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The eight essential skills

Ensure your learners with SEN join the
200,000+ building essential skills.

Build their eight essential skills helps every child and young person to thrive - from the classroom, to the world of work, to home. To truly equip children for the future, we must start building these skills from the very start of school, and keep going throughout.

Free advice toolkit

We've created a toolkit for school leaders that offers advice for embedding the essential skills and the principles into your everyday curriculum.

It comes with the Expanded Framework, which breaks progression down, placing three simple Stepping Stones between Steps to give more extensive scaffolding.

Why Skills Builder?

We work with schools focused on students with special educational needs across England:

The eight skills are a key part of this programme which links with other parts of the curriculum, enabling the children to use the skills in all subjects.

Nichola Heaffey -
Curriculum Lead, Littledown School

Teaching a skills-based curriculum is essential in order to prepare our pupils for adulthood; these are the real-life skills they need to succeed. The Skills Builder tool helps us to assess accurately to maximise the pupils' progress and the resources are helping us interest pupils who were previously challenging to engage in learning.

Joolz Scarlett –
Head Teacher, Manor Green School

Start building skills with a membership

Benefit from the Skills Builder Framework, Principles, training and online resources to teach essential skills.

£900 per school per year
with some fully-funded opportunities available

Goal Planning Conversation

Reflect on school priorities and existing provision to create goals for your programme.

Training & Support Sessions

Build confidence of all teaching staff with two 1-hour sessions delivered in-school by our outstanding teachers.

Teaching Resources

Explicitly teach skills with short video activities and use posters, certificates & passports to support progress.

Online Assessment Tools

Quickly and effectively assess your students’ progress, view data clearly and decide your next steps.

Then increase the impact
with additional elements

Develop a comprehensive approach to building skills with access to our complete range of in-school project resources, out-of-school experiences for students and further support for teachers.

Our programmes are flexible and adaptable, following Project-Based Learning principles, meaning they are accessible and engaging for students with a range of additional needs.

Priced at cost

Further Training & Support

Additional training to develop specific skills, work with targeted groups, support school goals and integrate skills into your curriculum.

+ £450
per session

Classroom Projects

Multi-session projects to explicitly teach specific steps of new skills and explore a big question through project-based learning.

+ £50 each
+ £500
for all

Challenge Days

An engaging opportunity for students to apply existing skills to a new context in school with support from our teachers on the day.

+ £750
depending on support required

See how other SEN schools
build essential skills

How Oak Grove College and The Sand Project build essential skills
Read case study
Littledown Special School, UK
Read case study
Bromley Beacon Academy, UK
Read press release