Last Friday (Feb 23), the BGKLLEN stood alongside the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA), the Minister for Education & Emergency Services and the Victorian Applied Learning Association and proudly launched the New Work Order Toolkit.
Designed to support educators in facilitating immersive, meaningful learning experiences that build students’ skills and capacity beyond the classroom, the toolkit is mapped to the VCAL curriculum and can be customised to fit varied contexts and timeframes. Split into five learning modules, the 27 individual lessons are based on insights and recommendations from FYA’s New Work Order report series.
Minister Merlino noted during his launch speech that “VCAL is something extremely special and unique to the state”. VCAL students are already diving deeper into career conversations and so the toolkit was aimed at supporting these students. “This toolkit is a very impressive document which gives you (teachers) advice on how you can help your students reach their potential”.
FYA CEO, Jan Owen AM said the toolkit aimed to help students build the skills and capabilities they will need to thrive in a changing world of work, where every job will be transformed by automation.
“FYA’s New Work Order report series shows that to be ‘work smart’ in the future, young people will need to not only acquire foundation and technical skills but be able to use these in increasingly entrepreneurial and creative ways, to be strong communicators and critical thinkers,” Ms Owen said.
The toolkit is a 12 month partnership between FYA and BGKLLEN and was created through a co-design process with 5 local schools.
“This was a perfect match from the beginning. We had teachers who felt they needed to modernise their approach to guiding students into the workforce and FYA who had undertaken that exact research and were very excited about taking it into every VCAL classroom” said Brendan O’Connell from BGKLLEN after the launch. “We have been overwhelmed by the uptake of the toolkit to date. We are only a few weeks into the new school year and already there are thousands of students who will be undertaking the modules this year”.
The New Work Order VCAL Teacher Toolkit can be freely downloaded by teachers HERE
If you would like more information on the Foundation for Young Australians New Work Order research, you can also find it HERE