Impact Report 2025/26: The Skills That Matter

At Apps for Good, we have long believed in the important balance between digital literacy, computing skills and essential life skills when it comes to helping young people to thrive, and equipping them to shape their future. Research consistently shows how vital all these skills are, especially in an increasingly AI-driven world, but striking that balance continues to be a challenge for schools, educators and curriculum design.

There is a consensus that essential skills such as listening, teamwork and problem solving are more vital than ever:

• The Skills Builder’s Essential Skills Tracker report (2025) showed that higher levels of essential skills are associated with greater AI adoption, higher wages, and better readiness for technological change.
• Research by Skills England (2026) has identified that a demand for specialist AI skills is accompanied by a need for transferable skills including digital literacy, problem solving, communication and critical thinking, and that we must provide young people with both opportunities to develop those skills and a shared language to articulate them.
• The Pearson School Report (2026) shows that these priorities are shared by educators and young people themselves; 60% of teachers say today’s education system does not set students up with the skills they need to thrive, and students ranked the most important skills for their futures as confidence, problem solving and human skills (such as communication and teamwork).

While we need to maintain this emphasis on essential skills, and ensure our education system can support students to develop them, we must also recognise the ongoing need for digital literacy and computing skills as technology continues to evolve rapidly, fundamentally changing roles and technical skills required by the labour market. The Pearson School Report highlights that although 68% of school students say their school is helping prepare them for a digital world, only 6% of teachers believe that the education system has enough digital emphasis to prepare learners for their futures.

Through building their prototype app, students across all Apps for Good courses build their digital literacy and computing skills. Essential skills are developed through a project-based learning approach that involves working as a team, generating ideas and bringing them to life through presenting to Industry Volunteers. While this dual development of both technical and essential skills has always been a core component of our learning approach, we regularly review our course content and feedback from students and teachers to identify where we can strengthen opportunities for skills development. Adaptations this year have included:

• Enhanced support for the development of computing skills: we improved our guidance materials on how to use App Lab (the platform students use to create their prototypes).
• Streamlined Industry Engagement and Showcase entry: we implemented personalised, automated communications for educators, giving more students direct access to industry volunteers to build their confidence, develop their apps further, and practice and build essential skills like speaking and listening.
• Updated our language on essential skills: we adapted the language in our course materials and post-course surveys to align with updates to the Skills Builder Universal Framework.

This year’s teacher and student feedback data suggests that our courses continue to develop both computing and essential skills for the majority of learners.

The role of AI in society, education and the workplace looks very different to how it looked when we piloted our first AI for Good course in 2024, and there are both opportunities and risks when it comes to students getting hands-on with AI.

AI use is increasing across the education space, but only 16% of teachers feel confident teaching about AI and 33% of secondary students don’t feel confident in understanding AI ethics. Meanwhile, young people are eager for practical AI experience; 56% of young people say hands-on AI projects would help them most.

In response to this increasing need, we’ve just launched our brand new course, AI for Good 2.0, which has been designed specifically for students to develop the skills that matter:

• Practical AI and computing skills: students build AI-powered apps to tackle real-world challenges, choosing from two coding pathways, JavaScript or AI-assisted (vibe) coding with Canva Code
• Critical thinking and AI-literacy: practical activities and group discussion help learners explore topics including bias, ethics, responsible AI, and deepfakes before applying their knowledge to their own projects
• The essential skills of teamwork, creativity, problem solving, speaking and listening: each lesson is mapped to a specific Step of the Skills Builder Universal Framework (which has been academically validated as a reliable and valid instrument for building and assessing essential skills)

As AI becomes more capable, human skills become more vital. We’re really proud of the way AI for Good 2.0 focuses on those human skills while giving teachers and learners practical, safe ways to engage with and use AI, and we can’t wait to report back in next year’s Impact Report about what we’ve learned!