World Youth Skills Day 15th July 2022
World Youth Skills Day on 15th July celebrates the ultimate premise of our mission here at WCSQM – to identify, enhance and celebrate the skills and competencies of our young people. Use our free classroom resources to mark the day at your school.
Skills crisis
In 2021, UNESCO estimated that schools were either fully or partially closed for more than 30 weeks between March 2020 and May 2021, due to COVID and reported that distance learning became the most common way of imparting skills. This limited educators’ capacity to provide quality provision which successfully developed young people’s skills, which, in turn, aggravated the UK’s skills shortage.
Radical change
According to all reliable measures, since May 2021 this shortage has only become more acute, particularly in the light of COVID 19, Brexit implications and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. Various national agencies have called for radical changes to our education system to address what they consider to be a skills crisis. For example, The Times Education Commission, which reported earlier this month, recommended the establishment of Career Academies. The Innovation Institute is advocating that in our learning environments, our assumptions must change fundamentally to raise students’ levels of competency across all disciplines.
Global economy
At World Class, we focus on supporting students to develop the skills, characteristics and competencies they need to flourish and succeed in an ever changing global economy. As a starting point, we find that some of our non-selective state school students lack the confidence or vocabulary to describe themselves in terms of World Class characteristics, even before we consider their skills’ enhancement. Our students are better able to explain they have a GCSE in mathematics, than confidently introduce themselves as somebody with the ability to make well-founded mathematical judgements. To this end, our frameworks of characteristics use descriptors that enable young people to interrogate, understand and describe their skills and competencies in professional terms.
Start early
Additionally, at World Class, we develop students’ understanding of their skills at primary age, because waiting to identify, and therefore excel in, skills post 16 is far too late. You have only got to see a Reception child skillfully pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand around the play area, with no sand spilled, to know this.
Celebrating skills
We are therefore big fans here of World Youth Skills Day, and have created resources for all schools to use, free of charge, to celebrate with us the World Class skills of their students and tackle the skills gap at a grassroots level.
Please contact info@worldclass-skills.org to get your free World Class resources.
