It’s set to be another big year for the Skills Builder Partnership. With real momentum behind our collective approach, we’ve been looking further to the horizon, and our 2025 strategy is the result.
Since 2019, our strategy has been focused on collective impact. We shifted from being focused on delivering our own programmes to working collectively with more than 700 partners around the Skills Builder approach. But that is just the first step in ensuring that one day, everyone builds the essential skills to succeed.
Turning momentum into breakthrough
As we look forward to 2025 and the next three years, some things will continue to be true. We’ll continue to work closely with educators to reach students in a full range of settings. We’ll collaborate with an increasing number of impact organisations as they roll our high-impact programmes building the essential skills of individuals in a wide range of settings – from sport to the arts, from expeditions to online learning. And our employer network will grow quickly as more businesses embrace the Skills Builder approach, joining up essential skills development from education into the workplace.
Alongside this core work, we’ll also accelerate uptake of the Skills Builder approach more widely. There are already encouraging developments in how essential skills are being recognised here: our Universal Framework has been adopted as a recommended model for developing new apprenticeship standards and a recommended tool for T-Levels. England’s latest statutory careers guidance for secondary schools and colleges advised that ‘in schools, each subject should support student to identify the essential skills they develop and to identify the pathways to future careers… The Skills Builder Universal Framework shows how to build essential skills into the school or college curriculum.’ And most recently, the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Committee released a report that explicitly endorsed the Skills Builder approach to help address youth unemployment.
But there’s still a way to go. Over the next three years, we want to achieve a step change in the number of high quality opportunities that exist for everyone to build essential skills.
Get involved
There are three big staging posts for us in 2022:
The first is the launch of our inaugural Essential Skills Tracker on March 1. This ground breaking new analysis will quantify skill levels across the whole adult population of the country, based on analysis conducted with YouGov. More than 2,200 adults of all ages completed a full self-assessment against the Skills Builder Framework. The result is the most complete picture we've ever had of who is building their essential skills, what the impact of education was on building them, and what the long-term impact of building them is.
The second is our annual Partnership Day, bringing together sector leaders to share new ideas, best practice, and to learn from peers working on that shared mission. We’ve got a great set of speakers, workshops and networking opportunities lined up – and for the first time since 2019 we might be able to be together in person! We’ll also be sharing our 2025 strategy and goals in full.
The final milestone is the publication of our 2022 Impact Report in October, in which we’ll evaluate progress across the Partnership and the shared impact we’re having. In 2021, the Partnership delivered 1,468,611 high quality opportunities for individuals to boost their essential skills. We’re excited to reveal where we get to then.
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Taking our learning forward
Essential skills are needed now more than ever. Youth unemployment is surging post pandemic, the growing energy and green sector warns of severe skills gaps, and the need for everyone to be equipped with essential skills has never been greater. The demand is there at every stage of our lives – from education, through training, and in the rest of our careers.
But if we can continue to build engagement with the Skills Builder approach as the de facto model for essential skills development, we could reach a tipping point where investing in these skills becomes the norm. The next three years will be crucial to realising this.
We’re not forgetting our lessons from 2021: collective impact works. Our impact – past, present, and future – is all made possible by the enduring support of our partners and sponsors, as well as the constant dedication of our team. We look forward to working together to take another leap towards achieving our shared vision: that one day, everyone builds the essential skills to succeed.
