Skills Builder

This content was written by

Adderlane Academy

Context

Adderlane Academy is a small school with 47% pupil premium. We felt our children lacked ambition and drive for their own learning and for their future employment. We wanted to join Skills Builder to help support this.

Overall impact

The children have enjoyed the focused skills building lessons and they thoroughly enjoy receiving tokens for demonstrating the different skills. The children are demonstrating the skills throughout the curriculum, they are learning to put the small steps into place and when working with the wider community, the skills are evident.

Keep it simple

In year 4, the children have had their own skills building book that they have worked in, they have completed different tasks in this book including tasks from the skills builder website. We have a display in the school corridor which shows all of the different skills with a focus on the particular skill we are working on. The children have also displayed jobs and careers they are interested in.

Start early, keep going

Children in Year 4 did an assembly for the rest of the school where they were able to share the different skills and what they meant, they also discussed the small steps and how to build on them. Teachers across school use the vocabulary throughout the whole curriculum. In this way, children are exposed to the different skills with a more entwined route.

Measure it

We have moved through the small steps and built on each one using different activities. The children are given tokens when they demonstrate using the skills well and have small envelopes to put them in, they can then access their envelopes which are displayed to look at how well they are achieving a particular skill.

Focus tightly

Children use their skills and are exposed to the skills throughout the whole curriculum. They began by having weekly, focused lessons on a particular skill whereas now it is more woven into the curriculum. They use a variety of ways to demonstrate their skills through focused tasks, games and discussions.

Keep practising

Children are involved in a variety of projects in the wider curriculum such as litter picking, visiting the local assisted home and transition to middle school events. They will also be going on a residential later on next month. These are perfect opportunities to demonstrate all of the different skills.

Bring it to life

We have had discussions about jobs and careers the children want to get into. They have their ideas displayed and we discuss what skills would be needed and how they would used those skills. The next plan is to look, as a whole school, at the six different career fields and focus on one particular one each half term. This would include inviting employees/workers into school to discuss the job roles and skills that are needed and they would complete different activities based around that role.

What's next

The next step is to embed the skills more throughout the whole school so that once they get further up, they will be higher up the small steps. We also want to move onto doing more work around careers and jobs.

North East England

United Kingdom

Primary

Adderlane Academy