LONDON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- More than 200 schools in England are jettisoning their traditional curricula in favor of teaching more life skills classes such as team-building, experts say.
The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday that educators at the secondary schools have merged classes like history and geography, creating more time to teach students life skills.
The newspaper reported that some schools run three-hour lessons for as many as 90 students under the new curriculum drafted by the Royal Society for the Arts.
"The main difference is that within lessons there is an emphasis on students developing things like being able to work in teams, how to research and how to use information," said Leslie James, head of education at the Royal Society for the Arts.
"It is much more interactive and much less didactic," James said if the new curriculum. "The problem with the traditional curriculum is that students cannot always understand how the different bits of information picked up in different lessons fits together."
Under the new curriculum, students are urged to develop five key "competencies:" learning how to learn, how to become active citizens, how to relate to others, how to manage situations and how to manage information.
