Extracting employability: closing the widening participation gap in politics teaching through model summits?

Teaching politics and international relations in higher education (HE) has shifted in recent years towards a focus on soft skills, with employability as a core output. The need to improve graduate outcomes has driven sector-wide responses that focus on additional support for students to gain experience and soft skills that can be translated into statements of employability. Yet, degree programmes are still often based on assumptions of students’ pre-existing skill sets, or an expectation that students will learn academic and professional skills as a byproduct of their degree. This article argues that this is problematic as it avoids focusing on the skills gap present in students from widening participation (WP) backgrounds. It establishes that the ‘soft skills’ increasingly sought by employers, such as complex problem-solving, leadership, public speaking, resilience, and active critical thinking, are core outputs of participation in model summits that focus on fast-paced interactive learning. Embracing model summits as a teaching tool presents opportunities for the enhancement of learning by focusing on skills training through the adoption of model summits within and alongside core content, providing students with the opportunity to extract key soft skills during their degree studies, potentially bridging the wider attainment gap for WP students.