Trivium 21c ltd.

Pretty much every subject studied in school requires the teaching of knowledge and skills. It would be mad to set up the two areas in opposition. Yet it happens. Why? Because some people think that skills work in the following way (as the old story goes): rather than provide the starving villagers with some fish to eat, teach them how to fish. In other words teach them skills and they will be able to access all the knowledge they need, or if you know how to work TikTok you can find anything out that you need, you can always google if you’re old school. A counter argument goes that if you have enough knowledge then you will, say, naturally become creative. Both these arguments are nonsense.

I’ve obviously set this argument up in such a way as to make it easy to rebut both sides. A straw man, you might say. Of course knowing how to fish, prepare, cook and knowing about over-fishing, and how to ensure the environment continues to support good fish production etc. is important. It is also important to realise that, say, in an arts subject it is vital to teach pupils ‘how’ to create ‘art’ as well as teach the knowledge of the art form. You wouldn’t teach loads of the latter and just expect the former to ‘just’ arise in all cases by magic.

A problem occurs because ‘skills’ is often shorthand for a list of, so-called, ‘transferable’ skills. Often beginning with a letter C, these skills are listed variously in different publications including some of the following:

• Critical Thinking
• Creativity
• Collaboration
• Curiosity
• Communication
• Meta-cognition
• Self-management
• Etc…

The problem then arises what is meant by these words? How are they broken down into their component parts? What might those component parts be? What changes do you have to make to adapt your teaching to ensure you are teaching these (soft?) skills? In other words, guesswork, or, expensively bought in, consultants’ guesswork.

And just because you are creative in Music it does not mean you can transfer that to being creative in Geography. Just because you are good at collaboration in PE it does not mean you will collaborate well in Physics. Even looking at the England football team, just because you collaborate well in the Arsenal team doesn’t mean you will do so for England, and that is about transferring within the same domain!

You have to be taught explicitly, or coached… even when you can do these things well elsewhere. But then we get back to the vagueness around what each term means. In football, collaboration, means being in the right place at the right time and training to ensure this happens. Collaborating on an assembly line in a sausage factory looks different and requires different being in the right place at the right time. Arguably. In theatre, creativity involves the actor working physically in a way that suits the form and genre of the production – and this changes – . An operating theatre is an entirely different proposition.

So it’s ok to teach skills, in context, but not to impose skills as ill thought through desirable attributes that can be imposed upon pupils regardless of what they are meant to be learning just because a bureaucrat somewhere says so.