This Scottish Careers Week, Jane Dailly, National Grants Manager at YouthLink Scotland, highlights youth work’s role in supporting young people’s skills development and enabling them to recognise the progress they are making.
“Learners should be supported to self-reflect on the skills and attributes they have developed. This will be essential in preparing for transition to employment, volunteering or to further or higher education.” – It’s Our Future, Independent Review of Qualifications and Assessment
Skills development is a continuous work in progress – for all of us, and usually over a whole lifetime. We build a sense of self efficacy when we build an understanding of our strengths, identify the skills we want to improve and notice what helps us hone these over time.
Young people in youth work settings tell us they really value opportunities to think and talk about their skills development, gathering insights and confidence that will help to prepare them for their future. They also say they don’t get enough of these opportunities in school. They notice that working alongside youth workers to plan their learning and track their progress using the National Youth Work Outcomes and Skills Framework helps them to feel more confident to talk about their strengths and identify their next steps:
“Having the framework and the descriptions of different skills was really helpful. It helped me realise that we all have a different idea of what, for example ‘confidence’ is. It was good to think about the different bits of each skill and that what matters changes at different times.”
“It has helped me see what I have done and why it is important to me. It will help me explain why I was good in my volunteering and what skills I have because of it.”
“I feel that I can talk about skills better now and it means when I apply for a job, I can share what I am good at more clearly.”
This Scottish Careers Week, we are highlighting the role that youth work plays in not only supporting young people’s skills development, but enabling them to plan and recognise the progress they are making, so that they feel a greater sense of agency as learners – and as employees of the future.
Co-designed by the youth work sector and young people over several years, the National Youth Work Outcomes and Skills Framework integrates:
Critically, the framework allows youth workers and young people to track individual progress in skills development, recognising and valuing individual starting points; individual journeys, and small changes that wouldn’t be captured by standardised approaches but that are significant to the young person involved.
Young people are clear why it is important for them to have time and support to understand the language of skills and be supported to reflect on their individual skills journey.
“It helped me realise what I have achieved. Before I would have just got involved in a group and not really thought about what skills I am getting out of it. Now I think about how I have improved in my communication and organisation,”
“I liked to compare where I was before with my skills and where I am now, it helps me speak about them more.”
“I liked that we kept doing this – it helped me feel more confident to talk about what I was getting better at.”
“It helps you see clearer what you are good at.”
“All pathways which support a positive destination for an individual have equal merit and should have equal status and esteem within the system and society.” – Fit for the Future: developing a post-school learning system to fuel economic transformation
Youth work is a person-centred, informal and individualised approach to learning and skills development and is a critical part of the wider education and learning ecosystem, but the difference it makes is not always amenable to standardised approaches to measurement.
Historically, this has resulted in important and often life-changing progress that young people make through their involvement in youth work being under-reported, under-recognised and under-valued.
It’s clear, despite this, that young people value the opportunities they have to develop skills through youth work. In the recent National Discussion in Scottish education, young people emphasised the value of building skills through youth work and having these recognised. Young people felt that their skills, qualities, experiences and achievements through youth work were either more important or just as important as their achievements in formal settings (82%). 88% said their skills and achievements through youth work should be recorded and acknowledged alongside formal qualifications and progress through school.
Over the last year, YouthLink Scotland has been supported by The Robertson Trust Education Pathways fund which focuses on improving educational outcomes for young who face barriers to participation, with a specific focus on poverty and trauma.
Three-year funding for our #EducationNeedsYouthWork project is supporting the youth work sector to further embed the use of the National Youth Work Outcomes and Skills Framework in practice and design a digital platform to track skills development using a genuinely young person-centred approach. Most importantly, the work is enabling marginalised young people to reflect on and articulate the skills they are developing through participation in youth work so that they can influence and shape their own educational experiences.
Over time, our hope is that this work will inform and national policy and practice, addressing the need to better recognise, record and value young people’s skills development, wherever it happens.