Life skills development: how the impossible dream could become reality

المبادرات الإقليمية في التعليم

2023 - 02 - 03

Reflecting on the Life Skills and Citizenship Education (LSCE) Annual Partner Meeting held in Amman, 30-31 January 2023

UNESCO

What are “life skills”?

The term “life skills” designates what others may call “soft skills”, “21st century skills” or “transversal/key competencies” for learning, life, work, and sustainable development. It was coined back in 2017, when the UNICEF Regional Office for MENA (UNICEF MENARO) launched a regional initiative called “Life Skills and Citizenship Education” (LSCE)¹ involving partners like UNESCO and many other UN organizations, NGOs, INGOs, businesses and universities from the onset.

Following in the footsteps of UNESCO’s Delors Report of 1996 (“Learning: The Treasure Within”), the LSCE initiative identified 12 important life skills to be developed in the MENA and Arab regions, categorized according the four Delors pillars of learning:

Learning to know/learn – Creativity, Critical Thinking, Problem solving (Skills for learning)
Learning to do – Cooperation, Negotiation, Decision making (Skills for employability)
Learning to be – Self-management, Resilience, Communication (Skills for personal empowerment)
Learning to live (and work) together – Respect for diversity, Empathy, Participation (Skills for active citizenship).

Life skills are crucial for learners to meet today’s – and tomorrow’s – challenges successfully, which includes constructively managing diversity, autonomously mastering new technologies, integrating the increasingly changing and unpredictable world of work, and contributing to sustainable development. However, due to different hindering factors in and out of school – such as crowded curricula focusing on theory and memorization/rote learning, inappropriate teaching practices, poor or unsuitable learning environments and learning assessment strategies, as well as low/lacking capacities of teachers, parents, and other stakeholders – the development of life skills needs to be supported by more effective advocacy, as well as by appropriate policies and practices.

About the LSCE Annual Partner Meetings

LSCE partners used to meet in-person on an annual basis to share their experiences in integrating and developing life skills in different settings and contexts and at different levels in both formal and non-formal education.

Owing to the COVID-19 crisis, the last in-person meeting was held in 2019. After that, the only meeting that took place was an online meeting in 2021. That is up until last January, when, after a long break, LSCE partners participated in their first in-person meeting on the 30th and 31st of the month, in Amman, at the invitation of UNICEF MENARO and UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States.

Considering the crucial role of life skills and citizenship education for learners, this year’s LSCE annual meeting aimed to enhance partners’ awareness of different LSCE initiatives and strengthen their shared context-specific understanding of what works and what doesn’t based on important lessons learnt during and post COVID-19.

Content and structure of the 2023 meeting

The two-day meeting consisted of several plenary sessions with interactive presentations and panels, as well as group work sessions. The discussions were trilingual (English, Arabic and French – with simultaneous interpretation) and centered around several key topics and areas, as follows²:

Consolidating lessons learnt in the context of COVID-19 response and post-COVID-19 recovery;
The new impetus given by the Transforming Education Summit (TES, Sept. 2022, New York City) to achieve SDG4 goals through transformative education – and to translate commitments into action;
Updates on LSCE joint regional initiatives and products supporting transformative education;
How to overcome learning poverty through recovery and accelerated learning;
Critical measures to enhance learning quality for all and strengthening the role of life skills (i.e., students’ wellbeing and life skills; teachers’ capacity and life skills; learning assessment and life skills; multiple pathways to learning and life skills); and
How to enhance working together in the MENA and Arab regions, with a focus on joint opportunities for turning commitments into action.

Short video footage was also integrated in sessions and during breaks to highlight several LSCE aspects, (e.g. the role of arts in promoting and developing life skills). Participants also had access to many resources displayed in the hall.

Meeting outcomes

Several important initiatives were shared regarding country experiences in coping with the COVID-19 crisis and its effects on national education systems. Among such initiatives are Jordan’s “Learning Bridges” (i.e. condensed curriculum to address learning loss); Egypt’s investments in digital infrastructure, the development of a national Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), as well as comprehensive curriculum review and forward-looking teacher policies that integrate life skills as a system-wide approach; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s building on previous investments on distance education through different media, including special channels with sign language interpretation; Lebanon’s “Learning Recovery” initiative based on catch-up programmes, psychosocial support, and the provision of eBooks; and UNRWA’s focus on teacher professional development and family involvement in support of Palestinian refugee learners.
Speakers also addressed different challenges, such as the need to improve their infrastructure (including their digital infrastructure); the need for better coordination of efforts for cost-effective and timely interventions; and the need to focus on learners’ and teachers’ wellbeing while countering the negative effects of school closure, such as increased school-based violence that several countries witnessed recently, especially at secondary levels. The importance of research and cooperation with academia was equally emphasized to ensure that promising practices are being documented properly and validated for further roll out and scalability.
The discussion also included some follow up on the outcomes of the Transforming Education Summit (TES) to clarify the concept of “transformative education” in the light of UNESCO’s document “Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education” (2021) and to elucidate the TES guidance on the five identified TES Action Tracks, namely:

AT1: Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools;

AT2: Learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development;

AT3: Teachers, teaching, and the teaching profession;

AT4: Digital learning and transformation; and

AT5: Financing of Education.

The national country commitments have been equally analyzed from the perspective of identified commonalities and specific priorities, such as the need to focus on developing foundational (reading, writing and numeracy) and digital skills; the need to enhance teacher professional development and well-being; and to improve the relevance of curricula and learning for today’s developments in society, culture, education, and the world of work in view of ensuring that learners possess the necessary competencies/skills for life, work/employability and entrepreneurship, active citizenship and sustainable development. In order to build on recent research outcomes and promising practical experiences, the World Bank (WB) and partners will conduct a regional workshop on “Advancing Teaching and Learning of Arabic” in May 2023.

During the group work sessions, the different groups explored the following considerations with focus on measures aiming to enhance the quality of learning for all and on the role of life skills:

(a) Ways of enhancing students’ wellbeing by developing their life skills through curricular and extracurricular activities (e.g., youth clubs, environmental clubs, psychosocial support groups, adolescent centres, skills courses, student parliaments, etc.);

(b) Solutions to enhance teacher competencies, motivation, and wellbeing, enable them to develop their own life skills, and better support them in integrating life skills development in their daily classroom and school practices. This includes improving teachers’ role in strengthening school-community (and school-parent) ties. To that end, an emphasis was put on the need to clearly state what is expected from teachers (i.e. competencies and tasks) in national teacher frameworks and other forward-looking documents. The discussions also highlighted the need to establish systematic and motivating teacher professional development systems and better align them with pre-service teacher education and training. Among identified needs was the importance of figuring out how to enhance teacher motivation in ways that transcend payment and status issues, like promoting teacher engagement in consultations, and policy- and decision-making processes.

(c) Recommendations to enhance the role and effectiveness of learning assessment regarding the development of life skills explored the role of learning assessment in promoting/developing LSCE. Given the many existing resources and experiences gathered (including the use of digital learning assessment strategies), education policy makers, practitioners and stakeholders are called upon to diversify their learning assessment strategies within their national assessment systems to ensure that different learning assessment types and forms are fit for purpose and used in complementary to one another.

(d) Different avenues to ensure multiple pathways to learning that all integrate life skills and provide flexile mobility possibilities among them have been equally explored. Participants identified the need for curriculum reforms that focus on establishing better linkages between general education and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), as well as the needs for developing broad competencies for life, work, citizenship, and sustainable development; recognizing skills and competencies acquired in non-formal and informal education; and better matching skill development with the demands in different social and economic areas based on better inter-sectoral and inter-ministerial cooperation.

As for the different initiatives and products that could be used to enhance joint work in the MENA and Arab regions, UNICEF shared their Measurement of Life Skills instrument that has been applied and piloted in several counties. Additionally, they presented their Learning Projects, a regional resource available in Arabic that links learning contents to real-life experiences. UNESCO shared several important global and regional resources as well, such as The ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (2018), and two publications in the making, namely the Repository of Promising Teaching and Learning Practices, and the Learning Assessment Framework for the Arab Region (LAF).

Key recommendations

During an open brainstorming/plenary discussion and the closing session, participants made a series of recommendations regarding some meeting follow-up measures and next steps, such as:

- Continue sharing MENA/Arab experiences and experiences from other regions regarding the development of life skills, taking the K-12 continuum into account. In this respect, UNICEF and UNESCO should develop and share a template to capture promising practices and resources related to integrating and developing life skills.

- Exert more efforts for active advocacy and public awareness to build effective coalitions for life skills.

- LSCE should be approached in a comprehensive way, by considering the system-wide alignment of curricula, teaching practices, assessment strategies, learning environments, etc.

- In order to build on existing promising policies and practices and ensure successful scaling up preconditions, it is important to develop and conduct joint initiatives in a coordinated manner. Such initiatives/joint work modalities should rely on specialized, inter-connected taskforces looking into: LSCE in the curriculum; tools to measure LSCE; teaching and assessment strategies; and the overall alignment of different components and sub-components of the education system.

- Good practice collection activities need to be built on reliable curriculum analysis and on the respect for Human Rights principles and approaches, such as tolerance and peace, constructive conflict resolution, with focus on active citizenship and sustainable development.

- More inter-sectoral and inter-ministerial work and coordination is also needed, especially because life skills development should not only engage education authorities. It rather needs a “whole-village” or a “whole-of-society” approach complemented by whole-of-government cooperation and media engagement to ensure effective guidance, resources, and public support.

- Teachers of the future need to be prepared to master the integration and development of life skills both online and offline by combing traditional and new technologies and strategies and based on cost-effective modalities. Teachers’ and learners’ life skills need to be aligned and developed in parallel.

- In promoting and developing life skills, the usage of local capacities should be encouraged, for instance, through sharing a pool of consultants (shared rosters).

- Better coordination among all stakeholders is needed in addressing the BIG questions related to education quality, equity, inclusion and accountability.

- At the same time, monitoring of LSCE integration and development needs to be enhanced at different levels based on setting quality indicators for LSCE.

- Funding sources/donors should be approached with multi-country proposals.

- A comprehensive report of the meeting should be circulated. Future joint activities should harness, capitalize on and maintain the momentum created by the LSCE meeting.

For related reading, you can check the following publications on LSCE:

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¹See unicef.org

²See Concept Note, Agenda and meeting brief report