Priority 1

Assessing 21C skills

For our education system to focus meaningfully on developing student 21C skills, we must have both a clear idea of what these skills are and how to measure them.

Great work has been done internationally to identify critical 21C skills, and despite differences of expression, we are now clearly all talking about the same things. Our 21C skills framework translates this work into a simple framework for New Zealand, and we encourage you to use it.

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Lagging behind, however, has been the measurement of those 21C skills, although much work is now going on here internationally. We see a common set of rigorous and reliable assessment tools for 21C skills as critical – without these, it is very hard for any of us to know what our students need or what our employees have, and to justify any work we do to improve them.