Barclays LifeSkills Accelerate your skills competition
Barclays LifeSkills, supported by Atlassian Williams F1 Team, has announced Accelerate your skills – a new national competition for young people aged 11–25.
What's involved?
Accelerate your skills launches in September 2026 and will challenge young people to use AI as a co-driver alongside their human skills to solve a real-world challenge.
AI is rapidly transforming the world of work, creating new and exciting opportunities for young people. But it is their human-centric skills, like critical thinking, problem solving and creativity, that are their superpower as they move into the workplace. To thrive, they’ll need to understand how AI works and how to work with it, applying strong human judgement alongside technology.
The competition has been designed to work flexibly across schools, youth and community settings, with free resources provided to support participation. Entries will be judged across three age categories: 11–14, 14–16 and 16–25.
As part of the Accelerate your skills competition, we are able to offer free facilitated LifeSkills sessions which focus on the core human-centric skills outlined above, these sessions are available from September until December.
The subjects we can deliver to help students develop the skills needed for the competition include:
- Listening and speaking (Communication)
- Creativity
- Adaptability
- Problem Solving
- Ethical Reasoning (Content coming soon)
- Critical Thinking (Content coming soon)
Who's this suitable for?
This programme is available to students in Years 7 - 13.
Following booking confirmation, your school should ensure that adequate numbers of staff are present during the workshop, and that the agreed number of students participate.
Where is this delivered?
This programme can only be delivered in school between September and December 2026
Gatsby benchmarks
Learning from career and labour market information
Linking curriculum learning to careers
Encounters with employers and employees
Make an enquiry
Step 1 - Phone our Schools Engagement Team
Phone our Schools Engagement Team on 0207 148 0934 to check eligibility*.
*Places are allocated on a ‘first come first served’ basis to schools in our target cohort (higher than average numbers of pupils eligible for pupil premium funding).