The language used in education shapes policy, practice, and perceptions. Edge’s series asks, What's in a Word? and scrutinises the impact of the terminology we commonly employ.
Skill is such a little word, yet it carries a heavy (an impossible) weight. The fate of nations, enterprises, and individuals rests upon the acquisition of skills. The Ministers’ foreword to the recent English White paper on Post-16 Education and Skills opens in this way:
"Skills are at the heart of our plan to deliver the defining mission of this government – growth.....For students it means access to new ideas and experiences, the security of a skilled job, the chance to earn a good salary and to build a good life. And for our country it means the skilled workforce we need to build more homes, strengthen our national defences, ensure a clean energy future, improve health, and be part of creating the future."
The point of all education and training is, according to the White paper, to produce skills. Education as a distinct form of activity that educational institutions, students, and teachers engage in, when it is mentioned at all, is pressed into service of skills. Universities are now subsumed in the pursuit of skills (and schools? and early childhood education?), and not just further education colleges and institutions providing vocational education.
Policy has progressively narrowed the focus of education over the last 50 years away from broader conceptions of citizenship formation, personal development, and occupational preparation to the production of human capital. Human capital theory now underpins educational policy in almost every country in the world, and certainly in England. The premise of human capital theory, expounded by economist Gary Becker in the early 1960s, is that more and better education leads to more demand for skilled labour, and from there to higher productivity and wages. In the 1970s, human capital theory was largely descriptive, it was used to explain why individuals and enterprises invested in education. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became normative, education should be about jobs. In the 2000s, human capital theory has become prescriptive, education must be about jobs.
And as human capital theory has become the dominant, prescriptive approach to designating the purpose of education and how it should be structured and funded, the preoccupation with skill has grown. We have moved from generic and employability skills in vocational education, to graduate attributes in higher education, and now to core skills and 21st century skills in all sectors of education. The concept of skill has expanded over the decades from an initial focus on manual craft workers and those in technical occupations to now encompass all aspects of our life, including character qualities, which according to the World Economic Forum, include persistence, grit, adaptability, curiosity, leadership and cultural awareness.
Arguably however, Post-16 Education and Skills makes human capital theory look positively liberal and expansive. At least human capital theory focused on knowledge and skills for work, whereas Post-16 Education and Skills focuses almost exclusively on skill. It mentions the word ‘knowledge’ 24 times, and the word ‘skill’ or ‘skills’ 497 times (more on this a little later).
But what is skill? The US social scientist Charles Tilly in 1988 argued that ‘As a historical concept, skill is a thundercloud: solid and clearly bounded when seen from a distance, vaporous and full of shocks close up’. We have hard skills and soft skills, socio-emotional skills, aesthetic skills, core skills, technical skills (not to be confused with AI skills), employability skills, self-management skills, cognitive skills, behavioural skills, specialist skills, and, of course, 21st century skills. In its recently produced classification of skill from 2025, Skills England recognises two classes of skill: occupational skills and core skills. Core skills are generic, and ‘are fundamental abilities that contribute to the capability to carry out the tasks associated with a specific job’. In contrast, an ‘Occupational Skill is defined as a capability enabling the competent performance of an Occupational Task’.
Skills England’s classification of skill has a four tripartite structure. Level 1 consists of 22 skill domains. This is elaborated into 106 skill areas in level 2, which in turn is further elaborated into 606 skill groups in level 3, and from there, into 3343 occupational skills in level 4. At the bottom of the taxonomy (underpinning the taxonomy?) is 21,963 occupational tasks, which relate to 4926 knowledge concepts. This precision is breathtaking. Their report has a diagram with skills in the middle, which maps courses to knowledge, knowledge to tasks, tasks to jobs, and jobs to skills.
The end result is a bureaucratic dream – a tool which allows mapping of skills and the inputs that are needed to produce them, to a job market and jobs which are static enough at any point to allow such a mapping to take place.
There are many problems with this conception of skill. First, it assumes skills are discrete, can be enumerated, added up in different combinations and configurations, and moved to meet any needs of the labour market. Even though Skills England’s taxonomy has a hierarchy, the emphasis is on discrete tasks. Second, it relegates knowledge to a supporting role at best, and it ignores the fact that skilful performance requires knowledge of a particular domain – for example, the ‘problem solving skills’ in putting out a fire on an oil rig are completely different to those in dealing with a room full of two year old kids having a melt-down in an early childhood centre. Each requires entirely different knowledge to solve their problem. In tying knowledge to tasks, knowledge is considered as isolated facts tied to specific contexts, rather than as part of a disciplinary system of meaning. Students must be able to choose appropriate applications of knowledge in specific contexts, and for this, they need to be familiar with the discipline from which the knowledge comes, and its inferential relationships to other concepts within that disciplinary system of meaning.
Third, it leaves human beings out of the equation. Skills are considered independently of the bodies and minds of those who exercise skill. However, we teach people and not skills. The precondition for the exercise of skilful performance in one context is individuals with broader knowledge, skills and attributes. Focusing on specific skills tied to tasks and jobs misses the broader underlying capacity needed for skilful agents at work.
Fourth, and most important, it leaves the social context of skill. Skill is not just an individual attribute. Individuals exercise skill in social contexts in their occupation and at work. Treating skill as an individual attribute, and breaking it down to tasks at work, misses entirely the social contexts in which skill is exercised, the power relations at work, who is recognised as being skilled and who is not, and the social purpose of the occupation which gives it meaning.
Written by
Leesa Wheelahan, honorary research fellow at SKOPE in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, and Professor Emerita, William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the University of Toronto.
Next time: In a Valentine's special, Dr Kate Paradine considers what the role of ‘love’ could be in education.