Over the past two years, we have been building an aspirational culture at our school in which children are praised and rewarded for displaying 'learning behaviors.' All staff at the school contributed to the creation of this ethos and are therefore committed to embedding our pupils not only with the knowledge but also the skills needed to be successful learners and future citizens and employees. As Raising Aspirations Lead, the connection between the Skills Builder programme and our vision for our pupils is evident and participating in the programme undoubtedly helps us to achieve this. As participants on the Careers Primary Benchmarks Pilot, we are also very aware of the need to explicitly teach our pupils new skills but also provide them with new experiences such as those offered by Skills Builder. The offer of workplace visits, projects and challenge days are very appealing as without the links and resources available through we may be unable to provide such a broad curriculum.
Skills Builder enables us to develop and embed the explicit teaching of skills to our pupils. In addition to this one of our school priorities is the redesign of our whole school curriculum with a focus on related skills and learning behaviours. Whilst, we have started this process and identified some of the skills, the vast number of resources available through Skills Builder has supported. The Challenge Day was a particular highlight.
