Insights

Lifelong learning – learning beyond compulsory schooling – can be an important factor in enhancing an individual’s employability and personal development, as well as social inclusion and active citizenship. As part of Lifelong Learning Week, this article examines the connection between lifelong learning and careers guidance.

A child’s early years – between birth and age five – are fundamental to their development, laying a foundation for future learning, skills and behaviours. Early years educational provision is therefore hugely important, and play is at the heart of effective provision. Supporting play in early years settings is crucial: it improves children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional wellbeing and helps them to learn about the world and themselves, laying the groundwork for their future learning and development potential. In this commentary, we consider not only the importance of play, but what this means for early years practitioners and how these practitioners can best be supported through effective professional development.

The National Careers Service supports thousands of people each year, providing advice and guidance to help our customers make informed decisions about careers, courses and work.

Careers support interventions in England have long been designed and delivered separately for young people and adults, creating a siloed system. In January 2021, the government’s ‘Skills for jobs: lifelong learning for opportunity and growth’ paper highlighted that the careers landscape in the UK is ‘confusing, fragmented and unclear’. What could be the benefits of a more joined up approach? In this commentary, we discuss the opportunity to streamline provision of services and create a continuum of support across all ages.

The early years sector has faced multiple challenges in recent months, with disruption from the pandemic converging with staff shortages, increased safeguarding concerns, higher numbers of children identified with additional needs, and a new statutory framework to implement, as well as pressure to ensure businesses remained financially viable. Despite this – or perhaps as a result – there was demand from the sector for high quality professional development to give practitioners the tools to support children effectively. The ‘Building on Success’ programme has emerged as an effective response to this – well-designed and responsive to the needs of early years professionals.

One of the newest additions to Education Development Trust’s UK portfolio, the School-Led Tutoring Programme has trained, assessed and endorsed thousands of School-Led Tutors across the nation since its launch in November 2021. This work aligns directly with Education Development Trust’s overarching vision to transform lives by improving education and our decades’ long legacy of supporting pupils by providing them with enhanced opportunities to learn and thrive. We have been delighted to see the incredible progress made in the initial few months of the programme and we are heartened to know the important difference our work is making to pupils and educators who are working hard to overcome the significant challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The impact of our work is critical to all we do at Education Development Trust. In this review, the third of our Annual Impact Reviews, we present the ways in which our work has made a positive difference to learners, teachers, leaders and education systems around the world, and how in another exceptional year, we have strived to further our mission to improve lives by transforming education worldwide.

The need to improve the quality of learning outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged students, is the greatest challenge facing education policymakers around the world – and improved teaching quality is perhaps the biggest driver for improving learning outcomes. In this report, we reflect on the practical steps that have been taken in England to improve teacher professionalism, but we believe that the insights this example provides will have a resonance and relevance for policymakers and education leaders in many other countries across the world.

The Connected Learning Centre (CLC), part of Education Development Trust, supports schools and other settings in using digital technologies creatively and critically. Importantly, it makes technology accessible to girls through the use of gender-responsive pedagogy– and engages teachers, leaders, parents and communities to do the same.

With finite financial resources for education around the world, ministers and policymakers are rightly preoccupied with efficiency and value for money. In our recent side event to the Global Education Summit, ‘High-Impact Domestic Financing: Evidence, Equity, Efficiency’, we heard fascinating insights from ministers and experts into how evidence of different types including disaggregated datadata is being used in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to inform cost-effective, impactful policy which holds the potential to transform the chances of the most vulnerable students. In this commentary, we examine three key themes which emerged from their discussions.

Following our Global Dialogue event earlier this year, our latest report draws on the rich discussions from the event to develop our thinking on some of the key ways in which we may be able to improve education for all as the world recovers from Covid-19. In it, we consider the importance of evidence and data in informing interventions and solution design, the need for mechanisms for participation and problem-solving and the significance of harnessing community and parental engagement.

TechPathways London was a two-year project, ending in 2021, designed to bridge the gap between the digital skills acquired in education and those required by London’s digital and creative industries. It offered a programme of free training for educators working with young people aged 11-24. Funded as part of the Mayor of London's Digital Talent programme, the project was a collaboration between the Connected Learning Centre, part of Education Development Trust, and Queen Mary University of London.