In 2020, Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s Youth Taskforce identified a need for more relevant school curriculums that better prepare young people for the future. Working closely with the GMCA Careers Hub, The Edge Foundation and Ashoka stepped in to help. Initially, this involved asking some key questions: What does the future skills landscape look like? How can headteachers build effective strategies to deliver these skills? And how can we empower young people to access equal opportunities, regardless of their background?
Together, we devised the New Capabilities for a New World Programme. Launched in January 2022 and lasting 12 months, this pilot secondary headteacher leadership development programme aims to help school leaders engage strategically with long-term planning. It provides them with the space and support they need to step back, consider how the world is changing and how they can usefully respond to that. It consists of 12 online / face to face workshops and a series of Action Learning Sets.
Going deeper with the Gatsby benchmarks
Over the past decade, the Gatsby benchmarks have provided schools with an invaluable careers framework to build upon. They provide a framework within which school leaders can create and innovate in order to take employer engagement to a deeper level. The New Capabilities Programme invites leaders to create a culture of listening that draws out the articulated passions, interests and needs of young people so these can be integrated into the curriculum.
Life as a school leader is like riding two horses simultaneously. One satisfying statutory obligations and the other doing what you feel is right for the long term success of your students. New Capabilities invites leaders to widen their definition of success and build learning experiences into their curriculum that attend to the relationships young people need to be successful in the real world. The programme is grounded in research from the US that suggests that it is not just ‘what you know’ but also ‘who you know’ that determines future life chances. Responding to what young people need in this way can unlock their true potential. This makes for exemplary careers education and personal development provision.
A focus on future skills
While the programme incorporates workshops, it’s much more than that. It’s also a collaborative community of practice. By exploring strategy, headteachers can introduce the new, long term capabilities that young people need into school development planning. Already, participants have visited each other’s schools and have come together to develop fresh future skills strategies, learning from and supporting each other along the way.
By horizon scanning for international best practice, school leaders are learning first hand what works in real world learning, future readiness and personal development and careers education. As leaders, it also encourages them to reflect on their own practice and develop the personal leadership capacities and cultures necessary for new future skills strategies to take root.
The initiative also includes a leadership development programme for young people, led by an inspiring young Ashoka colleague, Jaiden Corfield. His role is to help students in the pilot schools explore their own leadership journeys. By elevating youth voice, the programme practices what it preaches, resulting in strategies with input from both headteachers and young people themselves.
Addressing social inequity
Another important driver of the programme is social inequality. The levelling up agenda has stalled in this respect, largely because it’s so focused on disadvantaged students’ attainment. Even pre-Covid, we were spending £2.5bn a year on pupil premium with negligible impact on social mobility. Since measures of disadvantage are constantly changing and attainment gaps tend to swing against the economic cycle, academics and policy makers find it hard to evaluate impact.
New Capabilities takes a different approach to social inequity. Widening the lens beyond attainment measures to focus on the skills and capabilities that young people actually need to break through glass ceilings of disadvantage. In devising the programme, we’ve settled on some key mechanisms to support this. These include building capacities and cultures for changemaking and deepening developmental relationships within school to enable us to see and listen to the aspirations of young people and give them agency to effect change.
Crucially, the programme also focuses on social capital. Only by unlocking the latent resources that exist in professional and personal networks can young people get where they need to be. New evidence is piling up to support this. The programme introduces the language and understanding school leaders need to build social capital directly into their strategies (through initiatives like real-world and community-connected learning) giving young people equal access to the opportunities they need.
The perfect partnership
Each partner on the programme brings something unique. Edge has developed the research base and practice for project-based, real-world and community-connected learning. Ashoka focuses on the changemaker mindsets and skills that support this practice. The Careers & Enterprise Company, meanwhile, have been a key partner, helping ensure the design and development of the programme supports rigorous evaluation. This is vital if we’re to prove the programme’s worth and roll it out to more schools across Greater Manchester and, hopefully, beyond - contributing to the Careers Hubs model of best practice in careers education.
While it’s still early days for New Capabilities, I have high hopes. By taking a ground-up approach that few have dared to try, I think it could be the key to unlocking many of the problems that school leaders face in making education relevant for the 21st century.
Shaun McInerney is Programme Lead for the New Capabilities Programme and Senior Project Coordinator for Changemaker Education working jointly for the Edge Foundation and Ashoka UK. The pilot is funded by the Careers and Enterprise Company in partnership with Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s Careers Hub.
