Basic Skills and Competencies for Lifelong Learning
Basic Skills
The incorporation of basic skills into the curriculum emphasizes essential learning from an inclusive approach focused on applying acquired knowledge. These are the skills a young person should have developed by the end of compulsory education to achieve personal fulfillment, active citizenship, successful adulthood, and lifelong learning.
Purposes of Basic Skills in the Curriculum
Including basic skills in the curriculum serves several purposes:
- Integrating different learning types (formal, informal, non-formal).
- Enabling students to connect their learning, establish links between content, and use it effectively in various situations.
- Guiding teaching by identifying essential content and evaluation criteria.
Relationship Between Curriculum Areas and Skills
Curriculum areas are designed to help students achieve educational objectives and acquire basic skills. Each area contributes to developing different skills, and core competencies are achieved through work in multiple areas.
Organizational and Functional Measures
Various organizational and functional measures are essential to complement the development of basic skills. These include school and classroom organization, student participation, rules of procedure, methodologies, curriculum resources, and the school library. These factors can either favor or hinder the development of skills related to communication, analysis, creation, harmony, citizenship, and digital literacy. Tutorial action can also contribute to acquiring skills related to learning regulation, emotional development, and social skills. Finally, planning complementary and extracurricular activities can enhance the development of all basic skills.
Eight Core Competencies
Based on the European Union’s proposal, eight core competencies have been identified:
- Competence in linguistic communication
- Mathematical competence
- Competence in knowledge and interaction with the physical world
- Data processing and digital competence
- Social and civic competence
- Cultural and artistic competence
- Competence for learning to learn
- Autonomy and initiative
This Annex provides a description, purpose, and distinctive aspects of these competencies, outlining the essential level students should achieve by the end of compulsory education. Although referring to the end of this stage, their development should start from the beginning of schooling for gradual and consistent acquisition. Therefore, Primary Education considers these competencies and specifies the goals all students should achieve. While some aspects of these skills are not specific to this stage, it lays the groundwork for further development.
The curriculum is structured around areas of knowledge, which provide the referents for developing skills in this phase. Each area includes explicit references to its contribution to basic skills. Objectives and content selection aim to ensure the development of all skills. Assessment criteria provide benchmarks to evaluate progress in their acquisition.
1. Linguistic Competence in Communication
This competency refers to using language as a tool for oral and written communication, representation, interpretation, understanding reality, constructing and communicating knowledge, and self-regulating thought, emotion, and behavior.
The knowledge, skills, and attitudes specific to this competency enable individuals to express thoughts, emotions, experiences, and opinions; engage in critical and ethical discussions; generate ideas; structure knowledge; provide coherence and cohesion to speech and actions; make decisions; and enjoy listening, reading, and expressing themselves orally and in writing. These contribute to developing self-esteem and confidence.
Communicating and conversing involve skills for building constructive relationships with others and the environment, approaching new cultures, and gaining respect and consideration. Thus, linguistic competence is crucial for effective coexistence and conflict resolution.
Playing, performing, and discussing involve understanding various verbal interactions, becoming proficient in expressing and understanding spoken messages in different situations, and adapting communication to the context. It also involves actively using linguistic and non-linguistic codes and communicative rules to produce appropriate oral texts.
Reading and writing involve strengthening abilities to search, collect, and process information; understanding, writing, and using different text types with various communicative intentions; and fostering creativity. Reading facilitates interpreting and understanding written language, providing pleasure, discovering new environments, languages, and cultures, and enhancing communicative competence.
Selecting and implementing specific purposes for linguistic communication (dialogue, reading, writing) is linked to fundamental aspects of this competency, such as mentally representing, interpreting, and understanding reality, and self-regulating and organizing knowledge.
Understanding and communicating practical knowledge requires reflective knowledge about language and its rules, including the ability to observe and analyze language. Expressing and interpreting different discourses in various social and cultural contexts implies knowing and applying language rules and interaction strategies effectively.
This competency includes awareness of social conventions, values, cultural aspects, and language versatility depending on context and intention. It involves empathy, the ability to read, listen, analyze, and consider different opinions critically and sensitively, express ideas and emotions adequately, and accept and provide constructive criticism.
With varying mastery levels, especially in written language, this competency extends to foreign languages, enabling communication in different contexts, enriching social relations, and promoting access to diverse information, communication, and learning sources.
Developing linguistic competence by the end of compulsory education involves mastering oral and written language in multiple contexts and the functional use of at least one foreign language.
2. Mathematical Competence
This is the ability to use and relate numbers, basic operations, symbols, and forms of mathematical expression and reasoning to produce and interpret information, expand knowledge of quantitative and spatial aspects of reality, and solve problems related to everyday life and the workplace.
Mathematical competence includes interpreting and expressing information, data, and arguments clearly and precisely, enabling lifelong learning and encouraging effective participation in social life.
This competency also implies knowledge and mastery of basic mathematical elements (numbers, measures, symbols, geometry) in real or simulated everyday situations and implementing reasoning processes to solve problems or obtain information. These processes involve applying information to various situations, following arguments, identifying main ideas, and estimating and judging the logical validity of arguments and information. Consequently, mathematical competence involves following thought processes (induction, deduction) and applying computational algorithms or logic elements to identify the validity of arguments and assess the certainty of results derived from valid reasoning.
Mathematical competence involves progressive readiness, security, and confidence in handling information and situations (problems, unknowns) containing mathematical elements, using them appropriately based on respect and appreciation for certainty and reasoning.
This competency becomes meaningful when mathematical elements and reasoning are used to address everyday situations. Therefore, it includes identifying such situations, applying problem-solving strategies, and selecting appropriate techniques to calculate, represent, and interpret reality from available information. Ultimately, it involves the ability to use mathematical activity in diverse contexts. Its development in compulsory education is achieved by applying mathematical knowledge spontaneously to various situations, including other fields of knowledge and everyday life.
Developing mathematical competence by the end of compulsory education leads to spontaneously using mathematical elements and reasoning to interpret and produce information, solve everyday problems, and make decisions. It involves applying skills and attitudes to reason mathematically, understand mathematical arguments, express and communicate in mathematical language, use appropriate tools, and integrate mathematical knowledge to respond effectively to life situations with varying complexity.
3. Competence in the Knowledge and Interaction with the Physical World
This is the ability to interact with the physical world, both natural and human-made, to understand events, predict consequences, and work towards improving and preserving living conditions for oneself, others, and other living beings. It involves performing adequately, with autonomy and initiative, in diverse areas of life and knowledge (health, productivity, consumption, science, technology) and interpreting the world by applying concepts and principles from different scientific fields.
This competency includes perceiving the physical space where life and human activity develop, both on a large scale and in the immediate environment, and interacting with the surrounding space: moving within it and solving problems involving objects and their position.
Furthermore, competence in interacting with the physical space implies awareness of the influence of human presence, settlement activity, introduced changes, resulting landscapes, and the importance of ensuring that all human beings benefit from development. It also involves seeking the conservation of natural resources and diversity and maintaining global and intergenerational solidarity. It fosters critical observation of reality, analysis of information and advertising messages, and responsible consumer habits.
Based on knowledge of the human body, nature, and human interaction with it, this competency enables individuals to reason about different lifestyles and promotes a healthy mental and physical life in a healthy natural and social environment. It involves considering both individual and collective health and demonstrating responsibility and respect for others and oneself.
This competency enables individuals to identify questions or problems, draw evidence-based conclusions, understand and make decisions about the physical world, and understand the changes human activity has on the environment, health, and quality of life. It involves applying knowledge and procedures to respond to individual, organizational, and environmental needs.
It also incorporates the implementation of scientific and technical concepts and basic scientific theories. This involves the progressive ability to implement systematic analysis processes and scientific inquiry attitudes: identifying and raising relevant issues, conducting direct and indirect observations within a theoretical framework, asking questions, locating, obtaining, analyzing, and representing qualitative and quantitative information, comparing and contrasting tentative solutions or hypotheses, making predictions and inferences, identifying necessary knowledge (theoretical and empirical) to answer scientific questions, and obtaining, interpreting, evaluating, and communicating findings in different contexts (academic, personal, and social). It also means recognizing the nature, strengths, and limitations of research activity as a social construction of knowledge throughout history.
This competency also provides skills related to planning and managing technical solutions, following criteria of economy and efficiency to meet everyday and employment needs.
Ultimately, this competency involves developing and applying scientific and technological thinking to interpret information, predict, and make decisions with personal initiative and autonomy in a world where advancements in science and technology significantly influence personal life, society, and the natural world. It involves differentiating and evaluating scientific knowledge alongside other forms of knowledge and using ethical values associated with science and technology development.
Consistent with these abilities and skills, this core competency includes the responsible use of natural resources, environmental care, rational and responsible consumption, and the protection of individual and collective health as key elements of people’s quality of life.
4. Data Processing and Digital Competence
This competency involves seeking, obtaining, processing, and communicating information and transforming it into knowledge. It incorporates various skills, from accessing information to transmitting it through multiple media after processing, including using information and communication technologies (ICT) as essential tools for learning and communicating.
It is associated with gathering, selecting, recording, processing, and analyzing information using various techniques and strategies to access it according to the source and medium used (oral, print, audiovisual, digital multimedia). It requires mastering specific languages (textual, numerical, iconic, visual, graphic, and sound) and their decoding and transfer patterns. It also involves applying knowledge of different information types, their sources, potential, location, and the most common languages and media in which they are expressed.
Possessing information does not automatically equate to knowledge. Transforming information into knowledge requires reasoning skills to organize, relate, analyze, synthesize, and make inferences and deductions of varying complexity. It also means communicating information and knowledge using expressive resources that incorporate different languages, specific techniques, and the potential of ICT.
Being competent in using ICT as a tool for intellectual work includes using it to generate and transmit information and knowledge. For example, it can be used as a tool in using models for mathematical, physical, social, economic, or artistic purposes. This competency allows individuals to process and manage complex information, solve real problems, make decisions, work collaboratively, extend communication environments for community participation in formal and informal learning, and create responsible and creative productions.
Digital competence includes using ICT to extract maximum performance from understanding the nature and operation of technology systems and their impact on the personal and social world. It also implies managing strategies to identify and solve common software and hardware problems. It allows individuals to leverage information, analyze it critically through personal and collaborative work (synchronous and asynchronous), and interact with increasingly broader physical and social environments. Besides using it as a tool to organize, process, and direct information to pursue learning, work, and leisure goals.
Ultimately, digital competence involves regularly using available technological resources to solve real problems efficiently. It enables individuals to evaluate and select new information resources and technological innovations based on their usefulness for specific tasks or goals.
In summary, data processing and digital competence imply being autonomous, efficient, responsible, critical, and reflective when selecting, processing, and using information and sources and various technological tools. It also involves having a critical and reflective attitude in assessing available information, contrasting it when needed, and respecting socially agreed rules of conduct to regulate the use of information and its sources in different media.
5. Social and Civic Competence
This competency enables individuals to understand the social reality in which they live, cooperate, coexist, and exercise democratic citizenship in a pluralistic society, and commit to contributing to its improvement. It encompasses diverse and complex skills for participating, making decisions, choosing how to behave in certain situations, and taking responsibility for choices and decisions.
Overall, it involves using knowledge about the evolution and organization of societies, the characteristics and values of the democratic system, and moral judgments to choose and make decisions and actively and responsibly exercise the rights and duties of citizenship.
This competency promotes understanding the historical and social reality of the world, its evolution, achievements, and problems. Critically comprehending reality requires experience, knowledge, and awareness of different perspectives. It involves using multi-causal and systemic analysis to judge social and historical events and problems, reflect on them comprehensively and critically, and make critical and logically valid arguments about real situations and engage in dialogue to collectively improve the understanding of reality.
It also means understanding the characteristics of contemporary societies, their growing diversity and evolving nature, and demonstrating an understanding of the contribution of different cultures to the evolution and progress of humankind. It involves having a sense of belonging to the society in which one lives and demonstrating a sense of global citizenship while supporting local identity.
This competency also includes essential social skills that enable individuals to recognize that conflicts of values and interests are part of living together, resolve them constructively, and make independent decisions using knowledge of society and values built through critical reflection and dialogue within the framework of basic cultural patterns of each region, country, or community.
The ethical dimension of social and civic competence involves awareness of the environment, evaluating and reconstructing emotional and rational aspects for the progressive establishment of one’s own value system, and behaving in line with them when facing decisions or conflicts. This means understanding that not every personal position is unethical if it is based on respect for universal principles or values, such as those enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights.
Accordingly, the skills for this competency include knowledge and values, learning to communicate in different contexts, expressing one’s ideas and listening to others, empathizing and understanding different viewpoints, and making decisions at various levels of community life, valuing individual and collective interests. It also includes practicing dialogue and negotiation to reach agreements as a way to resolve conflicts, both personally and socially.
Finally, this competency includes exercising active and inclusive citizenship, which requires knowledge and understanding of the values underlying states and democratic societies, their rationale, organization, and operation modes. This competency allows for critical reflection on the concepts of democracy, freedom, solidarity, responsibility, participation, and citizenship, with particular attention to the rights and obligations recognized in international declarations, the Spanish Constitution, and autonomous legislation, and their application by various institutions. It involves displaying behavior consistent with democratic values, which in turn leads to skills such as awareness of one’s thoughts, values, feelings, and actions, and self-control over them.
In short, exercising citizenship means having the skills to participate fully and actively in civic life. It means building, accepting, and living by standards of practice consistent with democratic values, exercising rights, freedoms, responsibilities, and civic duties, and defending the rights of others.
In summary, this competency involves understanding the social reality in which we live, addressing conflict and coexistence using ethical judgments based on democratic values and practices, and exercising citizenship by acting with one’s own criteria, contributing to peacebuilding and democracy, and maintaining a constructive, supportive, and responsible attitude towards the enforcement of rights and civic duties.
6. Cultural and Artistic Competence
This competency involves knowing, understanding, appreciating, and critically evaluating various cultural and artistic events, using them as a source of enrichment and enjoyment, and considering them part of the heritage of peoples.
Appreciating cultural and artistic events involves possessing skills and attitudes that allow access to their various manifestations, including thinking skills, perceptual and communicative sensitivity, and an aesthetic sense to understand, value, and enjoy them.
This competency involves utilizing divergent and convergent thinking skills, reworking ideas and feelings, finding sources, forms, and channels of understanding and expression, planning, evaluating, and adjusting processes to achieve results in personal or academic endeavors. It provides both expression and communication skills, as well as the ability to perceive, understand, and enrich productions with different realities and the world of art and culture.
It requires operationalizing initiative, imagination, and creativity to express oneself through artistic codes. Since cultural and artistic activities often involve collective work, it requires cooperation skills to contribute to achieving a final result and awareness of the importance of supporting and appreciating the efforts and contributions of others.
Artistic competence also includes basic knowledge of key techniques, resources, and conventions of different artistic languages, as well as the most outstanding works and manifestations of cultural heritage. It involves identifying the relationship between these manifestations and society, the mentality and technical possibilities of the time they are created, or the person or community that creates them. This also means being aware of the evolution of thought, aesthetic trends, fashions, and tastes, as well as the importance of representative, expressive, and communicative aesthetic factors in the everyday life of individuals and societies.
It also requires an attitude of appreciation for the creativity involved in expressing ideas, experiences, and feelings through different art mediums, such as music, literature, visual arts, performing arts, or popular arts. It demands valuing freedom of expression, the right to cultural diversity, the importance of intercultural dialogue, and the achievement of shared artistic experiences.
In short, the skills that make up this competency concern both the ability to appreciate and enjoy art and other cultural events and those related to using artistic expression resources for one’s own creations. It implies basic knowledge of different cultural and artistic events, applying divergent thinking skills and collaborative working, having an open-minded, respectful, and critical attitude towards the diversity of artistic and cultural expression, and demonstrating a desire and willingness to cultivate one’s own aesthetic and creative capacity and an interest in participating in cultural life and contributing to the preservation of the cultural and artistic worlds of the community and other communities.
7. Competence for Learning to Learn
Learning to learn involves possessing learning skills and being able to continue learning effectively and autonomously according to one’s own goals and needs.
This competency has two fundamental dimensions. First, acquiring awareness of one’s own capabilities (intellectual, emotional, physical), the processes and strategies necessary to develop them, and what one can do for oneself and with the help of others or resources. Second, having a sense of personal competence, resulting in motivation, self-confidence, and a love of learning.
It means being aware of what is known and what needs to be learned, how to learn, and how to manage and control learning processes effectively, optimizing them to meet personal goals. It requires knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses, taking advantage of the former and having the motivation and will to overcome the latter with an expectation of success, progressively increasing confidence to meet new learning challenges.
Therefore, it involves awareness of the abilities involved in learning, such as attention, concentration, memory, language comprehension and expression, and achievement motivation, among others. It involves maximizing their performance and customizing them with the help of different strategies and techniques: systematic observation and recording of facts and relationships, cooperative work projects, problem-solving, planning and organizing activities and time effectively, and knowledge about resources and sources for collecting, sorting, and processing information, including technological resources.
It also involves the curiosity to ask questions, identify and manage the diversity of possible responses to a given situation or problem, and use different strategies and methodologies to address decision-making rationally and critically with the available information.
It includes skills for seeking information (individually or collaboratively) and, especially, for turning it into self-knowledge, linking and integrating new information with previous knowledge and personal experience, and applying knowledge and capabilities in similar situations and contexts.
Moreover, this competency requires setting achievable goals in the short, medium, and long term and meeting them, approaching learning objectives gradually and realistically.
It also requires perseverance in learning, valuing it as an enriching element of personal and social life that is worthy of the effort required. It involves self-assessment and self-regulation, responsibility and personal commitment, knowing how to manage effort, accepting mistakes, and learning from and with others.
In short, learning to learn implies awareness, management, and control of one’s own capabilities and knowledge from a sense of competence or efficacy. It includes strategic thinking, the ability to cooperate, self-assessment, and efficient management of intellectual work resources and techniques, all developed through conscious and rewarding individual and collective learning experiences.
8. Autonomy and Initiative
This competency concerns acquiring awareness and implementing a set of interrelated values and personal attitudes, such as responsibility, perseverance, self-knowledge and self-esteem, creativity, self-criticism, emotional control, the ability to choose, calculate risks and face problems, and the ability to delay gratification, learn from mistakes, and take risks.
It also refers to the ability to choose based on one’s own criteria, imagine projects, and carry out the necessary actions to develop personal plans and options as part of individual or collective projects, taking responsibility for them in personal, social, and occupational contexts.
It involves turning ideas into actions, setting objectives, and planning and carrying out projects. It requires reworking previous approaches or developing new ideas, seeking solutions, and implementing them. Moreover, it involves analyzing possibilities and limitations, understanding the developmental stages of a project, planning, making decisions, acting, evaluating, and self-evaluating what was done to draw conclusions and assess the possibilities for improvement.
It requires having a strategic vision of the challenges and opportunities to help identify and meet goals and maintain motivation to succeed in the tasks undertaken, with healthy personal, academic, and professional ambition. It also involves being able to relate academic offerings, employment, or entertainment opportunities with one’s capabilities, desires, and personal ambitions.
Moreover, it involves a positive attitude towards change and innovation, which presupposes flexibility of approach, viewing changes as opportunities, critically and constructively adapting to them, addressing problems, and finding solutions in each of the vital projects being undertaken.
Since autonomy and initiative often involve other people, this competency requires social skills to interact, cooperate, and work together: empathizing, valuing others’ ideas, engaging in dialogue and negotiation, being assertive to adequately communicate one’s own choices, and working cooperatively and flexibly.
Another important dimension of this competency, closely related to the social aspect, consists of skills and attitudes related to project leadership, including self-confidence, empathy, self-improvement, skills for dialogue and cooperation, organizing time and tasks, the ability to assert and defend rights, and risk-taking.
In short, autonomy and personal initiative involve envisioning, launching, developing, and evaluating individual or collective projects with creativity, confidence, responsibility, and critical thinking.