Over last two years Rethinking Assessment has been working with the City of Doncaster Council, local employers and education providers in the City to explore and prototype a Doncaster Skills Profile – the first regional approach to learner profiling which builds on the Rethinking Assessment Learner Profile conceptual framework.
Doncaster’s Education & Skills 2030 Strategy sets out a vision for equitable and inclusive lifelong learning that empowers people to thrive in life and work. In pursuit of this vision, the strategy focusses on developing a Talent and Innovation Ecosystem (TIE) – bringing the worlds of business and education closer together, and supporting a diverse and inclusive borough-wide learning community approach catering to individual needs.
The TIE aims to serve all learners, from those in the formal education system, to those in jobs looking to update their skills, and those who need new skills to re-enter employment, and has three main pillars:
1. New learning models: Bringing together learners of all ages, employers and community partners to collaborate on meeting real-world design and commercial challenges. By putting learners at the forefront of innovation, the TIE aims to provide learners with opportunities to develop core skills, as well as conceptual and practical knowledge that will allow them to flourish in life and work.
2. Strengths-based and demand-led: Aligning the local learning offer to areas of economic growth potential with existing skills gaps within Doncaster and the South Yorkshire Region to ensure the skills offer is demand-led. Building on the University City ambitions, the TIE aims to promote post-16 learning through five Centres of Excellence; Health & Care, Engineering, Creative & Digital, Green Technology, and Culture.
3. System orchestration: Co-designing and co-delivering learning experiences and validating learning outcomes, supporting learners’ progress through new and existing pathways, building relationships between business, communities and education providers through networks.
A key element in delivering these strategic ambitions is to advance new ways of recognising and showcasing learner talents and abilities, including through an online strengths-based portfolio for every resident which showcases their qualifications alongside wider achievements, skills, career goals and aspirations.
Working with the Rethinking Assessment team, a group of multi-sector stakeholders came together to collaboratively consider how a Learner Profile or Skills Profile could bridge the gap between education and the world of work, and systematically start to build core skills and experiences of the workplace sequentially throughout the education system and into adult learning. We’re really pleased to share our new report which brings together the research, prototypes and learnings from this project, and makes recommendations for next steps.
See: Developing a Digital Skills Profile for Doncaster

The long-term ambition is to develop new forms of assessment and recognition which capture the wider remit of skills and achievements that people have which are inadequately captured by the existing system, and to provide all residents with a digital portfolio which demonstrates to educators and employers everything they have to offer.
As stated by Leanne Hornsby, Service Director for Education and Skills at the City of Doncaster Council:
Cohesion across education, skills and business needs is critical if we are to enable a meaningful pathway into employability aligned to economic development at place levels. It is therefore important to make things as accessible as possible, giving learners of all ages the opportunities to develop and demonstrate their skills in a meaningful way, complimenting formative assessment.
This development is a great example of the impact that collaboration between learners, education professionals, employers and research and development experts can have, driving our Doncaster Skills Profile from concept to reality and into a tangible product that will give people the tools to demonstrate their strengths and thrive in life and work.
This project has been a key component in building the foundations to support the Talent and Innovation Ecosystem for Doncaster, helping to address skills gaps and connecting people to opportunities. This is a resource built by and for the place, creating a common language across a diverse system with competing priorities, but now with a renewed understanding enabling better connectivity and accessibility for all learners, whatever their starting point, through education into employability.