We are a secondary school and sixth form for year groups 7 - 13. We are located close to the Norfolk/Suffolk border and are part of a local MAT. Our cohort size is 250, with 200 in sixth form. 25% of our students are entitled to Pupil Premium. We got involved with Skills Builder as we recognise the importance of skills development in our young people, alongside their learning of the curriculum and the world of work. All our Year 7 students take part in a Skills day one day a week and we wanted to extend the explicit skills learning of our students from Year 8 upwards, using a common and consistent language.

Wider awareness of the eight essential skills and language are now used in school more often by both students and teachers. Steps are being taken to introduce the skills to employers we are working with. Teachers are seeing the value of using Skills Builder and like the resources. Skills Builder has been incorporated into our Careers & Skills programme and offer to students. The Accelerator programme has built momentum over recent months and the school is now seeing the benefit.

Over the next academic year, we hope to continue to build on our successes. The initial challenge was introducing something new to the school, as we were still in the middle of the pandemic and also introduced Unifrog at the same time. Having used the resources, teachers can see the value and are more confident delivering them. Being able to adapt the resources to suit our careers and skills programme has led to Skills Builder resources being more widely used, and both teachers and students are enjoying using the resources. They can see that building skills just has to be small steps at a time. Students are now starting to recognise how they can demonstrate their skills to potential employers, which we will incorporate into our Year 11 mock interviews in January 2023. We are looking forward to embedding Skills Builder further next academic year.