This process follows a six stage approach and is structured similarly for all three skills. Before starting to work through this process it is vital that the school has agreed an appropriate leadership structure to ensure a full understanding of roles, responsibilities and accountability. This usually involves an individual from the school's leadership team overseeing all three skills and individual skills coordinators leading each area.
Strategic Skills Lead (SLT)
This person will be responsible for ensuring that the individual skills coordinators are fully supported to implement this strategy on a whole school basis. Whole school decisions such as timescales for implementation, timetabling professional learning and communication with staff will be lead by the skills lead.
Skill Leader
The skill leader will lead on one of the three cross-curricular skills. They will be responsible for managing the implementation of the strategy to develop their skill area. They will work closely with the strategic skills lead to discuss progress against the aims of the strategy and to identify any possible risks to the implementation process.
During the first stage, you will need to gather information about the current situation in your school to determine your current position. This process will identify any strengths and establish key areas for improvement.
During this stage you will identify what you’ll be aiming towards in terms of provision for learners within the specific skill area. You will now form your strategy to form the foundation for the next stages.
During this stage you will start to put your strategy into practice on a controlled scale. The purpose of this is to gain examples to drive whole school implementation during the later stages also to test your procedures and structures. Stage 3 will provide you with a proof of concept and will reassure you that strategy is achievable.
You have now tested your strategy on a small scale. Before you work towards implementing this strategy on a larger scale you have the opportunity to review and change the procedures and processes that support the implementation in response to your piloted implementation in stage 3.
You are now ready to move towards full implementation of your strategy. In order to achieve this you will need to scale up at a pace that will allow you to support departments and practitioners to successfully embed the strategy.
You are now implementing this strategy throughout the whole school. The quality and consistency of authentic and high quality experiences has increased substantially. The challenge at this point is to build on the momentum and look for more ways to develop.