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Why don’t schools teach life skills? 12 reasons why your school might not teach them –
What we're covering..
Introduction 👋
Learning life skills can be one of the most difficult and stressful parts of becoming a grown-up.
As an adult, there are so many different skills to learn like:
- Paying taxes 🏛️
- Managing your money
- Renting a home 🏡
- Buying a home
- Looking after a home 🧽
- Building healthy relationships
- Car care 🚗
- Cooking
- Cleaning 🧼
- Looking after your wellbeing
- Parenting 👶
- Getting a job
- Communicating 🔊
- Coping with emotions 💞
- Solving problems
- Making decisions 🤔
- Managing stress
It’s common for people to wonder, “why didn’t school teach me all of these life skills”?
We’ve put together a list of the main reasons why some schools don’t teach life skills.
1. Grades are a priority 🏆
In a lot of cases, schools receive their funding from the government, based on the number of students that attend the school. 📈
This means that schools compete against each other to get students to attend their school. – The more students they have, the more funding they get.
In order to attract students to their school, schools need to encourage parents to send their children there.
Parents will often look at schools and decide where to send their children based on:
- Inspection records for the school/government ratings 🕵️♀️
- School average grades/how many students passed their qualifications 🏆
- Sports team performance 🏉
This means that schools tend to focus their time, attention, and money on improving these 3 things, in order attract more students, and keep their funding.
Competition between schools can be fierce, and not leave a lot of room to teach things like life skills, which aren’t usually part of the subjects on offer to get qualifications in.
2. It’s not in the curriculum 📜
Schools usually follow a set programme of learning set by the government, called the national curriculum.
The national curriculum is a set of subjects and standards that were created to make sure that children learn the same things.
If a life skills topic isn’t included in the national curriculum, then some schools might argue that they shouldn’t teach it.
3. Lack of guidance 🗺️
Teachers have to train in and study subjects in order to be able to teach them to others – including life skills! 🤓
At the moment, there aren’t a lot of instructions or training offered by governments to teach life skills at school.
Life skills are a huge subject – you could go on forever learning them!
So – the difficult question for teachers is: where do you start, and how much do you teach?
Without guidance and training, teaching life skills can be difficult.
On top of this, teachers may not have been taught life skills themselves in school, and don’t feel confident enough to teach quite intimidating subjects like:
- tax
- personal finance
- politics
- buying a home
Imagine if a teacher gave the wrong financial advice to students – it could have a really negative impact on their lives. 👎
For some schools, the lack of guidance is a reason to not teach life skills in school.
4. Funding/resourcing 🧑🤝🧑
Schools depend on funding and schools that are funded by the government are often told how different parts of their funding can be used.
In a lot of cases, this funding might not stretch far enough to teach life skills.
Teaching life skills on top of the many responsibilities of schools could need things like:
- increased teacher hours ⌚
- buying teaching materials/lesson resources 🎨
- paying for training for teachers to provide life skills lessons 👩🏫
…all of which requires money!
For some schools there isn’t the funding or teachers available to teach life skills.
5. Unsure if it’s their responsibility 🤷♀️
Since you can’t gain qualifications in life skills and there isn’t a lot of government guidance around teaching them, some educators are unsure if it’s their responsibility to teach life skills.
Some educators might think that due to the vast amount of teaching that schools provide in other topics, teaching life skills should be the role of a child’s parents or guardians, rather than schools. 👪
6. Providing new and different experiences for students 👩🔬
Some schools believe that their role is to provide students with experiences beyond what they’re likely to come across at home.
Things like:
- Science experiments 🧪
- Mathematical equations
- Understanding how geography works and the world around you 🗺️
- Understanding history and big world events
- Classic books and literature 📚
are all things that you might not commonly get to experience at home.
For some schools, the desire to provide students with these experiences outweigh the need to teach students about things that they are more likely to come across outside of school like:
- tax
- renting
- money management
- cooking
- cleaning
- self-care
- relationship building
- job hunting
7. Believing that students won’t remember them🧠
A common question educators have is, “When is the best time to teach life skills?”
If you taught a 12 year old about mortgages at school, it might take 20 years before they actually use those skills and buy their first home. 🏡
(In 2022, the average age of buying your first home in the UK was 32).
Teaching students life skills at the wrong age might not be very helpful for students, because they might not remember them when they need them. 🤷♀️
This confusion around what age to teach life skills, can lead to schools deciding not to teach them.
Some schools suggest that life skills should be learned at the age they’ll actually be used, because students might not remember them.
8. Believing that students won’t care 💔
It’s clear that teaching life skills in schools would mean a lot more work for teachers – but would it be worth it? 🤷♀️
Some teachers don’t think so, and believe that students might experience issues like:
- Finding life skills topics like finances too complicated 🥴
- Being bored in life skills lessons 😴
- Not caring about learning life skills when they’re not immediately usable 🙄
- Struggling to juggle life skills lessons on top of the other topics they have to learn for exams 🤹♀️
9. Feeling burned out 🔥
Schools are under more pressure than ever. 🥴
On top of delivering lessons, they are expected to juggle things like:
- Passing inspections
- Keeping parents happy
- Managing problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
- Covering everything on the curriculum
- Helping students to pass exams
- Creating evidence to show what students have learned
- Marking work
- Managing arguments and conflict between teachers, students, and parents
- Dealing with police and social services when students are struggling
- Monitoring student attendance at school, and chasing up students who aren’t going
- Juggling everyone’s ideas for improving the school
- Handling school complaints
- Keeping students safe from hazards
- Monitoring student wellbeing
- Working out the best places to use funding for students
- Organizing school trips and enrichment activities
- Coping with the emotional stress of bad behaviour from students
So even if teaching life skills seems like a good idea, there might not be the energy at the school because they’re burned out from managing the many challenges that schools face.
10. The education system might need an upgrade first📱
World-renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson argued throughout his life that the modern day education system was designed to meet the needs of the 19th century industrial revolution and produce workers for industry – and hasn’t changed much since.
There is desire from educators to rethink the education system to improve learning and modernize the way that schools work. 🧠
Significant changes to the education system are being proposed by educators, such as:
- Making learning more personalized and student-led 🪞
- Creating more creative and comfortable environments for learners 🎨
- Changing the way that students are assessed for learning, instead of written testing 🕵️♀️
- Adapting the school timetable so that students don’t have to change rooms every hour⌚
- No longer separating students by age groups, and instead by level of mastery 🪜
- Making subjects multi-disciplinary to make them more like real life 🔀
With all this potential change on the horizon, some schools might struggle to fit life skills into the mix.
This means that some schools might prefer to wait until more substantial changes take place in the education system before teaching life skills. 📆
11. Life skills can’t be taught in a classroom 🏫
Another argument why life skills shouldn’t be taught in schools is the opinion that life skills should be learned outside a classroom. 🏞️
Things like:
- Careers education/work experience 💼
- Cleaning a home
- Managing relationships 🤝
- Parenting/childcare
- Car care 🚗
might be difficult to demonstrate at school, and reduce the quality of life skills lessons.
12. Life skills topics change too quickly 🔀
Life is constantly changing, which means the subject areas for learning life skills change regularly too.
Things like:
- house prices 🏡
- interest rates (What is interest? (easy explanation) 📈) 📈
- available financial products 🏦
- tax rules 🏛️
- laws 👩⚖️
change regularly, which makes it difficult to keep life skills lesson materials up-to-date. 📆
In a lot of countries, the national curriculum materials might not get updated for several years, meaning life skills content could go out of date quickly. ⌛
It can take a lot of time (and money) to update learning materials regularly, so for this reason some schools might decide not to teach life skills.
The good news ✨
If you’re keen to see life skills taught more in schools, there’s good news! –
There are free resources! 🎉
More than ever, there are free resources available to help teach life skills.
The Grown-Up School provides 100+ completely free grown-up lessons and free worksheets to help learn life skills!
There is also support and resources available from places like:
- Charities
- The internet – you can learn so much from researching online!
- Youtube videos
- Podcasts
- TV series
- Local businesses
- Motivational speakers
- Banks – financial education programmes
More research 🕵️♀️
In addition to there being more resources available to learn life skills, there is also more research demonstrating the desire and need to learn them.
This includes studies such as:
- Age-Specific Life Skills Education in School: A Systematic Review
- Significance Of Life Skills Education
- The Status of Life Skill Education in Secondary Schools -An Evaluative Study
Improving awareness 🔊
With more research in place about teaching life skills, becomes more awareness of their importance.
Teachers are more keen than ever for their students to learn life skills, and are finding new ways to incorporate them into their classrooms. 👩🏫
Increased flexibility for teachers✍️
In a lot of education systems teachers are being given more flexibility around what they teach.
This means that some teachers can start to write their own curriculum of learning for their students. 📝
Giving teachers more flexibility can help them to make sure that learning is:
- relevant and useful for students 👍
- tailored to the geographical area the students are living in 🧵
- making use of opportunities for students in their local area 🗺️
- more personalized for students and their ambitions 🪞
A lot of teachers believe that life skills should be taught in schools, and can use this flexibility to create more opportunities for students to learn life skills in their learning plans.
Conclusion 👍
So that’s it!
There are lots of different reasons why life skills aren’t taught in schools, such as:
- Grades are a priority🏆
- It’s not in the curriculum📜
- Lack of guidance🗺️
- Funding/resourcing🧑🤝🧑
- Unsure if it’s their responsibility🤷♀️
- Providing new and different experiences for students👩🔬
- Believing that students won’t remember them🧠
- Believing that students won’t care💔
- Feeling burned out🔥
- The education system might need an upgrade first📱
- Life skills can’t be taught in a classroom🏫
- Life skills topics change too quickly🔀
Despite this, there seems to be an upward trend of schools teaching life skills. 📈
Hopefully this article has helped you to understand better why schools might not teach life skills.
If you know anyfriends or family memberswho might benefit from learning about why schools don’t teach life skills, share this post with them!
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