What did happen to ‘Core Skills’?

The think tank Demos has launched a major attack on the inadequacies of the current school curriculum and how it is failing many young people seeking employment.

https://demos.co.uk/research/the-employability-badge-skills-for-life-work-and-a-stronger-society/

Demos reports that transferable skills are now more valuable to employers – skills like leadership, teamwork, problem solving and emotional resilience for example.  It argues that schools emphasise the importance of academic knowledge, but not these.  It also argues that the decline of many ‘extra curricula’ activities has narrowed the curriculum further. The consequence, Demos argues, is much higher rates of youth unemployment (10%) compared to other sections of the population.

Employer organisations and their respective think-tanks have continued to bang on about this. But since their emergence some 50 years ago, English vocational qualifications continued to emphasise the importance of ‘core’ skills – the generic activities cited by Demos.

Despite various initiatives, ‘core’ skills never really embedded themselves in GCSE and A-levels or other ‘high stakes’ qualifications – with many arguing that generic and transferrable skills were not able to be assessed and quantified in the same way as academic knowledge. With the emergence of ‘applied’ qualifications (GNVQ was reinvented as a ‘vocational A-level’ ) many core skills dropped away or were reclassified, first as ‘key’ and then as much narrower ‘functional’ skills in English, maths and ICT, with external assessment through exam boards. This is the case with the new T-levels. Meanwhile, individual employees continued to use academic qualifications as an indication of a potential recruit’s suitability.

One conclusion drawn is that, like the courses they were  part of, core skills were aimed at ‘non-academic’ learners. So rather than the creation of a new correspondence between education and the economy, as Demos suggests, core (generic) skills were designed for young people who didn’t succeed in education  and were expected to enter the workplace, rather than follow the university route (but who schools needed to keep out of the academic track and provide an ‘alternative’ curriculum). Ironically, many of these young people end up in periphery and precarious employment.  Work that generally doesn’t require the sorts of skills listed by Demos and which many youngsters are not prepared to do.

It remains the case that most generic and transferrable skills can be developed in the workplace and in this respect, Demos is right to call for better and longer work experience placements for those in full-time education and for closer relationships between employers and schools. But these important skills can also form part of a new comprehensive curriculum offer for all students and don’t have to be restricted to a vocational context.