Making room to grow: developing soft skills in the primary curriculum

Where did you learn how to solve problems effectively? To communicate a point? Or to try again after failure?

The answer may not be in a classroom. It may be on the playground, building dens, or by negotiating the rules of street games!

Thinking skills are more important than ever, but many children spend less time in the practical, unstructured environments that develop them.

According to the Ofcom report summary, 'Media use and attitudes', (link), 'YouTube and SnapChat lead the way when it comes to screen time. Across 8 - 14s, children spend about 48 minutes a day on YouTube and 45 minutes on Snapchat.' The full report, 'Online Nation' (link) stated, '8 - 14 year olds spent 2 hours 59 minutes per day online' and 'as the child age increases, so too does the amount of time they spend online.'

Save the Children (link) reported that 'Only one in four children play out regularly on their street compared to their grandparents generation where almost three-quarters said they played outside a few times a week.'

Helen Dodd, Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Exeter explained, (link)

"To have just 27% of children playing outside compared to 80% in the past represents a huge change to the nature of childhood. It's logical to expect this to have consequences for young people's development. As a society, we're not taking this seriously enough."

Through unstructured play, children develop skills like problem solving, imagination, resilience, communication and confidence

Identifying and teaching soft skills

I have written about the value of metacognition. I have also examined how different countries are ensuring that students remain active and critical thinkers, as AI tools become available.

In order to evaluate and ensure children's thinking and other soft skills, we must first be clear about the exact skills we require.

In 2012, Margaret Hilton and James Pellegrino, working for the National Research Council in the United States, led a committee to define what had been vaguely called "21st-century skills" or "soft skills." (link) They looked at decades of psychological and educational research and realized that human competencies generally fall into three categories:

• Cognitive skills: Problem-solving, processing information, and thinking critically.

• Interpersonal, or social skills: Communicating, collaborating, and reading relationships.

• Intrapersonal skills: Managing emotions, stress, behaviours, and goals.

At the moment, many schools incorporate the teaching of these soft skills into traditional subjects across the curriculum.

Resilience is developed in PE, discussed in PSHE schemes, and practised through activities like redrafting writing and debugging code.

Spoken communication is taught as part of English and Drama, gaining even more traction after oracy was highlighted in the UK Curriculum and Assessment Review as one of the "five areas of applied knowledge" needing more attention.

Problem-solving is taught through mathematical reasoning, computational thinking, and scientific enquiry.

Many schools do an incredible job at teaching and developing the soft skills that children need, balancing these with the knowledge and study skills needed to succeed academically.

But as childhood is changing, is it time for a more systematic approach to teaching and assessing these skills,? How can this be achieved without adding to teachers' workload and an already burgeoning curriculum?

Mapping the essential skills

If we are to build a systematic approach, we cannot rely on a vague definition of 'soft skills'. We need to be clear about the categories of skills we expect young people to develop. This will enable us to plan activities to develop these skills and to make informed judgments as to whether children are developing as they should be.

Using the National Research Council's framework, a comprehensive primary roadmap for these skills would encompass:

• Cognitive skills (How we think): These would include critical thinking (the ability to question information), research, planning, effective problem solving, learning agency (fostering learners who take ownership of their learning), metacognition (thinking strategies), learning (knowing and using effective strategies for recall), digital literacy (understanding and using technology)

• Interpersonal skills (How we relate): This moves beyond mere talking to oracy and discussion, active listening, leadership, teamwork and empathy and citizenship

• Intrapersonal skills (How we manage): This includes curiosity, resilience, organisation, reflection and self-care

What does progression look like?

A systematic approach requires us to look at these skills not as inherent personality traits, but as skills that can be developed sequentially. Just as we have clear progression frameworks for writing or addition, we need a clear progression framework for human competencies.

For example, resilience in Reception might look like a child buttoning up their coat against a struggle. In Year 6, resilience might be a child trying the same piece of writing, calculation or design problem several times independently until they succeed.

By breaking these skills down into developmental milestones, teachers can track progress without drowning in extra paperwork.

Below, I have provided example milestones for some of the skills listed above:

Cognitive skill: Problem solving

Year	Milestone
Reception	Trial, error and self regulation Tries a physical solution to a problem (i.e. fitting a jigsaw piece in a puzzle) and if it fails, tries a different solution rather than giving up
1	Simple verbalisation Verbally identifies what the problem is and suggests at least two different ways to solve it before taking action
2	Goal-directed selection Chooses a specific tool or strategy based on the nature of the problem and explains why they chose it
3	Decomposition Breaks a larger problem down into smaller, manageable parts and tackles them one at a time
4	Step-by-step sequencing and monitoring Plans a multi-step solution ahead of time and actively checks if the plan is working midway through the task
5	Evaluating and pattern recognition Recognises patterns within a problem and similarities between a current problem and previous problems
6	Critical tool evaluation and output verification Evaluates the best method to solve a problem (independent though v asking a peer, v asking a digital/AI tool) and actively verifies the output

Interpersonal skill: Active listening

Year	Milestone
Reception	Whole-body focus and basic recall Demonstrates active listening through body language (looking at the speaker) and can repeat the last phrase or instruction spoken
1	Conversational turn-taking and questioning Listens to a story without interrupting and generates a single question that directly connects to what has just been said
2	Non-verbal cues and basic clarification Listens to multi-step instructions and can rephrase them back to a peer or teacher to verify understanding before starting work
3	Active summarisation Listens to a short presentation or explanation and can accurately extract and record 2-3 pieces of factual information from the spoken audio alone
4	Collaborative idea building Listens to a peer explain a point of view during a discussion activity and can clearly summarise the peer's argument before presenting their own counter point
5	Perspective tracking and respectful dissent Listens to a multi-person discussion or audio track and can accurately identify the emotional tone, underlying motives and different viewpoints of the speakers
6	Critical auditory evaluation and register-shifting Critically analyses a spoken argument, lecture or audio clip to actively identify logical flaws, unbacked assertions or potential bias

Intrapersonal skill: Curiosity

Year	Milestone
Reception	Multi-sensory investigation Instinctively explores new objects, spaces or ideas using multiple senses and openly asks "Why" or "How" questions when encountering something familiar. Primary focus: Instinctive exploration
1	Question formulation ("What if...?") Moves beyond simple "Why" to ask open ended "What would happen if..." questions about a topic, showing a desire to test boundaries. Primary focus: Hypothesising
2	Directed information gathering Identifies a specific topic they want to know more about and actively seeks out an immediate resource to find the answer. Primary focus: Intentional curiosity
3	Gap identification Recognises when information is missing from a text or presentation and asks targeted, specific questions to fill in that specific knowledge gap Primary focus: Critical curiosity
4	Multi-source investigation When a topic sparks interest, independently seeks out more than one source of information (e.g. comparing a book with an educational video) to explore it further. Primary focus: Independent exploration
5	Sustained inquiry and inter-subject links Pursues an avenue of inquiry independently over several days, connecting to a curious spark in one subject (e.g. History) to another (e.g. Science or Art) Primary focus: Sustained, autonomous inquiry
6	Strategic iteration including use of technology Uses curiosity to drive advances inquiry, intentionally designs, tests and iterates complex questions or digital searches to unearth deep, nuanced information rather than accepting surface-level answers Primary focus: Strategic inquiry

Putting this into practice: infused skills vs isolated subject

How do we include these milestones into school provision, without significantly increasing the workload of teachers and adding content to a curriculum that is already full?

Broadly, schools would have a choice of two models, each with its own benefits and hurdles.

Option 1 - Infused skills. When skills like the ones above are included as goals in existing lessons, those skills become regularly practised and familiar. By ensuring that children have opportunities to develop their discussion, listening, problem solving and curiosity in lessons like Maths, existing planning and timetables can be modified, not rewritten. The downside of this approach is that when skills are embedded across subjects, they can end up being assessed nowhere, making it hard to know if children are progressing.

Option 2 - Isolated subject. Creating a dedicated subject called 'Soft skills', or 'Personal skills' would ensure regular and dedicated time given to activities that developed the above, essential skills. Assessment would become systematic and children would see the significance of these skills by being given dedicated time to work on them. The downsides would be taking curriculum time from elsewhere, and a risk that these skills become isolated in this new subject, instead of practised all the time.

The Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) refers to teaching of soft skills as 'Social and Emotional Learning' (SEL). (link) These are competencies that ensure success in school and later life.

The EEF website states,

"'Social and emotional skills are essential for children's development - they support effective learning and are linked to positive outcomes in later life."

The EEF SEL framework lists five competencies which form the basis of children's development of these skills. These are:

• Self-awareness

• Self-regulation

• Social awareness

• Relationship skills

• Responsible decision making

The EEF webpage, 'Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools' (link) contains a wealth of useful materials, guidance, frameworks and case studies to help schools ensure that children develop these necessary skills.

The case studies are particularly useful and interesting, showing how schools have approached the dilemma of adding more content to the school curriculum. The case study about Billesley Primary School stated,

"We set about teaching SEL strategies discretely at the start of every lesson, by presenting the children with an engaging, low risk question that was unrelated to the learning."

This approach seems like a good middle ground between completely redesigning lessons to infuse soft skills, and teaching soft skills in a standalone subject.

Conclusion: recognising change and adapting

Soft skills are the foundation for success, both academically and personally. Children who listen effectively, verbalise their ideas, solve problems, are creative and show resilience are far more likely to succeed at school than children who have not developed these skills.

Schools must be vigilant and recognise ways that the world is changing. All screentime is not equal, use of digital technology can provide incredible creative opportunities and help children overcome barriers. Screen use can also take time away from the types of activities, like playing outside, exploring nature, problem solving and spoken communication which develop the skills that children need.

In this blog post, I wrote about how different countries are addressing the use of AI by pupils in education. While the approaches differed, they were unified by consideration of the importance of preserving children's thinking and avoiding cognitive offload.

In order to effectively establish what children's thinking and other skills should look like, we need to be clear about the expectations for different year groups. We can then say whether digital tools like AI are contributing or detracting from these.

We don't necessarily need to further crowd the curriculum or take away from the knowledge taught in other subjects. Greg Ashman said, "Knowledge is what we think with". I love this quote because it speaks both about the value of knowledge, but also about the importance of using it. As we prepare children for a world where information is increasingly readily available, it will be the harmony of their soft skills and their knowledge that determines their success.