Ed Balls on GMTV

He looked to me like someone making a play for the big job!

DCFS Conference

I was fortunate enough to make the DCFS organised conference on 14-19 in early June.

Some key highlights that I noted .

An ask the audience straw poll at the beginning of the day:

How prepared do you feel about: Diplomas Functional Skills FLT

Very confident 8% 10% 11%

Quite confident 51% 45% 27%

Not that confident 31% 38% 43%

Not at all confident 10% 8% 19%

Targeting

Diplomas are badly targeted - By saying it's for everyone, the message that it's more right for some groups is sadly weakened. DCFS were encouraged to make it clear who the target students were.

Students love them

They like Functional Skills much more than GCSE. They like the practical aspects of the Diplomas. They like the fact they move around - although this is itself is a serious problem for organisations. Retention on the Diplomas is excellent.

Conflict at institution level

There are many many conflicts.

Students movement, difficult to teach, harder to pass, cultural differences between schools and colleges, competition for funding between institutions, scared to put students in who may fail.

One final point. They did make a lot of the fact that by having regional events, we could reduce our carbon footprint. But at the same time I counted a dozen support staff at each regional event - effectively three times the normal number required. Must have cost a fortune to put on and also cost a lot of CO2 putting all those extra people up in the Hilton each night.

Sorry for the break in service - back again now

A few things have conspired to stop me updating my blog.

I had a holiday!

Life at guroo is extremely busy

The www.functionalskills.org forum has been established and this has taken up a fair bit of time.

Back again now though.

Jonathan

Hard to engage kids

Yet another report this week highlighting the difference in achievement between those who have a hard start in life and those who don't.

Looked after children and those who move around a lot do so much more badly at school.  I've mentioned this before but there should be no reason why this is the case, but it is.

I do believe the tightly structured curriculum and the focus on teaching to the test means these groups of children suffer when it comes to exams.  

Lets just hope that the more practical curriculum that will come about with functional skills and, at least for these groups, the introduction of the Foundation Learning Tier will help them.  It's really about time we move away from focusing the majority of the best resources on the borderline and started to address the issues of learning rather than passing exams.