The Importance of ‘Skills Starters’

Hey! My name is Tamsin, and I am a secondary programme coordinator in Birmingham. One of my favourite parts of every session is the skills starter, which is a vital part of every session on the programme. You may be wondering, what is a skills starter, and what does it do? It’s a very good question!

As every session is focused around a skills statement, I like to think of the skills starter as the warm up to developing your skills. After all, you can’t exercise without warming up, and the same goes for essential skills.

There are a range of skills starters that all PCs across Envision use, and each one focuses on a different skill, or a different combination of skills. For example, if the team needs to practice solving problems through looking at different solutions, the session could start with a game of Articulate. In this skills starter, the team has to explain a picture on the board to one of their teammates without saying certain words.

The most important part of a skills starter comes at the end, when the team reflects on how they played the game, and what they could do differently next time. It’s also vital for the team to see how they could use lessons learnt from the skills starter in the rest of the programme, especially in their project. Coming back to the Articulate example, some learnings from the game could be that the team need to communicate as one cohesive team to work out their plan.

These learnings and reflections form a crucial part of the team’s skills development journey, and is often something that the young people pick out as some of their favourite moments!