Generic skills in the 14-19 curriculum: an international review: summary report

This project was designed to comparatively review how generic skills are understood and delivered across 10 different jurisdictions, while considering the policy implications for England. The project was commissioned by the Centre for Education Systems. Our research highlighted that the most common generic skills are communication, collaboration, personal qualities, ICT-related, creativity, critical thinking, and citizenship. It also highlighted that England is an outlier in only including generic skills for learners on study programmes, who are most likely to be on vocational courses, from 16-19, with no compulsory generic skills in the remaining 14-16 and 16-19 academic curriculum. The implications for England are to learn from the experience of those delivering study programmes, to support teacher autonomy in integrating generic skills more explicitly into existing teaching and learning, and to seek to agree a consensus amongst policy-makers to include generic skills in the curriculum.