Transversal Competencies

Transversal Competencies is a term widely used to describe the broad-based skills, knowledge and understandings that aim to meet the many challenges facing countries around the world as they prepare their learners for current global realities. Other names given to this skill set include:
  • ​21st century skills
  • Soft Skills
  • Employability skills
  • ​Entrepreneurial skills
  • Transferable skills
​Regardless of what they are called there is a general acceptance that these competencies need to be systematically and strategically taught, assessed and reported in curriculum and training programs in schools, VET and industry..
The Australian Curriculum is one of the key players in ensuring transversal competencies are embedded in the curriculum.
Except from article in the Weekend Australian 15/09/18
Australian students are set to be taught fashionable but contentious 21st-century skills, ranging from critical and creative thinking through to “mindfulness”, “gratitude” and “resilience”, with moves under way for a radical redesign of the national curriculum.
The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority has started a review of the curriculum that is understood to draw heavily on the recent Gonski review, an OECD future of education project and the work of a US-based “futurist” who has been contracted to help “modernise” the mathematics curriculum.
Read full article here

Australian Curriculum
General Capabilities

General capabilities are a key dimension of the Australian Curriculum. They encompass knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that, together with curriculum content in each learning area and the cross-curriculum priorities, will assist students to live and work successfully in the twenty-first century.

ATS 2020

Assessment of Transversal Skills 2020 (ATS2020) is an innovative policy experimentation project co-funded by the European Commission which provides a comprehensive learning model for the enhancement of student indispensable transversal skills within curricula and offers new approaches and innovative tools to teachers for the development and assessment of these skills.​

Transversal Competencies in Education Policy and Practice

This report provides an understanding of how transversal competencies are viewed, implemented, and adapted in education and policy across the Asia-pacific region.