Are life skills taught in schools? 🛠️

Are life skills taught in schools? 🛠️ –

What we're covering..

Introduction 👋

Life skills are extremely important for navigating our world. 🗺️

But are schools teaching them?

From managing money to communicating effectively, these skills are essential for success in life.

In this article, we’ll look at whether schools are teaching life skills, the challenges they face, and how teachers and parents can help.

What are life skills? 🛠️

Life skills are the different skills and abilities that help us to navigate life. 🗺️

These are the types of skills you need to help you to navigate things like:

Looking after your money 💰
Relationships
Getting a home 🏠
Travelling
Making money and working 💼
Caring for a home
Looking after your health and wellbeing 🥦
Being a good person

Life skills go beyond the type of academic knowledge you might learn at school, and instead focus on your overall personal development, social interactions, and practical know-how for creating a happy and healthy life for yourself.

Are life skills taught in schools? 🏫

The short answer –

Sort of – the traditional curriculum teaches transferable skills that are useful, but often doesn’t teach them in the context of real-life scenarios. 🌍

There is a huge room for improvement in curriculums for life skills relating to things like:

independent living 🏡
financial literacy 💷
employability skills and career management 💼

Whether or not your school will teach these life skills, depends on a number of factors such as:

school funding/resourcing
what school leaders think is a priority for students

Skills that curriculums don’t teach comprehensively 👎

Studies and general feedback have found significant gaps in life skills areas such as:

Independent living 🏡: household maintenance, understanding household bills, meal planning and cooking, grocery shopping, basic home repairs, preparation for household emergencies, health and safety at home.
Financial literacy 💷: budgeting, saving, investing, managing debt, understanding credit scores, navigating taxes, retirement planning, insurance basics, understanding loans (e.g., student loans, mortgages), avoiding financial scams.
Career management 💼: workplace behaviours and skills, choosing career paths, networking, CV/resume writing, job searching techniques, interview skills, professional communication, time management in the workplace, conflict resolution at work, negotiation skills, adapting to workplace culture, continuous learning and skill development.

The Research 📊

Research has found things such as:

87% of British people don’t feel like they were adequately prepared for life as an adult — saying they weren’t taught the life skills they needed before leaving full-time education. (Metro News)
Half of young people do not feel prepared for the world of work. (CBI 2018)
60% of employers say that new graduates coming through the system are “unprepared for a commercial career”. (CBI research)
40% of employers state the biggest reason they cannot fill entry-level vacancies “isn’t a lack of people, it’s a lack of adequate skills”. (CBI research)
72% of young people said they wanted to learn more about money and finance in school with just 15% citing school as their main source of financial education. (London Institute of Finance and Banking 2021/22 Young Persons Money Index)
81% of young people said that they worry about money. (London Institute of Finance and Banking 2021/22 Young Persons Money Index)
According to The Independent, nearly half of parents don’t feel equipped to teach their children important life skills.
In Wales in 2019, the Welsh Youth Parliament created a comprehensive report to the government, campaigning to have life skills education prioritised for young people.

Transferable skills from academic subjects 🔀

It is common for students to disengage from school due to uncertainty of how lessons will help them in real life. 🤷‍♀️

For example, a student might complain that they’re unlikely to use “Pythagoras’ Theorem”, bunsen burners, or the biology of a leaf in real life. 🍃

Whilst a lot of people may not directly encounter these challenges, they teach transferable skills like problem solving, numeracy, and literacy. 🔀

Unfortunately, this way of teaching people new skills is quite abstract. 🥴

It is a lot easier for a student to appreciate the value of learning how solve real-world problems, like paying taxes! 💰

This makes life skills lessons an important tool for re-engaging students who have disengaged from education. Life skills education can make learning more relevant and engaging for students, providing a bridge between the classroom and the real world.

Factors that influence whether your school will teach life skills 👩‍🏫

Whether or not your school will teach life skills can depend on things like:

1. School funding 💷

As teaching life skills isn’t necessarily a mandatory part of the curriculum, this means that schools have to pay for life skills education from any spare budget or spare teacher resourcing they have.

The availability of funding can have a huge impact on a school’s ability to incorporate life skills education into its curriculum.

2. Leadership at schools 🏫

School leaders can have a huge influence on what is treated as a priority for their school. 🎯

Depending on what your school leaders think is a priority will decide how likely it is that life skills will be taught in your school.

3. Government policies 🏛️

Local government can decide priorities and funding for schools in their area. 🗺️

Whether or not your local government thinks that life skills is a priority for schools can decide if life skills will be taught in your school.

4. Teacher training 👩‍🏫

The level of training and expertise among teachers in areas related to life skills education can affect the extent to which these skills are taught in classrooms.

If teachers don’t feel comfortable teaching life skills, they are less likely to get taught in schools.

5. School assessments 🔍

Schools want to pass their inspections and assessments with flying colours, so the things that schools are inspected/assessed on, decides what they prioritise for students. 📝

As it stands, a lot of schools aren’t assessed or inspected on how comprehensively they teach life skills, which means that schools are less likely to prioritise teaching life skills.

6. Community support 🤝

Support from parents, community organisations, and local businesses can contribute to the implementation of life skills education initiatives within schools.

If the local community are keen for life skills to be taught, and offer schools support, then it’s more likely for schools to teach life skills.

7. Student needs and interests 👩‍🎓

The needs, interests, and backgrounds of students can influence whether or not life skills are taught to them.

If students are struggling with the main curriculum, or need help in other areas, then it’s less likely that life skills will get taught.

Challenges schools face 👎

One big problem is that currently there is no standard way to teach life skills, like there is for subjects like maths.

Also, schools have limited time and money, so they can’t always focus on life skills as much as they should.

Why don’t schools teach life skills? 12 reasons why your school might not teach them 👩‍🏫

The good news ✨

If you’re keen to see life skills taught more in schools, there’s good news! –

There are free resources! 🎉

More than ever, there are free resources available to help teach life skills.

The Grown-Up School provides 100+ completely free grown-up lessons and free worksheets to help learn life skills!

There is also support and resources available from places like:

Charities
The internet – you can learn so much from researching online!
Youtube videos
Podcasts
TV series
Local businesses
Motivational speakers
Banks – financial education programmes

More research 🕵️‍♀️

In addition to there being more resources available to learn life skills, there is also more research demonstrating the desire and need to learn them.

This includes studies such as:

Improving awareness 🔊

With more research in place about teaching life skills, becomes more awareness of their importance.

Teachers are more keen than ever for their students to learn life skills, and are finding new ways to incorporate them into their classrooms. 👩‍🏫

Increased flexibility for teachers✍️

In a lot of education systems teachers are being given more flexibility around what they teach.

This means that some teachers can start to write their own curriculum of learning for their students. 📝

Giving teachers more flexibility can help them to make sure that learning is:

relevant and useful for students 👍
tailored to the geographical area the students are living in 🧵
making use of opportunities for students in their local area 🗺️
more personalised for students and their ambitions 🪞

A lot of teachers believe that life skills should be taught in schools, and can use this flexibility to create more opportunities for students to learn life skills in their learning plans.

Conclusion 👍

So that’s it!

Are life skills taught in schools?

The short answer is sort of – the traditional curriculum teaches transferable skills that are useful, but often doesn’t teach them in the context of real-life scenarios. 🌍