VIEWS & OPINION Excellence at work Comment by CHRIS HYDE, Senior Quality and Standards Manager at WorldSkills UK
Excellence is reachable for every young person.
Whatever the learners background or stage of learning, if their environment provides support and can model what excellence looks like, then for learners producing either technical or academic work, excellence is achievable. I have had the privilege to see this in action, firstly, with my own journey towards becoming a master craftsman and in those of my students who attended the international renowned Rycotewood Furniture Centre in Oxfordshire. Of which, some of the alumni you will see on TV or YouTube.
I have often been asked the question is it nature or nurture that produces excellence? Well, over three decades as a creative educational leader in technical, vocational education and training (TVET) I have seen those who had a lot of natural skills require some nurture and those learners who had some natural skills require a lot of nurture.
Nurture is certainly key to supporting learners to develop and manage their mindset and skills productivity. It is what we do as teachers and drives our passion. The recipe I discovered is to nurture the culture, create a transformative learning environment with ambitious standards, then employ committed educational trainers who are dedicated experts to make learners become excellent. Alongside this leadership of the environment, resources and standards, is for the learners to practice reflective activity, resilience, and growth mindset.
When interviewing or mentoring learners it is clear they want to be the best that they can be. They can be daunted by the high quality that they can see and wonder if they can ever reach the standard of excellence. They can, with nurture. This starts with mindset rehearsal, practising a belief and technique. We see this technique in the performing arts when actors or dancers practice movement and sequencing when alone, in small group work and then full-dress rehearsal, before the live show. It is also like when a bobsleigh driver is about to start their run down the course. Sitting in their cars their head and body move from left to right as they rehearse the course. This visual rehearsal is why in a digital world, virtual reality of simulation or gaming is key to performance gains. In vocational work, nurturing learners to rehearse the making of a project, mentally visualising the marking out, picking up tools, cutting, assembly, cleaning to the moment of standing back to admire the finished produce. Sometimes this end point is where all the emotions flood out as they realise it worked out as well as they thought and believed. Excellence is as much in the mind as with the skills and knowledge of success and failure through the journey towards excellence. These combinations produce small marginal gains to create excellent performance, we see this activity in sports all the time. Of course, nothing is made right first time, prototypes, failures, tough critiques are all part of nurturing towards excellence. Reiteration of the process, ‘learn-practice-reflect-repeat-reflect- repeat with more challenge- reflect’ and being curious in asking the questions like, why did that fail? how might I improve on
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that process or technique? are part of the journey. It is hard; however, it is possible. Nurtured through peer support, repeated pressure testing and levels of complexity, learners can grow in ability by using live projects and real clients to receive feedback. The celebration of project work where learners can talk to others about their journey and their achievements becomes the conclusion of each wave of adventure in pursuit of excellence. At WorldSkills UK, we use international insight from the WorldSkills community and competitions to measure benchmarking excellence. With this insight the Quality and Standards team which I lead have produced free on- demand resources across many subject areas for educators to use which after learners complete a task calculates where each learner measures against local, national, and international standards. The benchmarking tool is our gold standard
on-demand resource and the WorldSkills UK USP. It is designed to support excellence.
WorldSkills UK is well known for national and international competitions. However, less known, and just as powerful is our pre-competition activity within our learning lab, a free online portal, a virtual stadium of many resources, designed to reach all learners to be confident and prepared for future competition entry or work.
The learning lab hosts the Centre of Excellence 2.0 that develops senior leaders through communities of practice events. It also has bookable bespoke live sessions, led by our training experts as continuous professional development programmes for educators, including topics on mindset and competence to excellence. There is a comprehensive, free online, careers programme that aligns to the Gatsby Framework of career education guidance that educators and learners would benefit from.
Alongside the gold standard benchmarking resources are other tools designed to measure excellence. These include a bank of previous pressure tests (competition tasks) accompanied by WorldSkills UK assessment criteria, which helps learners understand how they will be assessed at national and international competitions.
Some other on-demand tools hosted in the learning lab which sit alongside the benchmarking resources are hackathon events and inter-college competition templates for college groups or regions to use.
All these resources, hosted in the learning lab are signposted to make it clear and easy for educators to use at certain points of the academic year. They fall into three sections, each with a drop- down resources’ menu. They divide into the setting of learning at the start of the year, the Holding of learning mid-year and the Landing of learning towards the end of the academic year. The resources and tools in the learning lab are great ways to evidence a well-designed ambitious curriculum to inspectorates and the team at WorldSkills UK can help embed them.
March 2024
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