As reported by the National Literacy Trust, “70% of employers place literacy skills within their top three considerations when recruiting school leavers”. With ‘speaking and listening skills’ having been removed from formal English GCSE certification (post-2016), and with written grammatical/technical accuracy accounting for only 20% of GCSE English Language assessment criteria, even the most ‘academically validated’ school leavers (600,000 per year) are unlikely to have the broad range literacy skillset that employers demand.
EdenFiftyOne™ aim to assist employers to improve the literacy of their employees by providing a tool which will help them to identify which literacy skills are needed by their workforce, and context-specific materials to help meet that need. They are an EdTech platform that deconstructs the qualities of reading, writing, speaking, and listening into 51 universal skills of English language and literacy. The EdenFiftyOne™ for Business will help employers analyse their workplace literacy requirements by mapping against the 51 skills to provide a focused and specific response without the need to employ generic, external provision.
A Minimum Viable Product version is currently available as a web-app and is being trailed in schools. This project aims to refocus on the vocational sector and offer the technology to employers. Central to that aim will be the development of a bespoke, multi-platform mobile app which will enable employees to engage with and benefit from the instructional content outside of an educational setting.