Can preschools help kids build essential skills for emloyment
Connecting essential employment skills with early education may seem a little far-stretched. However, new research in UK highlights the need to prioritise the social and emotional development among pre-school children as key for their future employment opportunities.
The skills that matter most
What are Essential Employment Skills? The research highlights a set of six skills identified in ‘The Skills Imperative 2035’ report as especially vital to the future workforce. Interestingly, all of them come under two large categoris – social-emotional learning and approaches to learning.
These six skills are a mix of cognitive skills: (problem solving and decision making; information literacy; creative thinking); social skills (collaboration; communication); and self-management skills (organising, planning and prioritising).
The report concludes that high quality early education with focus on social-emotional skills is essential for children’s development. Therefore, kindergarten teachers should be highly trained to model and teach children good social-emotional skills.
How schools fail to develop good employment skills for the future
The head of the National Education Union in UK points out three major factors in school education which stand in the way of building the skills kids need for their successful future employment. These are:
- the exam factory culture in schools which is to blame for students lagging behind in socio-emotional skills.
- an obsession with memorisation of knowledge over the development of important skills.
- the creation of rigid, overloaded curricula is also alienating for young people.
The Union head concludes that exams “force the arts out of the curriculum and drive the toxic school league table culture that now overrides everything else.’
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