Wednesday 30 September 2009

Spending doom and gloom

Spending cuts are very much in the news at the moment with current Government and possible Government ministers seemingly falling over themselves to show how much can be cut without making any difference.

I remember the early 90's when ICT was becoming more and more popular in schools at the same time as tight spending controls meant that much less money was in the public sector.

It didn't stop investment, spending money on the right things will always be top of any priority list, the issue is spending money on the wrong things and it's this that gets cut when spending is drawn in.


Friday 25 September 2009

UKCES Skills analysis

Published this week is an analysis of how the UK compares to the OECD international community on skills.

The bottom line is that at lower and intermediate levels, the UK has a big problem and its getting worse as the rest of the world improves their skills at a faster rate that the UK does.

Even worse, fixing this takes a long time, it can't be fixed solely at school or college, in 10 years time, 80% of the workforce are already in employment now!

I don't have any magic bullets, but it is a problem that we all can help in fixing by up skilling everyone. To get into the top 10 of countries, 50% of today's will have to gain a higher level qualification in the next 10 years - that's a lot!

Monday 21 September 2009

Dame Tanni Greay Thomson

Nothing to do with functional skills at all this post. Just to show how inclusive the Great North Run is, I was struggling up to the water stop at 9 miles in what felt like 35 degrees of blazing sunshine (in reality it was just a nice day).

Now I always pick the water up at the end of the queue because there are less queues there and I had to double take as I was handed my bottle by Dame Tanni-Grey Thomson.

Now retired from racing she was just along to help out!

Friday 18 September 2009

Dull and uninspiring exam text books

Another example in the school of "I bet you didn't know that you knew this already" thinking.

Exam boards that encourage their chief examiners to write a book about the subject end up with an uninspiring and dull book that is designed to get teachers to teach solely to the test.

Further that having a chief examiner write a book can be seen as anti-competitive and a possible restraint of trade - strong stuff indeed.

We collectively need to make sure that Functional Skills does not end up like this. Certainly the learning materials that we produce at Guroo try to avoid this trap,

Thursday 10 September 2009

exelearning

I've been playing with exelearning as part a project to turn all of the guroo functional skills learning content into scorm packages.

It seems to work quite well, very clunky if you are editing long sets of questions, but it's useable and quite functional.

The next stage for me is Moodle!

Tuesday 1 September 2009

D DAY

Diploma Day that is - it was even announced straight aftyer Johnnie Walker crashed the pips at 8am this morning.

Estimates suggest 35000 new studnets start this morning plus 10000 still doing them from last year.