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International perspectives on how education offers solutions to tackle skills
mismatches and shortages
Speech to 5th International Conference on Employer Engagement & Training, London, UK, July 2018
Bill Lucas
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What’s the point of school? To create students who are ready for work? To prepare students for
university or college? To develop morally good people? To teach young people knowledge and skills?
To cultivate lifelong learners? Some blend of all of these? Ever since schools were invented there
have been debates about the degree to which the role of education is to be the supply side of the
skills that employers want or something else. All too easily it can become a Punch and Judy show in
which the worlds of academia and business vie with each other for supremacy.
But it need not be like this. For in the past few decades we have become much clearer about which
skills are most important for employability and, excitingly, they bear a remarkable resemblance to
what we also know to be the skills or habits of mind of good learners. Countries across the world are
beginning to catch up with this news and reframing their education systems to focus on the
development of young peoples’ capabilities to stand them in good stead for university, for
employment and for a lifetime of learning.
In the middle ages it was obvious whether you were essentially one of the privileged few taking an
academic course through university - the Trivium and the Quadrivium - or undertaking an
apprenticeship leading to a trade. The two pathways were very clearly different, one academic the
other vocational. By the nineteenth century, fuelled in part by the burgeoning number of grammar
schools, it had become common to use a shorthand description of an academic curriculum as the 3
Rs of reading, arithmetic and writing. Exactly when this mnemonic developed is debatable but, as Sir
Christopher Frayling reminds us, it was, in any case an educational sleight of hand:
‘The original meaning of [the 3Rs] was completely different in Regency times, at the beginning
of the 19th century. The three Rs were reading, wroughting and arithmetic - in other words,
literacy, making things and numeracy…And then in the era of Mr Gradgrind and the Great
Exhibition of the 1850s, the wroughting got dropped in favour of writing.’
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By removing wroughting the curriculum lost a third of itself, replacing something practical with
something academic. It is from this period that, arguably, the fruitless academic versus vocational
debate about school dates, with the 3Rs becoming synonymous with scholarship and the grammar
school curriculum moving away from any connection with the workplace.
Skills for employability
Of course young people need something broader than the 3Rs, however defined, to be successfully
employable. In 2009, with Guy Claxton, I undertook a review for the National Endowment for
Education, Science, Technology and the Arts
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. We found twenty-four different frameworks in use
across the world which sought to expand the curriculum of schools in a direction which suggested an
interest in both employability and lifelong learning. We termed them ‘wider skills’. In the following
year a similar review
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was published in the USA by Chris Dede in which the by now ubiquitous phrase
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bill.lucas@winchester.ac.uk - Professor Bill Lucas, Centre for Real-World Learning, University of Winchester, UK
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‘twenty-first century skills’ was used. In recent years a number of organisations have undertaken
similar reviews, of which the Asia Society
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and UNESCO
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are just two examples.
In fact employers’ organisations are increasingly clear about the kinds of wider skills they want from
schools. In the UK the Confederation for British Industry (CBI) has been running a campaign to
promote the characteristics, values and habits it thinks desirable. On their wish-list, these are
clustered around being determined, optimistic and emotionally intelligent - see Figure 1.
Figure 1 – The CBI’s characteristics, values and habits
The World Economic Forum
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has gone a stage further separating out the kinds of characteristics the
CBI describes into foundational literacies, competencies and character qualities.
Figure 2 – World Economic Forum, 2015
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Meanwhile thinking has moved on with a growing evidence base for which capabilities or
characteristics add most value to society. Economically speaking James Heckman and Tim Kautz
(2013) have shown, see Figure 3, that certain capabilities matter more than others
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:
Figure 3 - Heckman and Kautz, skills improving cognition and character
In educational terms Leslie Gutman and Ingrid Schoon (2013) suggest a very similar list of desirable
non-cognitive skills for young people, Figure 4:
Figure 4 – Gutman and Schoon, desirable non-cognitive skills for young people
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In a review we carried out at the Centre for Real-World Learning (Lucas and Hanson, 2015), we
sought to bring together research into the area of character development with research into
employability. We concluded that there are a set of useful habits of mind, see Figure 5, along with a
number of transferable skills which together make up what it is to be employable
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:
Figure 5 – Lucas and Hanson, employability habits of mind and transferable skills
The use of the term twenty-first century skills
In the last two decades it has become common for educators concerned to connect the worlds of
education and work more effectively to use the expression ‘twenty-first century skills’. The term at
the same time also suggests that we are in a paradigm shift, what some commentators call the
fourth industrial revolution, as we move from one century to the next.
For the first few years of the millennium I found the idea of twenty-first century skills a helpful
marker of a need for change. More recently I have come to see this phrase as increasingly unhelpful.
There are a number of reasons for this. It is unbelievable that one set of skills will be the same for a
whole century. If we cannot specify which skills matter, we are just being vague. The use of twenty-
first century skills can all too easily sound evangelical implying that ‘traditional’ knowledge no longer
matters. An extreme version of this position is that Google is the answer to everything and schools
no longer need to teach knowledge. Perhaps most importantly I am dissatisfied with the word ‘skills’
which does not adequately describe what I see employers saying that they need. More precisely
indicative of meaning than skills for me are the following - capabilities, dispositions, attributes,
competencies and habits of mind.
In reaching this point of view I am going with a global trend in education. For where once national
documents focused on knowledge and skills, increasingly education ministries are including
something broader than these such as capabilities or competencies. In the Breadth of Skills project
being coordinated by the Brookings Institution data from 102 countries
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were analysed. Capabilities
(though not necessarily named as such) are mentioned by 76 countries somewhere in their
educational documents, with 36 countries referring to them in their vision or mission statements and
51 in their curriculum documents. Additionally 11 countries seek to describe their progression across
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age groups and subjects. At a state level Ontario in Canada has particularly well-developed thinking
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about the development of competencies.
If one were to sum up the core attribute or capability which employers increasingly need it is the
higher-order problem-solving suggested by Seymour Papert in 1998:
We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which
they were not specifically prepared.
To be able to act in this way requires knowledge, skill and capability, along with the presence of
mind to know how to apply or transfer what was learned in other contexts to the situation in hand.
A global reframing of education as capabilities
When considering potential skills mismatches between the outputs from school and the needs of
employers it is traditional to use a sector-focused lens and describe specific areas where there are
shortages. Identifying and then seeking to deal with a lack of skills in STEM is a good example of this
approach across the world.
But for the last decade the Centre for Real-World Learning has sought to take a different approach.
Believing that the perspective of skills is too narrow, we have begun systematically to reframe
education in terms of a set of expansive habits of mind or dispositions which better allow the worlds
of education and employment to talk to each other and which, at the same time, more realistically
describe the kinds of learning we believe schools and colleges need to provide.
With support from the Edge Foundation we started with a model of real-world learning
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, Figure 6:
Figure 6 – Centre for Real-World Learning’s model of real world learning
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In this model the ‘inner’ ring contains the tools of the effective learner, arranged into four
compartments. These we refer to as the learner’s habits of mind. The ‘outer’ ring comprises six more
general dispositions or frames of mind that support and direct the learner’s activities. In the centre,
the ‘bull’s eye’, is the learner’s presence of mind: the quality of mind that enables learners to mesh
the resources they bring with the demands and opportunities of the present situation. Together, the
four habits of mind, six frames of mind, and presence of mind, add up to a learner’s real-world
intelligence: their ability to engage effectively with the real-life challenges and opportunities which
they encounter.
We have also explored two key aspects of the educational experience strongly wanted by employers
– engineering and creativity. With the Royal Academy of Engineering we have worked with engineers
and educators to understand the ways in which engineers think and developed a model of six
engineering habits of mind
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, Figure 7.
Figure 7 – Centre for Real-World Learning’s engineering habits of mind
By focusing on systems-thinking, adapting, problem-finding, creative problem-solving, visualising and
improving engineers and their employers have told us that we get to the heart of engineering much
more effectively than describing it in terms of, for example, physics, chemistry, design and maths. By
focusing on the engineering habits there are other benefits too. The habits are gender neutral where
physics and maths are not (being more attractive to boys than girls). And the names of the habits
bring with them suggestions as to how they might be taught which might help to cultivate them in
students.
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Creativity is similar in many ways to engineering in that it spans many different subject disciplines.
Here our model, developed after a series of field trials supported by Creativity, Culture and
Education, has been very widely used across the world and was influential in persuading the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that creative thinking should be
the focus of the new Programme for International Assessment (PISA) innovative domain test in
2012
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.
Figure 8 – Centre for Real-World Learning’s five dimensional model of creative thinking
This model has been shared by the OECD
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and used to underpin a guide to teaching creative
thinking
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. It has been used to frame the curriculum of secondary schools such as Thomas Tallis
school in London and Rooty Hill High School in Sydney.
Recently the OECD offered a model of education which seeks to show the relationships between
knowledge, skills, attitudes and values with competencies (their word for capabilities)
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, Figure 9:
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The paper’s author is co-chair of the PISA 2021 Creative thinking strategic advisory group
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Figure 9 - The Future of Education and Skills: OECD Education 2030 Framework
Knowledge, skills, attitudes and values are seen as interconnected and interacting to produce
competencies (or capabilities) in action.
There is, arguably, one more conceptual stage beyond capabilities which suggests that the outcome
of schooling is not only about being capable but also about routinely deploying capabilities in a range
of real-world settings, something I have developed through work with schools in Australia
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. Figure
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Figure 10 - From Knowledge and Skills to Dispositions via Capabilities (Lucas, 2017)
Dispositions and habits, I suggest, are an even stronger forms of capabilities. A young person who is
disposed routinely to persevere in a variety of contexts is much more likely to succeed than one who
has some good persevering techniques but frequently fails to apply these! We know from the earlier
descriptions of what matters to employers in this paper, that that the development of certain
capabilities and dispositions is important. We equally know that such employability habits and
transferable skills require deep learning if they are to be developed. The USA National Research
Council defines deeper learning as:
The process through which an individual becomes capable of taking what was learned in one
situation and applying it to new situations (i.e. transfer)….the product of deeper learning is
transferable knowledge, including content knowledge of how, why and when to apply this
knowledge to answer questions and solve problems.
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Across the world now national education departments are starting to take the opportunity to
reframe the way they present the curriculum in ways which are beginning to narrow the gap
between school and work.
Australia is a good example of a country that has made significant progress in reframing education.
Figure 11 shows the interplay between learning areas (subjects), cross-curricular priorities and
general capabilities. Of particular interest in this last category are the critical and creative thinking,
personal and social, intercultural and ethical capabilities.
Figure 11 – The Australian curriculum
To ensure that education delivers what employers want and what further and higher education
needs, national systems will need to think beyond the language of skills, especially those spuriously
associated with the whole of the twentieth century. Instead systems need to refocus their curricula
to prepare young people better for the real world of complex personal and working lives by
purposefully developing a set of capabilities which are widely recognised as being important. These
capabilities will be rooted in a range of subject disciplines and underpinned by a range of different
skills. Those who run schools and those who run enterprises, whether for or not for profit,
necessarily have different values and needs. But by explicitly framing certain key capabilities as
central to education it will increasingly be easier for the world of education and employment to find
common cause.
Bill Lucas is Professor of Learning and Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the
University of Winchester in the UK. Bill is co-chair of the PISA 2021 Test of Creative Thinking
strategic advisory group, a member of the LEGO Foundation’s advisory board and an international
adviser to the Mitchell Institute in Australia. This paper contains some early thinking for a more
extended report to be published in Melbourne later in 2018.
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References
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Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Arts, interviewed in The Guardian 29 June
2004
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https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/wider_skills_for_learning_report.pdf
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Dede, C (2010) Comparing frameworks for 21st century skills. In Bellanca, J & Brandt, R (Eds.). 21st
Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press
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https://asiasociety.org/files/21st-century-competencies-east-asian-education-systems.pdf p5
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http://www.unevoc.unesco.org/go.php?q=TVETipedia+Glossary+A-Z&id=577
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Boston Consulting Group (2015) New Vision for Education. World Economic Forum
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Heckman J and Kautz T (2013) Fostering and measuring skills interventions that improve character
and cognition. Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor. IZA Discussion Paper, No. 7750.
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Lucas, B and Hanson, J (2016) Learning to be Employable: practical lessons from research into
character. London: City & Guilds
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https://www.brookings.edu/research/visualizing-the-breadth-of-skills-movement-across-
education-systems/
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http://www.edugains.ca/resources21CL/About21stCentury/21CL_21stCenturyCompetencies.pdf
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Claxton, G, Lucas, B and Webster, R (2010), Bodies of Knowledge: How the Learning Sciences Could
Transform Practical and Vocational Education. London: Edge Foundation.
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Lucas, B, Hanson, J and Claxton, G(2014) Thinking Like an Engineer: Implications for the education
system. London: Royal Academy of Engineering
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Lucas, B and Claxton, G and Spencer, E (2013) Student Creativity in School: First steps towards new
forms of formative assessment. OECD Education Working Papers. 86: 1-46
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Lucas, B and Spencer, E (2017) Teaching Creative Thinking: Developing learners who generate
ideas and can think critically, Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing Ltd
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https://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/Global-competency-for-an-inclusive-world.pdf
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Presentation by Bill Lucas to schools in Melbourne, March 2017
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National Research Council. 2012. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge
and Skills in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
