Opening Minds Framework

What are competences?

The Opening Minds curriculum features five categories of competences: learning, citizenship, relating
to people, managing situations and managing information. Focusing on competences means that
Opening Minds teaching emphasises the ability to understand an d to do, rather than just the
transmission of knowledge.

These competences are broad areas of capability, developed in classrooms through a mixture of
instruction and practical experience: children plan their work, organise their own time and explore
their own ways of learning.

Subject boundaries are less defined than in traditional curriculum teaching, with schools often
integrating the teaching of several subjects together into modules or topics, where competences can
be developed through the exploration of common themes. Crucially, the input of teachers and the
individual needs of schools are central to the planning of each Opening Minds project.

Five key competences

Each competence category contains a number of individual competences, which are exp ressed in
terms of what a school student could achieve having progressed through the curriculum:

Learning

Students would have:

 understood how to learn, taking into account their preferred learning styles, and understood
the need to, and how to, manage their own learning throughout life
 learned, systematically, to think
 explored and reached an understanding of their own creative talents, and how best to make
use of them
 learned to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves
 achieved high standards in literacy, numeracy, and spatial understanding
 achieved high standards of competence in handling information and communications
technology and understood the underlying processes.

Citizenship

Students would have:

 an understanding of ethics and values, how personal behaviour should be informed by these,
and how to contribute to society
 understood how society, government and business work, and the importance of active
citizenship
 understood cultural and social diversity, in both national and global contexts, and why these
should be respected and valued
 understood the social implications of technology
 understood how to manage aspects of their own lives, and the techniques they might use to
do so including managing their own financial affairs

Relating to People

Students would have:

  understood how to relate to other people in varying contexts, including those where they
manage, or are managed by, others, and how to get things done
 understood how to operate in teams, and their own capacities for filling different team roles
 understood how to develop other people, whether as peer or teacher
 developed a range of techniques for communicating by different means, and understood how
and when to use them
 developed competence in managing personal and emotional relationships
 understood, and be able to use, varying means of managing stress and conflict.

Managing Situations

Students would have:

 understood the importance of managing their own time, and developing techniques for doing
so
 understood what is meant by managing change, and have developed a range of techniques
for use in varying situations
 understood the importance both of celebrating success and managing disappointment, and
ways of handling these
 understood what is meant by being entrepreneurial and initiative -taking, and how to develop
capacities for these
 understood how to manage risk and uncertainty, the wide range of contexts in which these
will be encountered, and techniques for managing them.

Managing Information

Students would have:

 developed a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information and
have learned how to analyse, synthesise and apply them
 understood the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement, and have learned
how to do so