Developing key skills: Effective enrichment in secondary schools
About This Event
This best practice webinar considered practical ideas for academic enrichment activities in secondary schools that develop key skills and effectively prepare students for higher education.
Hosted by SecEd in partnership with our friends at The Brilliant Club, our expert panel identified the skills that are most important for further and higher education and the modern workplace before discussing how enrichment activities and learning beyond the curriculum can teach and enhance these skills.
We considered skills including critical-thinking, independent learning, self-efficacy, oracy, and other so-called “soft skills” that are vital to student progression and outcomes.
The webinar considered how enrichment activities can target disadvantaged students, including Pupil Premium, and open opportunities.
We then drew on the experience and lessons learned from The Brilliant Club’s work with schools (the education charity works with almost 900 schools and 20,000 students a year).
The webinar also considered the forthcoming curriculum reforms. The Department for Education, in its response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, has confirmed it will be working “on the development of a new set of benchmarks, to set out the steps every school and college can take to provide every child with access to a strategically planned and ambitious enrichment offer”. Ofsted will also be taking account of these benchmarks once they have been developed.
As such, we discussed what we might expect from these benchmarks, the tenets of an effective enrichment programme, and what schools need to consider to ensure their offer to students is broad, balanced and ultimately effective.
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