In East London, it’s 2008 and a group of Business Studies students are negotiating with the canteen to sell snacks at lunch, striking the best deals from the local warehouse, or creating customisable hats. It was a taste of what was to come in developing the broader skills – essential skills – that would shape their future success. 

As the Skills Builder Partnership celebrates its 15th year of building essential skills, we look back at some of the moments along the way and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

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Starting out

Skills Builder’s journey began thanks to a realisation for CEO and Founder, Tom Ravenscroft. It was the moment of getting an offer to go into management consulting out of university that made him realise his true passions were in teaching, after his experiences of tutoring in his teens. 

“It was the sense of challenge, the sense of it being something different, something that felt meaningful and worthwhile.” 

The students at the secondary school in Hackney in East London, were some of the first to experience an early essential skills curriculum. “One of the things I felt quite acutely as a teacher, fairly quickly, was that we had such a focus on the exam and course outcomes, that we basically lost sight of the fact that there was anything else that was part of that complete education.” 

“For example, one piece of coursework on the Business Studies course was writing an invoice. It felt pointless to teach them something they would forget, and be able to learn quickly in a context they needed to”

Reflecting on his own education, Tom recognised the contrast between what he felt was the very full, rich education he'd been lucky enough to receive and feeling like those opportunities weren't always available for everyone. Combined with the knowledge that his students weren’t getting the education he felt like they deserved, Tom came up with a plan. 

“So the idea I had was to combine teaching the Business Studies content with something entrepreneurial, so actually getting them to set up their own small businesses and then using that as a route to build interpersonal skills, self-management skills, communication skills, and creative problem solving skills. 

“What was fantastic was that they wanted their business to be successful and therefore they were willing and eager to learn the content and to be able to apply it. It was transformative” 

“I had one group who linked up with a wholesaler in Hackney and were selling donuts and all sorts of other unhealthy snacks at lunch time in the playground. I had another group who were doing it as a social enterprise, doing catch up tutoring, and then another group who were making customised hats.”

“They were developing these broader skills very quickly as a result because actually they were having to negotiate with people, they were having to communicate what their plans and ideas were, they were having to – and wanted to – overcome problems, so they really stuck at trying to resolve them – like negotiating with the canteen to be able to sell stuff in school”

Inspired by his students’ transformation in acquiring these skills, Tom shared his idea with other teachers. The moment he realised he was really onto something was from those teachers’ feedback. “They were seeing real impact and engagement from their students too, then it felt like maybe there's something in this that’s worth developing.”

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Application of essential skills

The essential skills in the Universal Framework are speaking and listening, problem solving and creativity, staying positive and aiming high, and leadership and teamwork. All of these skills have been crucial for the success of Skills Builder, from leadership to speaking and listening. 

“I think what's been really interesting over the last 15 years as I've seen how developing those essential skills has been really critical for me. 

“There have been some technical things I’ve had to learn, like accounting, but where I’ve really had to develop is across all the essential skills – creating a plan to build our business, thinking strategically, overcoming setbacks - this is huge - setbacks never go away, they just become different problems, sticking at difficult problems and coming up with multiple ways of solving them. And then of course speaking and listening when you've got to bring other people along and try to share that vision.

One of the interesting challenges for Tom is how he is working on the application of his essential skills with consistency, in any context. 

“What I see in myself is that when everything is going well and it's a very low stress situation, I know what to do in terms of how I should enact those essential skills – the real challenge is when you're in a situation of stress or there's lots of different things going on, do you still do the things that you should do in order to use that skill effectively?”

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Moments along the way

One of the most memorable moments of the Skills Builder Partnership’s journey was its early uptake. 

“I’ll never forget the first time a school signed up for the programme – that just felt borderline miraculous…somebody wants to do this with their students?”

The successes in those early schools embracing essential skills gave real insight into how they were achieving awards, how they were changing the curriculum, how they were measuring progress and communicating with parents about essential skills. 

“They were schools where we were able to really give students opportunities that they hadn't had, and we overwhelmingly still focus on the schools where they're not serving the most affluent population. Some don't necessarily have the same exposure to the full range of possibilities that their peers might”

One of the ways Skills Builder has brought those opportunities to life is through trips. 

“I remember the first trip we did with primary school students, which was to a law firm in central London and I don’t think they'd ever had six and seven year olds in their office space before! It was incredibly refreshing, frankly, for the lawyers who were volunteering with them, just to see the work they did through their eyes.”

The scale and reach of the Partnership has also been particularly significant, with the growth in the international side of its work as a notable achievement. 

“It’s been a huge privilege to visit at least a dozen different countries with Skills Builder over the last few years. It's been particularly exciting in Uganda and Kenya where we've been able to work over multiple visits and really build Skills Builder into the national curriculum and assessment. It's been an extraordinary 15 years.”

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The future of essential skills

Fast forward to 2023 and in the face of the challenges of AI, automation and technology, Tom is confident of the eight essential skills’ continued relevance. 

“I've had people ask me, are the essential skills still the essential skills in a world with technological change? And I think the answer is yes, they are.”

“We've been very thoughtful in terms of how we’ve defined them, how they've been broken down into steps in the Universal Framework to give them that timelessness. That is one of the core principles of essential skills – they’re not fixed in one particular setting, they are about adapting to the environment and the tools available.

“There is constant change, but essential skills are the human skills that machines can’t do – they require nimbleness,  the ability to adapt quickly and to really take in a lot of contextual information which algorithms are much less able to do. 

 “The biggest risk is that we believe that this is a bigger dislocation than it is and we forget everything that we've learned over the last 15 years about how to build essential skills really effectively.”

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The power of the collective

Tom sees his 15 years with Skills Builder as a huge privilege, doing something that solves a really important, pressing problem, alongside the 900 partners that make up the Partnership. 

“Even from the very earliest days, it has never felt like a lonely journey, it's very much a journey that I've been really privileged to share with so many other people and learnt a lot from them and I’ve been constantly impressed with what people are able to achieve as we work together.”

“None of this works through any particular individual. But it’s because it's all of our partners working together to achieve something that we collectively believe is really important. And so I'm really grateful, to be able to work with partners who have the attitude of thinking about the bigger impact and how we all chip in, but also to work with such a fantastic team of people day to day who are so invested in what we're trying to achieve”

“I think that’s why things like celebrating anniversaries matters – because if you and the team that surrounds you really care about something, it's very easy to be so focused on solving the next problem, trying to grow the impact, trying to do the next thing, that sometimes you lose sight of how far you've come. We've gone from a handful of classrooms in 2008 to reaching millions of individuals through Partners using the Skills Builder approach. It is so exciting when I take a pause to think about it.”

Looking forward, there is huge scope for growth, with ambitious targets for the Partnership.

“By 2025 we want to cumulatively deliver 10 million opportunities to boost essential skills, which is no mean feat. 

“That’s a lot more growth and impact, a lot more partners, trying to really keep making systemic change. But that is what is exciting and energising, knowing we're working towards something that's important. It’s a big challenge, but one that feels completely achievable if we keep working hard and keep working smartly on it.”

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If you’d like to join us on our ambitious and momentous journey, get in touch and we’d be delighted to meet you.

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