Holistic Competencies

Ask a university lecturer, an employer or a parent what they would like to see in a 16-year-old, and the list rarely stops at good grades. Critical thinking, collaboration, empathy, creativity, responsibility. For years these capacities were called “soft skills” — as if they were secondary, a pleasant add-on to “real” learning. Research shows there is nothing soft about them: they are among the strongest predictors of how a life unfolds.

What we mean by “holistic competencies”

We follow the conceptualisation of the OECD Learning Compass 2030, in which a competency is the integration of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values mobilised to meet complex demands (OECD, 2019). We call them holistic because they involve the whole person — how they think, relate, feel and act.

In the CogniPraxis Framework, holistic competencies form the second level of learner development and are organised in three clusters:

• Interpersonal, emotional and ethical: emotional awareness and self-awareness; empathy and respect for diversity; communication and collaboration; ethical judgement, integrity and responsibility.
• Thinking and meaning-making: critical thinking, problem solving and decision making; systems thinking; creativity, imagination and innovation; curiosity, inquiry and reflection.
• Future-ready, civic and stewardship: health literacy; global citizenship, environmental awareness and intercultural understanding; digital, technological and AI literacy; financial literacy; agency, initiative and entrepreneurial spirit.

Holistic competencies are built on executive functions. Critical thinking requires holding back your first impression; collaboration requires shifting into another person’s perspective; creativity requires keeping several ideas in mind at once and combining them. That is why, in our framework, they sit on the second level — not because they matter less, but because they presuppose the cognitive core.

What research shows: at school

Social and emotional learning also lifts academic achievement

A landmark meta-analysis of 213 school-based social and emotional learning programmes, involving more than 270,000 students, found improvements in social and emotional skills, attitudes and behaviour — and an 11-percentile-point gain in academic achievement (Durlak et al., 2011). The benefits were still visible at follow-up months and years later (Taylor et al., 2017). A more recent meta-analysis of more than 400 studies and over half a million students confirmed positive effects on skills, attitudes, school climate and academic achievement (Cipriano et al., 2023).

Thinking can be cultivated

Critical thinking is not an innate gift: a meta-analysis of interventions designed to teach it found that it improves when students engage in dialogue, work on authentic problems and receive mentoring (Abrami et al., 2015). Creativity is positively — modestly but consistently — related to school achievement (Gajda et al., 2017), and intellectual curiosity has been described as the “third pillar” of academic performance, alongside intelligence and effort (von Stumm et al., 2011).

Responsibility and collaboration

Conscientiousness — the tendency to be organised, responsible and dependable — predicts academic performance to a degree comparable with intelligence and independently of it (Poropat, 2009). And cooperative learning, when well designed, has positive effects on both achievement and students’ attitudes towards learning (Kyndt et al., 2013).

Beyond school: in life

Here the findings become even more striking. In a study that followed children for 13 to 19 years, social competence in kindergarten — whether a child cooperates, helps, listens to others and solves problems with peers — predicted education, employment, mental health, substance use and criminal activity in young adulthood (Jones et al., 2015).

In the labour market, jobs requiring strong social skills have grown steadily in recent decades and are increasingly well rewarded (Deming, 2017). Character skills predict success in life — educational, occupational, health — sometimes as strongly as cognitive skills, and, crucially, they can be developed (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Personality traits predict longevity, relationship stability and occupational attainment to a degree comparable with socioeconomic background and cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2007). In international reports on the future of work, the skills highlighted as most critical are analytical and creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning (World Economic Forum, 2025).

Critical thinking has tangible real-world effects too: people who scored higher on a critical-thinking assessment reported fewer negative life events — in health, finances, legal matters and relationships (Butler, 2012). Low health literacy is associated with more hospitalisations, less use of preventive care and, among older adults, higher mortality (Berkman et al., 2011). Financial literacy is associated with planning ahead, saving and avoiding high-cost borrowing (Lusardi & Mitchell, 2014). And at the level of society, economic analyses estimate that well-designed social and emotional learning programmes return, on average, around 11 dollars for every dollar invested (Belfield et al., 2015).

“Soft” skills are, in fact, among the most durable predictors of how a life will unfold.

Where a child will need them

Holistic competencies do not live in a separate box. Children need them when they work in a group and someone disagrees; when they try to understand a character’s point of view in a novel; when a viral video seems convincing; when an AI answer sounds confident but is wrong; when they have to manage their pocket money or make a decision about their health; and, later, in jobs that probably do not exist yet.

What it looks like in practice

• Ages 6–8: names the feelings of a story’s hero and connects them to their own; waits and listens during pair work; wonders “what else could this object be?”; looks after a class plant and records its growth.
• Ages 9–11: investigates how much water their household uses in a week — combining mathematics, science, financial and environmental thinking; compares two headlines about the same event and identifies the difference in perspective.
• Ages 12–14: takes part in a structured debate on an ethical dilemma in science; designs, with their team, a small campaign about a problem at school.
• Ages 15–16: checks the reliability of an answer produced by an AI tool; develops a social-enterprise idea with a real budget.

All of this happens within academic content — in language, mathematics and science — not in a separate “skills hour”. The specific methods and practices that make this possible are presented in the article “How Development Becomes Practice”.

The gap between research and the classroom

Holistic competencies now hold a central place in educational debate — at the OECD, in modern curricula, and in Greece with the introduction of the Skills Workshops (Εργαστήρια Δεξιοτήτων). This is an important step of recognition. International research, however, points to two pitfalls.

The first is implementation quality. The benefits of social and emotional learning programmes depend on whether they are sequenced, active, focused and explicit — and when implementation is problematic, effects shrink substantially (Durlak et al., 2011). The second is disconnection from content. Generic skills taught separately from their subject area transfer poorly (Tricot & Sweller, 2014), and critical thinking cannot operate without knowledge of what we are thinking about (Willingham, 2007). This is why research recommends moving from stand-alone “programmes” to strategies embedded in everyday teaching (Jones & Bouffard, 2012).

The CogniPraxis approach

At CogniPraxis, holistic competencies are developed within the lessons themselves, on the foundation of executive functions, and supported by mental toughness — the capacity to use them under pressure. Every lesson has an explicit academic and an explicit developmental goal, because empathy, critical thinking and responsibility are not taught through definitions; they are cultivated through experience, dialogue and reflection.