Summer weather

On holiday this week in Devon and up early to play golf to be met by howling gales and genuinely monsoon rain conditions.

I don't have enough clothes with me to go outside in this - the glorious British weather - I thought we were going to have a lovely summer!.

A week off!

My summer holidays are this week.

Any one who knows me will also know that for many years we've been going to an activities hotel in devon for a few days. No different this year either.

So a week of football, tennis, squash, golf, badminton, massages, great food, snooker, swimming and generally punishing my body as much as is possible in a period of 5 days.

Then it's back to building the content for guroo!

End of term - end of work?

Not likely.

We're pretty much at the end of term here and the phones have mainly stopped ringing but now the hard work starts.

I get four days off next week but on 3rd August we start a two week intensive content project. 6 people in the team, reviewing, improving, testing, trialing and generally getting all the new stuff ready to go. It's hard work but probably one of the most rewarding jobs of the year and when it starts to go live at the end of the month it makes it all worth while.

Another career door closed

A piece in the TES made me think today.

It was all about teachers having thr right level of qualification and basically the argument was that taechers should have at least a B at GCSE and certainly no worse than a 2;2 in their degree.

I sort of fail on both accounts, my O level grade in English was just a C and my degree in Pure Maths from 1984 is just a third.

According to the Government, this makes me too thick to be teacher. I don't really have a problem with that as I already have a career but what I do have a problem with is that this apparent focus applies to teachers, who on the whole "do good and add value" to our society whereas bankers don't need any form of qulaification at all and do the complete opposite.

Must be lovely to have a pair of politicians glasses that enable you to see the world with such clear vision!

Level 3 Functional Maths

This doesn't exist, the argument being is that if you can show that you are functional at level 2 then you are functional, you can't become more functional!

But listening to my favourite radio show this morning (Radio 2 Johnnie Walker standing in for Terry Wogan) Johhnnie mentioned that the new maths A level "Using Maths" was causing some consternation amongst the acadmeic community.

Too right, sounds like a level 3 functional maths qualification to me.

But then again, perhaps we could ask those people who are supposed to be numerate (bankers, those insurance people who tell me that I'm lucky not to have lost more money on my endowmment policy, politicians who apparently think that a cut in funding is actually an increase - I could go on) to do this real life A level in Maths?

Getting it right

Something I've noticed very clearly over the last few months (since about Easter I guess) is that confidence in what functional skills is, is increasing.

A year ago, 6 months ago even, we'd start every conversation by saying - "do you know what functional skills are?" then spend a few minutes explaining them before we ever talked about Guroo.

But that's changes, and it's a bit like a switch, the change has happened remarkably quickly and the balance is now in favour of knowledge about FS. Now we're being asked how we help!

Add to that the fact that Nov and Jan exam results were very much more respectable and indeed were higher than the equivalent GCSE then it's all starting to come together.