Social and emotional skills, non-cognitive outcomes, soft skills—whatever you want to call them, they matter. Competencies such as motivation, self-efficacy, meta-cognition and conscientiousness have all been shown to underpin higher academic performance in pupils and lead to more successful outcomes later in their lives.1
Unsurprisingly, opportunities to develop these skills are not evenly distributed across society. Studies have found that young people from less-privileged backgrounds are less likely than their more affluent peers to access opportunities to develop the social and emotional competencies that lead to better life outcomes.2
Attention towards these outcomes is increasing across the education sector, as are interventions aimed at rectifying the disparity in social and emotional skills. However, knowledge of what works in this area is extremely limited.
Why are non-cognitive skills important?
Cognitive ability and measures of academic attainment endure as the mainstream focus in the education sector. However, interest in non-cognitive skills has increased recently given that several have been found to predict long-term life outcomes with impressive accuracy.
In their study comparing the influence of different factors on critical life outcomes, Roberts et al. found that ‘Big Five’ traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism— were similar or stronger predictors of mortality than IQ or socioeconomic status.3 Other studies have found that conscientiousness in particular predicts academic attainment, health and employment outcomes as strongly as measures of cognitive ability.4
A further explanation for increased attention towards non-cognitive outcomes lies in the increasingly saturated graduate employment market. When surveyed by the Sutton Trust, 94 per cent of employers expressed that life skills were at least as important as academic results for the success of young people.5 Standard qualifications based on cognitive ability and academic attainment are rarely sufficient for securing a role; candidates are typically selected based on assessments of their non-cognitive strengths. This piles on the pressure for pupils to not only succeed academically, but to also fit the specific character profile employers are looking for. Unfortunately, this is far more straightforward for some than others.
