The Skills Builder Hub and Accelerator

Once based on local needs, the labour market is now a global beast. The skills gap is considered by many experts to be one of the most significant threats to organisations worldwide. More pressingly, the lack of essential skills holds back individuals from achieving their potential or making their fullest possible contribution. Latin America and the Caribbean particularly struggle to close the skills gap with economic pressures keeping them behind their global peers.

Essential skills like communication, creative thinking, collaboration and self management can be taught and need to be explicitly developed throughout education and into employment.

By building the capacity of schools to teach essential skills alongside the curriculum in Latin American regions, we can support students to develop the skills needed to succeed in world full of international competition.

The skills gap is considered by many experts to be one of the most significant threats to organisations worldwide (World Economic Forum, 2020). ‘Soft’ skills like creativity, leadership and team-work, are described by 92% of recruiting professionals as equally or more important than ‘hard’ skills (LinkedIn, 2019), yet it is recognised that not enough is being done globally to develop them.

We currently tackle the skills gap through our award-winning work with over 750 schools, colleges, employers and organisations in across the UK and internationally. We are keen to expand our work into communities in Latin America and the Caribbean - a region ranked by the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2018) as having the worst skills-gap in the world. This problem affects people throughout the region, but especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds who are found to lack skills-building opportunities growing up (Inter-American Development Bank, 2017).

Over 40% of Latin American employers report difficulty finding workers with the right skills (Manpower Group, 2018). The problem is compounded by school curricula in both Latin America and the Caribbean offering no clear structure for essential skills development or focused training, leaving teachers struggling to develop students’ skills within a very crowded curriculum.

We currently partner with several international organisations, such as ‘Teach a Man to Fish’, an educational charity which runs programmes in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras, and the British Council, which works with schools across Latin America. We will enlist their help in identifying a region for our pilot programme which:

• Is known to have a significant essential skills gap.
• Has four to six non-selective schools willing to collaborate with us in finding solutions,
• Has an appropriate local organisation which we can partner with. It should have internet access and the ability to link with each of the four to six schools.

Together with our local partner organisation, we will host regular online forums and feedback sessions with these schools, to adapt our skills-building approach to their local context. This will include translating resources and tackling any context-specific barriers to them benefitting from our programme.

Each school will be given access to our online platform, resources and remote training. This will build the capacity and confidence of the staff at each school to teach essential skills in a way that inspires their students, empowering them to reach their full potential.

Our solution takes our existing approach to developing essential skills in schools and applies it to the Latin American context.

We focus on developing eight essential skills, explicitly endorsed by the Confederation of British Industry (2018), and others, as being critical:

• Listening
• Speaking
• Problem Solving
• Creativity
• Staying Positive
• Aiming High
• Leadership
• Teamwork

These skills underpin success at every stage of life: they unlock learning while at school, ensure young people are fully prepared for the independence of university and college, and empower people to land their dream job. The Skills Builder Framework stops these skills being hazy concepts and instead breaks them down into 16 teachable, measurable steps. 

Each school will be part of the Skills Builder Accelerator programme, the fastest and most comprehensive way for schools to embed a culture of developing essential skills. This includes:

Strategy planning: Three sessions of web-based support, helping the senior leadership team to develop and implement a skills strategy for the whole school.

Teacher Training: Two teacher training sessions for the staff team and online training tools to support them in learning how to embed essential skills development in their lessons. 

Ongoing support: A dedicated Education Associate (Skills Builder member of staff and qualified teacher) to provide, phone and email support as well e-learning modules and guidance materials for teachers. 

Skills Builder Hub: Access to our digital resource base which includes a full suite of teaching resources to support learners at every stage of education as well as assessment tools. 

Each school on our pilot project will be given access to a newly translated, beta version of the Skills Builder Hub. One of the earliest stages of the project will be to identify resources to prioritise translating and adapting to the local context. Depending on the funds we can raise, we would eventually hope to offer a fully-functional, Spanish-language version of the Hub with a full-suite of resources.

We will partner with a local organisation who works with schools to provide invaluable support in overcoming the language and distance barriers to delivering this programme. In line with how we work with other international schools, training and support will be delivered remotely through an online video platform. Our partner organisation will help us find a local translator to translate training in real-time and they will host schools for the strategy planning and training sessions, ensuring they are able to access appropriate IT facilities.

The Skills Builder Partnership joins over 750 educators, employers and skills-building organisations around common language and shared approach to developing and measuring essential skills. Together the partnership is working towards a day where everyone will build the essential skills to succeed.

The Skills Builder Hub, powered by the Skills Builder Framework which takes the eight essential skills and breaks them down into teachable, measurable steps, is our innovative solution to developing essential skills on a global scale. 

The Hub is free to access, and provides teachers with a diverse range or resources- from short stories, to video activities, to whole school challenge days and projects. Resources can be filtered by Skill and stage of progress- with options for pre-school age students all the way up to highly skilled individuals. Group-level formative assessment is weaved throughout, helping teachers to reflect on their students’ progress over time- with an overview which highlights exactly what they need to learn next.

Since September 2019 over 12,000 teachers, from over 50 different countries have, signed up to access our online resources. Our focus now is on finding ways to make this platform even more accessible, through its translation into a range of different languages, with resources to fit a variety of regional contexts.

We know that teachers benefit most when they use this resource alongside participation in the Skills Builder Accelerator programme. Our priority is therefore to invest further in our remote training capacity so we can reach teachers where there is the highest need.

Our Theory of Change identifies three conditions as necessary if everyone is to develop the essential skills to succeed:

1) Developing essential skills is valued by everyone: schools, youth organisations, employers and young people themselves.
 2) There is a consensus about how we talk about, teach and measure essential skills.
3) Everyone has access to the tools and resources to develop essential skills effectively.

We achieve this through:
o Creating networks of educators, employers and organisations that are dedicated to building the essential skills. This pilot will start small - with a network of one organisation and four to six schools- but it is a model that we believe has huge potential to expand.
o The Skills Builder Framework, which was developed through a rigorous, research-based approach involving the input of over 60 leading expert bodies. Translating it for the Latin American audience will have a huge impact.
o Our specialised resources and tools for skills-building, developed over a decade by our team of qualified teachers. Making them accessible for a global audience is our next big ambition.

Having access to the Skills Builder Hub, and taking part in the Skills Builder Accelerator Programme, will enable the schools on this project to develop their students’ skills in a measurable way. Resent research shows that students on our programme achieve 62% more progress across the essential skills over a year than their non-participating peers. Additionally, 80% of teachers we train report increased confidence in teaching essential skills.

We are currently running our Skills Builder Accelerator Programme in 550 schools and colleges, including ten international institutions. This means:

• Approximately 110,000 young people are being provided with essential skills development, with their progress tracked against our Framework. 
• Nearly 3,000 educators are building their confidence and capacity to deliver essential skills provision.

In addition to those those reached through our programmes:

• Over 5,900 teachers signed up to access our Skills Builder Hub in the last academic year, benefiting nearly 40,000 students.
• Tens of thousands of individuals are indirectly impacted through our collaboration with 86 partner organisations, each of which use our Skills Builder Framework in a range of ways across their operations.

Over the last ten years, our approach has been to expand the number of schools we work with. Our priority for the next five years is to deepen engagement and sustain partnerships with our schools, and therefore we aim to continue working directly with no more than 600 schools a year. This includes 100 based outside the UK, and 25 to 50 in Latin America.

We will continue to increase the number of individuals served through our solution, by:
• Translating our Skills Builder Hub and resources into a range of languages. 
• Building the capacity of partner organisations around the world to deliver essential skills training to local educators, allowing our solution to have an even wider reach. We plan to work with five such organisations in 2020-21, and then steadily increase the number year-on-year

We envision our pilot project in Latin America taking a minimum of one year, and generating the following outcomes:

o An understanding of which of our resources are most relevant to the Latin American context- plus the development of new ones.

o Spanish versions of our toolkit, Skills Builder Framework, Skills Builder Hub and a range of resources. 

o Strong links with a local organisation, which we can continue to work with as we connect with a greater range of schools in the region.

o An understanding of the barriers schools in a developing region may face to accessing our resources and training, and solutions to these issues.

This will enable us to slowly build a consistent presence across the Latin American and Caribbean countries, forming partnerships with more schools, colleges and organisations. 

Within five years we hope to have established a stronghold of 25 to 50 schools and colleges across the region, each within a network surrounding a local partner organisation.

We know our organisation has the potential to scale up significantly; in the last 10 years we have gone from reaching 600 students to over 130,000 a year. However, our focus now is on sustaining engagement with schools and deepening impact, rather than increasing the number of schools.

Financial- One of the most significant financial barriers to us expanding into the Latin American and Caribbean market is the cost of translating our online platform and resources into Spanish (then Portuguese and French).

In addition, securing funding for schools to re-enrol on our programme after the initial, fully-funded year, may pose a challenge. Our current UK model is to offer schools the opportunity to self-fund their re-enrolment on our programme. As we expand our work over the next five years, into poorer Latin American countries, and disadvantaged communities especially, it may be inappropriate to ask schools to fund this.

Technical- Remote training, support and access to our Skills Builder Hub relies on good quality software and internet.

Cultural- Our earlier resources were designed mainly with a British audience in mind. They may not all be as relevant for the Latin American context.
Market- It may be difficult to enter the education sector of a country we are not based in, with no direct experience of.

Financial: In the past, we have received extensive funding to develop our Skills Builder Hub and its online resources. We therefore feel confident that adapting our Hub for the Spanish-speaking market will attract investment from philanthropic organisations.

In terms of re-enrolment:

• Where there is the greatest need, we will fund re-enrolment for Latin American schools, through corporate sponsorship and our growth fund.
• We will build the capacity of local organisations to train teachers to deliver essential skills provision, allowing this important work to continue without our direct contact. The schools will continue to benefit from full access to our Skills Builder Hub, Framework, and resources.

Technical: We will continue the model of forming a network of schools around a local organisation which we partner closely with. This organisation will act as an intermediary, offering their IT facilities to teachers, and hosting our remote training and support sessions.

Cultural: Pilot programmes, such as this one, will allow us to collaborate with a small group of educators- working together to ensure our resources are culturally relevant.

Market: Identifying an initial local organisation to partner with, is the essential first step to making links with local schools. We will do this through the help of our 120+ employer partners, and 80+ partner organisations, many of which have connections with education-focused organisations abroad. We know finding the right organisations will be a time-consuming process; we plan to work with just one pilot cluster of schools in the first year, and expand slowly.

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Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spend an average of 5% of GDP on education and skills programmes, yet are struggling to close the skills-gap (IDB, 2017). Our solution is therefore very attractive- it is cost-free in the first year (with life-long free access to the Skills Builder Hub), has been proven to measurably increase essential skills at a significant scale, and has been independently reviewed twice, by PWC and the education consultancy LKMco.

The essential skills gap in Latin America and the Caribbean has extreme economic consequences. It is one of the biggest reasons why this region is unable to overcome the ‘middle-income trap’, and a leading cause of the region’s sustained levels of inequality (WEF, 2018).

Whilst Latin American countries have shown in recent times that they are willing to invest significantly in their people’s skills and education, the region’s persistent skills gaps shows that they don’t yet have the right strategies. We therefore believe there is a huge market for our proven solution. 

 Despite the Skills Builder Hub currently being entirely in English, it has gained initial interest from users in Latin America and the Caribbean. Educators from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Venezuela have already signed up to access our online resources. With the translation of our Hub and investment in context-specific resources- including an increase in those which can be printed and used in an offline environment- we believe the potential for engagement among Latin American users is extremely high.

We have 29 full-time members of staff, and one part-time member of staff.

Our organisation was founded in 2009 by a small team of teachers, concerned that something fundamental was missing from education: the skills that young people need beyond academic achievement to really thrive.

From its origins in a single classroom in London, we have grown to the point where our programmes reached over 130,000 students in the last academic year. Our organisation is now divided into three teams- Development, Programmes, and Operations- each managed by a highly-qualified expert in their field. The Programmes team, who deliver our training, are all qualified and experienced teachers.

We have received explicit endorsements from the Confederation of British Industry, Careers and Enterprise Company, Gatsby Foundation and others. In their recent report, the World Economic Forum (2020) lauded our organisation for our exemplorary work furthering life-long and student driven learning.  We have also won awards from Social Enterprise UK (2017), Ashoka (2017), PwC (2015) and Teach First (2009).

Rooted in pedagogy, our Skills Builder Framework is the culmination of four years’ work and research. It was developed by engaging sixty individuals and organisations from across academia, employers, representative bodies and skills-building organisations. 

In recent years, we have gained experience working with international schools and colleges- including delivering our training and support remotely, with the aid of a local translator.

We now work with ten schools and colleges internationally, in India, Malaysia, Spain, Oman, and the UAE. We reach additional schools through the support of a local partner organisation, in the Czech Republic, Spain, Brazil and Zimbabwe.

We lead a partnership of over 750 schools, colleges, employers and skills building organisations.

• Employers: The 120+ employers who are part of the partnership use our Framework in a range of ways, including to ensure a fair recruitment process, to promote professional development, and in employability outreach programmes.
• Organisations: We work with 86 partner organisations, enabling them to embed the Skills Builder framework across their online platforms, existing programmes, and work experience schemes.

We currently work with seven international organisations, including:

• British Council: UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities, operating in over 100 countries. We have created a set of workshops for their Connecting Classrooms digital series and have presented at their conferences
• Edumais: A non-profit organisation operating in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, providing high-quality education to the most disadvantaged. They use Skills Builder resources to enhance their classroom materials.
• Teach A Man to Fish: An organisation which works with schools in Africa, Latin America and Asia, using the Skills Builder Framework and resources.
• Schola Empirica: An independent, Prague-based NGO and Educational Institution, accredited by the government. They are translating our Framework into Czech with the aim of introducing in to teachers across the country.

Our business model is to build the capacity of teachers and senior leadership in schools and colleges, in order to empower them to develop their students’ essential skills.

We are a not-for-profit social enterprise, which relies largely on fundraising to deliver our product to those in need. As such our online platform- the Skills Builder Hub- is free to access for educators across the world. Some extra resources do cost a premium to access, enabling us to generate a revenue to help fund our activities.

We fundraise in order to offer our Skills Builder Accelerator Programme freely to schools which meet our qualifying criteria in their initial year. This product includes:

• Strategy planning: Three sessions of support helping the Skills Leaders in each school develop and implement a skills strategy for the whole school.

• Teacher Training:
  • Two ‘train-the-trainer’ style, day-long workshops.
  • Two teacher training sessions open to all staff within each school.

• Ongoing support: Email and phone support from our team of Education Associates, as well as e-learning modules and guidance materials.

The schools we currently work with are offered the opportunity to self-fund their re-enrolment on our programme, at a highly subsidised rate. As we expand globally into less economically developed regions, we will focus on building the capacity of our local partner organisations to deliver our skills building training, in order to benefit schools and colleges unable to afford multiple years directly working with us on a Skills Builder programme.

Our current business plan combines traded income from schools with fundraised income, whilst also exploring new income streams. We employ a development team within our organisation, dedicated to securing funding from our corporate partners, trusts and foundations. We aim to always maintain reserves to cover 3-6 months of operating costs, and have already secured funding for our work until at least the end of 2020.

We aim to fundraise the costs of translating our online platform and resources. In terms of funding the Skills Builder programmes we offer to Latin American schools and colleges, short-term we will seek funding for pilot projects like this, to support a small number of institutions.

Long-term we will scale up our current fundraising model, whereby our corporate partners, trusts and foundations, each provide funding for a certain number of schools in a preferred region. Many of the companies we partner with are major international corporations with offices across the world, which may be keen to support local schools.

As state schools in Latin America tend to have smaller budgets than those in the UK, we will not be able to secure as much income from these schools re-enrolling on our programme. We believe schools which cannot afford to re-enrol will not be at a significant disadvantage as the programme is designed to build a high level of capacity for excellent skills provisions after just one-year. However, we will explore fundraising options to build the capacity of local organisations to deliver training in our place.

The TPrize challenge could help us overcome the following barriers:

Financial: Access to some of the generous prize funding being offered, would enable us to translate our Skills Builder Hub and resources for the Spanish-speaking market. Depending on the funding, we could achieve our goal of creating a fully-functional, Spanish-language version of the Hub with a full-suite of resources.

Financial support would make this pilot project possible. It would enable us to deliver our Skills Builder Accelerator Programme in the local schools, build the capacity of a local organisation to act as our intermediary, and undertake a collaborative research progress with our newly established network.

Technical: We would greatly benefit from strategic advice on how to deliver our tech based solution in areas where IT facilities may be limited.

Joining the supportive Solve community and being connected to range of experts and peers who provide similar tech based solutions to ours, would be very beneficial as we update our Hub for the Latin American market, and invest further in our capacity to deliver remote training.

Identifying a local organisation:

Identifying the appropriate partner organisation to build our network of schools around, is a key part of our strategy for overcoming financial, technical, cultural and market barriers to our engagement.

MIT Solve is an initiative with global scope. It has partnerships with organisations working across Latin America, such as Kinedu, Retos and Supercívicos. Being part of this network could enable us to find the perfect local organisation for our pilot project.

A key element of our strategy, is to form partnerships with education-focused organisations operating in the regions which we want to reach. These organisations should have internet access, the facilities to host remotely-delivered training sessions, and the ability to link with local schools.

Our partner organisation ‘iTeach schools’ is an excellent example of the type of partnerships we are seeking to make. iTeach schools leads a network of schools in Maharashtra, in India. We collaborated with them to train six schools in the region to use the Skills Builder approach, preparing them to embed resources from the Skills Builder Hub into the everyday curriculum.

Other organisations which we would like to partner with include:

• The Latin American Youth Forum: a youth-led initiative which helps young people aged 13 to 19 to maximise their potential and move into education, training or employment.
• Save the Children: We already have strong links with this global charity, as they have hosted groups of students at their London headquarters, through our skills-based workplace visits.

We already partner closely with London Youth, a similar organisation which operates in the UK. We collaborate on strategies for London Youth to use our approach and resources to develop their participants’ skills. There is potential for a similar type of partnership between Skills Builder and the Latin American Youth Forum.

They would be an excellent organisation to partner with as we begin our work in Latin America, as they work closely with educators across the region.