I’m pleased to share our Impact Report 2022. It’s been a year of big progress, and the culmination of our three year strategy that commenced in 2019.
Collective Impact
In 2019, after running for a decade as Enabling Enterprise and growing to reach around sixty thousand students a year, it was clear that no single organisation could ever equip everyone with the essential skills to succeed.
We also saw that there were plenty of people and organisations who cared about building essential skills. We knew that they did so in a huge range of different ways and different settings – whether the arts, sport, drama or more.
Likewise, essential skills were critical for employers who had long called for more focused efforts to ensure everyone built them.
That alignment between employment and education has been a critical part of our approach. It was captured most clearly when we launched the Skills Builder Universal Framework in 2020. Developed with partners including the CIPD, CBI, Gatsby Foundation, BITC and the Careers & Enterprise Company, the Framework broke down essential skills into steps which anyone could teach and assess on the path to mastery.
This provided the shared language and approach that underpinned a more aligned, impactful approach.
Joining up the journey
In the last year, the Partnership has been made up of 841 partners. All of us commit to using that Framework and approach to align our efforts to build essential skills for everyone.
It has been fantastic to see growing engagement across all of our partnership groups: educators, employers, and impact organisations. Together, our efforts mean that wherever in life an individual is they have access to tools and programmes that boost their essential skills.
Our work has grown rapidly outside the UK this year and in partnership with British Council we have worked with government ministries in Kenya and Uganda, as well as running work in ten countries.
Looking forwards
As the scale of our work grows, we are making sure we understand the bigger picture too. Our Essential Skills Tracker 2022 showed starkly the huge advantages that higher essential skill levels provide across a lifetime: in access to employment, earnings, and wellbeing.
But it also highlighted that too many people are caught in a skills trap where missing early opportunities to build essential skills puts them on a a trajectory that reduces their future career and life opportunities.
We know this can change, and I hope you see this Impact Report as a demonstration of just how much can be achieved.
