The Learning Skills curriculum: Raising the bar, closing the gap at GCSE

In recent years, there has been much debate about whether schools should aim to teach students generic learning skills, or whether they should focus instead on teaching subject-specific knowledge. Indeed, some have argued that ‘teaching generic skills does not work’ (Tricot and Sweller, 2014) since, in order to think critically or creatively, the most important thing is to be knowledgeable within that domain. But what if research showed that as well as teaching children what to learn, we can also teach them how to learn more effectively? In this article, we present the findings of the Learning Skills curriculum, an intervention that was developed and implemented at a secondary comprehensive school in southern England between 2010 and 2014, and evaluated from 2009 to 2017.   The study took place at a UK secondary comprehensive school (referred to here as ‘Sea View’) where the proportion of students eligible for free school meals was