At LifeSkills, we are committed to supporting a whole-school approach to employability and skills education.
With the world of work changing fast, we recognise how crucial it is to support busy educators to make sense of the landscape – and this is somewhere that LifeSkills can help.
We had the opportunity to visit Ernest Bevin School in Tooting, South London, to speak to staff from across the school and find out about their priorities, challenges, and what support made the biggest difference when it came to embedding employability and skills across the curriculum.
We saw: A healthy level of competition can work wonders for teachers as well as students, making learning engaging and motivating.
How LifeSkills can help: We have built interactive educational games that help make careers and employability learning more engaging, including Play The Boss. In this game, participants decide against the clock if a CV will make the cut – it can start great discussions with students as they consider how they present their best selves to employers.
We saw: Adopting a whole-school approach to embedding employability can help schools meet Ofsted criteria and tell the story of their approach to careers. In England, Department for Education statutory guidance on careers guidance expects schools to “prepare all students for future success in education, employment or training, provide unbiased information about potential next steps and provide good quality, meaningful opportunities for encounters with the world of work". In addition, the Ofsted framework from February 2025 places more emphasis on learners’ broader outcomes, beyond exam results alone. This means supporting them to confidently and smoothly move into the next phase of education or employment is more important than ever.
How LifeSkills can help: We want to continue supporting you in exploring and engaging with LifeSkills content in different ways, so we've brought you ready-made schemes of learning. They are designed to help you have greater impact by providing a structured approach to embedding employability skills education across a term or academic year. The new schemes of learning offer a clear and progressive journey through existing LifeSkills lessons, tools, and activities, showing how you are revisiting key topics to deepen prior learning and deliver a joined-up approach to employability skills.
We saw: Getting staff buy in across the school leads to the greatest impact. The commitment of teachers of Citizenship, Business, Psychology, as well as careers leads and heads of year for KS3 and 4, is key to raising young people’s aspirations and making learning relevant to later life.
How LifeSkills can help: We understand that planning is crucial for busy educators to sequence lessons, embed key topics across subjects, and collaborate with colleagues. Our new schemes of learning have been designed with educators and based on feedback from our users to ensure they are practical and easy to use. While all your old favourite resources are still available, the new schemes of learning offer more structured support to work collaboratively, build a common language when it comes to employability skills, and bring curriculum coherence.
We were inspired by the practice we saw in school and will continue to put educators’ feedback at the heart of the LifeSkills programme. We hope the schemes of learning can be a valuable tool to help you further your commitment to employability skills - and look forward to hearing how you get on.
The schemes of learning for financial education and employability skills are now available to use on our hub, for ages 5-11, 11-14, 14-16 and 16-19.
