30th January 2015 6:00
By Blue Tutors
It was recently announced that a new campaign has been launched by a group of employers and an economics research group to encourage the government to prioritise training in so called ‘soft skills’. These skills include communication, team work, friendliness and general social graces which make people easier to work with. The campaigners are concerned that these skills are not being fostered, and that businesses could lose millions without attention being paid to the basic skills which keep businesses running smoothly. But whilst the campaign has asked for more attention to be paid to these skills, there have been few suggestions as to how we might teach these skills. What can private tutors contribute to this?
I have never seen a request for a tutor to help with soft skills, just as these are not generally taught in schools. Rather, it is assumed by the government, teachers and parents that soft skills will be passed on at school through a “hidden curriculum”, and do not need to be explicitly addressed. To a certain extent, this is true. Students learn to be polite to teachers and one another or risk detention, they learn to wait their turn and are sometimes asked to work in teams at school. However, especially with the removal of speaking and listening skills from the English curriculum, businesses fear that schools are becoming poorer at fostering these skills. In order to pick up the slack, tutors should observe all their student’s skills including both academic and general when assessing new students.
This means not only ascertaining a student’s ability at the subject being taught, but also getting an idea of how advanced their communication and general social skills are, and working on any deficits. Sometimes, tutors may find that these areas need the most work, rather than the academic side they were employed to improve. And of course, deficits in academic understanding may be related to deficits in soft skills. There is sometimes a direct link, for example poor emotional understanding and communication skills will make a nuanced response to literature more challenging. But there are also indirect factors too. For example, students with poor communication skills and behavioural problems may well fall behind at school due to being labelled as problem students by teachers. For this reason, it is extremely important that tutors consider the value of “soft skills” when teaching their students, in addition to focussing on academic skills alone.