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Oaklands School is committed to preparing students for life beyond education by providing a high-quality, engaging careers education. We aim to raise aspirations, equip students with the skills they need to reach their full potential, and offer meaningful experiences of different career pathways. Our bespoke, innovative careers programme includes a dedicated one-hour careers lesson each week for all students in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, alongside a wide range of careers-related activities throughout the academic year.
We chose to get involved with the Skills Builder Accelerator to further strengthen our approach to essential skills development. The programme aligns with our vision by providing a clear framework and practical tools to help our students build the transferable skills that employers value. By embedding these skills across our curriculum and enrichment activities, we are helping students to become more confident, capable, and prepared for their future pathways.
Overall impact
The overall impact of the Skills Builder Accelerator programme at Oaklands School has been very positive across our whole community. It has given us a clear, shared language and structure for developing essential skills, which has improved consistency in how these skills are taught, discussed, and understood by both staff and students.
For teachers, the programme has provided a strong framework and practical tools that have supported planning and delivery—particularly in our weekly careers lessons. It has boosted staff confidence in explicitly teaching skills like teamwork, problem solving, and speaking, and has helped to embed these skills more meaningfully across the wider curriculum.
For students, the programme has made essential skills more visible and tangible. The use of progression steps has given students a sense of achievement and direction, helping them see how these skills connect to their futures.
Keep it simple
At Oaklands School, we have taken a whole-school approach to embedding the Skills Builder Universal Framework and building awareness of essential skills among students, staff, and parents.
For students, essential skills are introduced and reinforced through weekly careers lessons in Key Stage 3 and 4, where the language of the Universal Framework is consistently used. Skills such as teamwork, problem solving, and listening are explicitly taught, practiced, and reflected on. We also link these skills to real-life situations, including work experience, enterprise, and enrichment opportunities, to help students see their relevance.
For staff, we have delivered CPD sessions focused on the Skills Builder framework, ensuring all teaching and support staff are confident in using the shared language of the eight essential skills. Teachers are encouraged to reference and model these skills in lessons across the curriculum, not just during careers sessions.
For parents, we share information about the Skills Builder programme through newsletters, parents’ evenings, and our website. This helps to build a shared understanding and encourages parents to support skill development at home.
We show that we value essential skills by celebrating progress in them. Students reflect on their skill development in their personal development folders, and we incorporate skills into our reward systems. We also use the Skills Builder Hub to track and celebrate students’ skill growth.
Start early, keep going
At Oaklands School, we are committed to ensuring that all learners, regardless of age or stage, have the opportunity to build their essential skills in a meaningful and consistent way. Our structured careers programme begins in Key Stage 3 and continues through Key Stage 4, with all students receiving a dedicated one-hour careers lesson each week. These lessons explicitly focus on the Skills Builder Universal Framework, helping students understand, practice, and reflect on the eight essential skills. e also use the Skills Builder Hub to track progress and tailor support for individual learners.
While our current focus has been on embedding the framework with students and staff, involving parents is something we are keen to develop further. We recognise the important role they play in reinforcing these skills at home and are exploring ways to strengthen communication and engagement with families as part of the next phase of our work.
Measure it
We use a range of tools and approaches to understand our students’ essential skills and track their progression over time. A key element of this is the Skills Builder Hub, which provides a structured and consistent way to assess where students are in relation to the eight essential skills. Students complete self-assessments that help them reflect on their current strengths and identify areas for development. This information is then used by staff to plan targeted activities and set meaningful goals.
We also gather insight through teacher observations, student reflections during careers lessons, and feedback from enrichment activities such as work experience and enterprise projects. This helps us to build a more rounded picture of each student’s skills in both classroom and real-world contexts.
This insight has been incredibly helpful in several ways. It enables us to differentiate our teaching, support individual learners more effectively, and track progress over time.
Focus tightly
At Oaklands School, students have regular, structured opportunities to build their essential skills through direct instruction, particularly during our dedicated weekly careers lessons in Key Stages 3 and 4. These lessons follow a carefully planned scheme of work that runs alongside the Skills Builder Universal Framework, ensuring each of the eight essential skills is explicitly taught, revisited, and developed over time.
Our scheme of work is mapped to the progression steps in the Skills Builder Framework, enabling staff to deliver age-appropriate, focused lessons that build students’ understanding and ability step by step. We use the Skills Builder Hub to support this delivery, drawing on its wide range of high-quality resources, including lesson plans, interactive activities, and assessment tools. This allows us to track progress, tailor support to individual needs, and ensure consistency across year groups.
Keep practising
We are committed to giving students frequent and meaningful opportunities to practise their essential skills in a range of settings beyond direct instruction. We believe that for skills to become embedded, students must apply them in real-world and cross-curricular contexts.
Essential skills are built into our wider curriculum, with teachers across subjects encouraged to highlight and reinforce them in lessons. For example, teamwork and problem solving are regularly used in group projects, practical tasks, and class discussions across subjects like science, DT, and PSHE.
Outside of the classroom, we offer a range of enrichment and extra-curricular activities—including work experience placements, student leadership roles, sports teams, clubs, and volunteering—which are all designed to support skill development in real-life contexts.
Bring it to life
We are committed to helping students understand how the essential skills they develop in school can be applied in the wider world. We do this through a range of real-life challenges and project-based learning, such as group problem-solving tasks, and themed activities that replicate real-world scenarios. These experiences allow students to apply skills like teamwork, leadership, and problem solving in a purposeful way. In our careers lessons, we regularly encourage reflection and discussion, helping students make clear links between the skills they are developing and how these will support them in future education, employment, and everyday life. We also make use of the Skills Builder Framework to help students identify the steps they are working on and see how those skills apply in different contexts.
While we already provide work experience and enrichment opportunities, we recognise the value of working directly with employers to further enhance this. Developing more employer engagement—specifically linked to the Skills Builder Framework—is a priority for us moving forward. We see this as a key next step in providing students with authentic insight into how essential skills are used in a wide range of careers, and in strengthening the relevance of their learning.
What's next
One key priority is to strengthen employer engagement, using the Skills Builder Universal Framework as a structure for meaningful interactions.
We also recognise the importance of parental involvement, and plan to begin sharing more information about the framework and how parents can support their child’s skill development at home. This may include workshops, newsletters, and embedding skills-based conversations into existing parent communication.
Internally, we are continuing to embed the essential skills more deeply across the wider curriculum, encouraging all subject areas to consistently reference and reinforce them, not just during careers lessons. This will help to ensure that essential skill development is truly a whole-school encouraging all subject areas to consistently reference and reinforce them, not just during careers lessons. This will help to ensure that essential skill development is truly a whole-school effort.
