everyone involved. 

If you’d like to learn more about joining the Partnership, we’d love to hear from you. 

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