The mandatory cross-curricular skills of literacy, numeracy and digital competence are essential for learners to be able to access knowledge. They enable learners to access the breadth of a school’s curriculum and the wealth of opportunities it offers, equipping them with the lifelong skills to realise the four purposes. These are skills that can be transferred to the world of work, enabling learners to adapt and thrive in the modern world.
We have developed a curriculum which enables learners to develop competence and capability in these skills and, where there are opportunities, to extend and apply them across all Areas. Developing these skills is therefore a consideration for all practitioners.
Learners must be given opportunities across the curriculum to:
- develop listening, reading, speaking and writing skills
- be able to use numbers and solve problems in real-life situations
- be confident users of a range of technologies to help them function and communicate effectively and make sense of the world
- Rather than planning for these skills separately, the whole school should be involved and engaged in order to embed these skills across the curriculum. It will, therefore, be the responsibility of all practitioners across all Areas to develop and reinforce these skills across the curriculum, and not just for specialist practitioners in the fields of mathematics, language and computing.
The cross-curricular skills frameworks
We will use the latest versions of the Literacy and Numeracy Framework and the Digital Competence Framework to ensure all learners have frequent authentic opportunities for the development of these skills.
