Heads & Tales - Tom Ravenscroft
Episode 8 and we are thrilled to welcome Tom Ravenscroft - Founder & CEO of Skills Builder Partnership.
The Skills Builder Partnership brings together more than 550 schools and colleges, 130 employers and 100 other skills-building organisations around a common language and approach to building essential skills.
Tom was the 2009 UK Entrepreneurship Teacher of the Year. He has served as a non-executive director of Teach First and has also been recognised as one of the UK’s leading social entrepreneurs by being elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2017. His first book, The Missing Piece was published in October 2017.
Do you have a mentor of your own?
Mentorship is so important, and I've been incredibly lucky along the way. I've had lots of people who were able to give me good advice, for example, when I was setting up Skills Builder, there was Brett Wigdortz who set up Teach First. He was somebody who was able to talk me through the practicalities and the angst that comes with setting up a social enterprise. More recently, someone like Julia Cleverdon has given me great guidance too.
Tell us about your own education and what brought you to the profession.
I always enjoyed learning. I think people who work in education tend to have either really loved school or to have found it awful and want to do it completely differently. I was very lucky with the school I had with a broader education which helped me build skills for life.
You started as a teacher in Hackney. What was it like?
I went to Oxford and studied Economics and Management but I wasn’t excited by the conventional career routes people took. One day I was chatting to a friend who'd started teaching and she was telling me horror stories of trying to engage teenage kids. I just thought it sounded like a terrific challenge and a big adventure.I plowed into it naively, going straight from my final exams into teacher training about two weeks later. I was teaching a full roster of classes from September.
Ofsted came in within a couple of months of starting and I was reassured by the senior teachers that the inspector wouldn't come into such a new teacher's classroom. The very first lesson of the inspection was with my most challenging year eleven group and I remember that one of the kids was chucking stuff around. Something bounced off the door and the split second later the door opened, and the inspector walked in. Had that been a second difference, that would have hit them squarely in the face. It would have been the end of my teaching career!
Overall, what struck me most was that the kids hadn't developed any of those broader skills: creativity, problem solving, leadership, teamwork, the ability to plan or to adapt. It just felt like they’d missed out on having what I would consider a complete education.
How did you come to set up the Skills Builder Partnership?
I started by designing a course to build those broader skills for my students, which we now call essential skills. Without them, they weren't going to thrive at college or university or in the workplace. I started sharing it with some other teachers and they also started seeing some good results for their students. I realised this was going to have more value and effect as a separate organisation.
You’ve had a huge impact on teachers but obviously had to leave the profession to set up your organisation. How should we retain teachers in schools?
I never left with the intention of leaving for good and I always thought I’d come back after a few years. There are so many challenges, however, not least is the increasingly myopic focus on whether you're a good teacher, which basically comes down to the grades your students get in your subject. I think sometimes there's less focus on skill development and there's more focus on just getting through the assessment process. We need to move away from that.
What do you think are two or three great qualities are that a teacher needs to have?
Firstly, being effective as a as a communicator because there's a lot of information that you're trying to convey as a teacher. It needs to be paired with the receptiveness to what is happening in the room – what is understood and what isn’t.
Secondly, as we’ve seen from the way teachers have used the Skills Builder Partnership, they can be so imaginative and creative too. They need the ability to be able to create and imagine games and strategies.
Finally, I think the most effective teachers are effective leaders. They bring the students they work with them and they help them to stay motivated and excited about the future and to realise their own potential as well.
You wrote a book, The Missing Piece. Tell us more about that.
I wrote The Missing Piece back in 2017 as I was sick to death of hearing about cognitive load theory! It didn’t resonate with my experience of teaching. I tried to be more critical around the consensus that knowledge was the only thing that mattered.
In the book, we also drew out some essential skills that students should learn and ways in which they could be taught.
What’s really going to move the needle on these changes?
After 14 years at Skills Builder – teachers still always have issues around the timetable availability and resource availability for these changes, especially if you only measure success as exam results. We need to ask: how can they (wider skills) be a core part of what the assessment framework looks like in England? We work in 10 other countries where Skills Builder is built into the national curriculum, it’s in teacher training and assessment, so I’m optimistic that it’s perfectly possible for this to happen particularly in England. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are moving further ahead of us, but we’ve got a lot to catch up on!
It shouldn’t rely on teachers being heroes to teach these skills. It should just be part of the incentive system, a normal part of good teaching.
What have been the biggest roadblocks to your progress?
One of the real tipping points for us was in 2017 by which point we’d grown to work with 60,000-70,000 students. However, we wanted it to be a part of every student’s experience. How could we take this beyond and scale? This was why we created the Partnership – so organisations could take and mould the framework and build it in different ways. This year we delivered 2.3 million opportunities to build essential skills. So it was that point of frustration that turned into a pivot in our approach.
What’s next for you?
We’ve demonstrated that it’s possible for every to build essential skills but it’s now about thinking in areas such as national education policy and how can we learn from best practice internationally where it’s being achieved more widely. Other countries have shown this type of approach is possible. That will undoubtedly keep me entertained me for the next 10 years!
How to: Peer Mentoring in your School
Thursday 20th April, 4.30pm, Online
Secondary Schools Lead Sally Kemp is hosting a free webinar on how to set up peer mentoring in your school.
Including:
• The key challenges we've learnt doing this with 1000s of students.
• The ways the programme meets Ofsted criteria on pupil personal development.
• The importance behind matching mentor with mentee to create lasting impact.