The average learner today will have had 10-14 jobs by the time they are 38.

The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2009 did not exist in 2004.

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that are yet to be invented to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet (shift happens).

The Critical Skills Programme was developed by a group of leading teachers and the business sector.

They were asked to come up with two lists :

- What skills or dispositions were needed to be successful lifelong learners?

- What skills were employers finding were missing from school leavers?

The list of these skills included :

• problem solving

• decision making

• critical thinking

• creative thinking

• communication

• organization

• management

• leadership

...along with the following dispositions:

• owners of life-long learning

• self-direction

• internal model of quality

• integrity and ethical character

• collaboration

• curiosity and wonder

• community membership

The teachers then worked on a classroom model to encourage development of these and Critical Skills was born.

The Critical Skills classroom model is based on four educational ideas :

- Collaborative Learning in a community context

- Problem-Based Learning

- Experiential Learning

- Standards-Driven Learning (Assessment for learning)

The methodology introduces a framework for teachers to explicitly teach the skills needed for life alongside the more traditional content.

Created before the QCA’s development of Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills, the Critical Skills link smoothly into this agenda giving teachers a method to explicitly teach and assess PLTS.

Alongside the teaching framework we have a series of tools to use to explicitly teach skills. These provide teachers with a ‘toolkit’ which can be dipped into to support learning within the classroom.