The new government has a burning priority: boosting UK growth and productivity. What if we could unleash £22 billion of value to the UK economy, reduce unemployment, increase earnings, and boost job and life satisfaction by equipping learners with a more complete education?
Essential skills are a critical part of the equation – those highly transferable skills that almost anyone needs to do almost anything, and which support technical skills and knowledge.
There are eight skills found to have universal importance:
- Speaking and listening
- Creativity and problem solving
- Aiming high and staying positive
- Teamwork and leadership
These skills have been identified as being of primary importance for some time. The CBI first called for their inclusion in the curriculum in 1989, while subsequent waves of educational reform have toyed with taking these skills more seriously with mooted qualifications and inclusion on curricula, albeit under different names: Labour’s diplomas; enterprise education; personal learning and thinking skills; and more.
There is growing international consensus about how critical these skills are too. In Australia, Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong, the development of essential skills is seen as a critical piece of a good education. Indeed, the OECD’s latest Pisa tests included international comparisons of creativity and critical thinking skills.
This is a positive step. Because the evidence of their impact is overwhelming. Studies have found that higher levels of skills in the population generally lead to improved outcomes, including economic growth. Recently, Skills Builder Partnership revealed a 12 per cent wage premium associated with higher levels of essential skills. This translated into a £22 billion cost to the UK economy in 2022 of having a low level of essential skills – similar to that of numeracy. The National Foundation for Educational Research also found positive impacts on job and life satisfaction as well as the wage premium.
The forward-looking picture is at least as compelling. Sources as diverse as McKinsey, Nesta and the OECD highlight that demand for these skills is projected to grow further as technological advances allow much repetitive work to be automated and AI becomes a more intelligent partner.
It was with exactly this impetus that leading educational and employer organisations came together to create the Universal Framework for Essential Skills. The goal was to provide a shared model for building and assessing these skills step-by-step. For example, the broad concept of teamwork became sixteen steps starting from seeing value in working with others, or recognising appropriate behaviour in a setting, through to influencing team dynamics and supporting team members’ development.
It’s called the Universal Framework precisely because it works to join up the complete journey of how individuals build essential skills over their whole lives – from primary school, through secondary school and into college, university or apprenticeships and then beyond that across their careers. These skills steps are deliberately transferable and can be contextualised to a huge range of different settings.
In its design, the Universal Framework helped to overcome some of the real barriers that have held back progress in this field to date. Firstly, it showed that transferable skills also have a knowledge base that can be effectively taught, practised and assessed. Secondly, it allowed individuals to demonstrate and articulate their essential skills in a way that made sense in both education and employment. Thirdly, its universality ensured that it could be built and refined at all stages of education, in the co-curricular space, and through employment too.
Fast forward to 2024 and adoption of the Universal Framework has been exponential. It forms part of statutory careers guidance and is backed by leading sectoral organisations. In 2023, learners benefited from 2.6 million high-quality opportunities to build their essential skills. It’s backed by more than 900 partners from National Citizens Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company to Lloyds Banking Group. Those partners have a touchpoint with 87 per cent of secondary schools and colleges.
Crucially, teaching professionals in the UK view essential skills to be as important as literacy and numeracy for success in life. There is widespread support for the Universal Framework and 86 per cent of teachers are asking for inclusion of essential skills in the national curriculum.
We now have the opportunity to truly realise individuals’ potential by enhancing and unleashing their essential skills. This will require three policy changes. Firstly, include essential skills in the national curriculum, school accountability and assessment, with clear age-related expectations and the teacher training to help it stick. Secondly, adopt the Universal Framework across government as the national model to build the skills with rigour across individuals’ lives. Finally, use the Framework to amplify the impact of government-funded enrichment and extracurricular programmes by increasing clarity on outcomes, increasing alignment, and allowing consistent measurement of progress.
We have the social need, the economic need, the demand, the evidence and the blueprint to build essential skills at scale. With the right changes, our new government can deliver a complete education and unlock growth while delivering social justice.
