Assessing the feasibility of a large-scale social-emotional skills assessment in Canada

Our Partner

Skills for Success (SFS) Program is within Economic and Social Development Canada (ESDC). The program is designed to support Canadians who need to improve their foundational and transferable skills. Formerly known as the Essential Skills project, ESDC changed the original framework to the SFS in recognition of the importance of the effect of social and emotional skills on labour market outcomes.

The Skills for Success Framework contains nine skills for learning, work, and life. They are communication, creativity and innovation, problem solving, reading, digital skills, collaboration, adaptability, writing, and numeracy.

• See More: Contextualized Essential Skills Demonstration Project

The Challenge

Canadians need a broad range of skills to be able to lead engaging and fulfilling lives. These skills go beyond traditional ‘hard skills’, like reading, writing, and numeracy, to include social and emotional skills (SES), such as collaboration, communication, and creativity.

Blueprint was tasked to investigate the feasibility of developing a large-scale survey assessing Canadians’ skills across these nine areas. This survey was intended to be inclusive of previously excluded populations (e.g., persons with disabilities, rural and remote) as well as provide an approach for capturing national level data on this emerging and highly complex research area, Skills for Success.

Our Task

By conducting a literature review, jurisdictional scan and engaging with 18 stakeholders from across the skills development sector, we identified key challenges to implementing a large-scale survey of this kind.

Additionally, Blueprint was tasked with creating a ‘roadmap’: a practical series of steps the SFS Program would undertake to develop a SFS survey for adults, including suggested activities, timescales, divisions of responsibilities, contracting opportunities, and conditional pathways.

The Report

This report has five sections: project overview, the current state, moving forward, the roadmap, and conclusions. The SFS Program engaged Blueprint to conduct a feasibility study focusing on the following three broad areas:

1. Explore considerations for determining an approach to survey development for a large-scale online social and emotional skills (SES)survey for adults, including concerns related to feasibility and cost.
2. Research existing SES assessments and provide guidance on assessment selection, adaption, and development.
3. Identify implementation issues, particularly related to inclusivity and supports for people living with disabilities.

What we've learned

While there’s a considerable consensus on the strategies and tools usedto assess hard skills like reading, writing and numeracy, the research on “softskills” is less developed both in Canada and internationally.

The feasibility study found a lack of existing resources and protocols that could inform the development and implementation of a large-scale social and emotional skills survey. There were few suitable existing skills assessments and little indication of how to include previously excluded populations, like people with disabilities.

Recognizing the government's intention to break new ground and to become a thought leader in this area, our roadmap provides a summary of key consideration and action items across five stages, which aim to guide the development of an assessment tool that is valid, effective, and meets the needs of both government and the wider ecosystem.