Functional Skills Newsletter May 4th

Our bi-weekly look at the world of Functional Skills.

Diploma research from DCSF, Functional Skills in Foundation Learning video, Guroo goes superfast and more accredited exams.

168 pages of DCSF research about diplomas! A weighty report this one and even I can't justify the use of a bank holiday to read it all. So instead I did a search for functional skills and it threw up in the "Key Findings" section:

• There were some challenges faced in teaching Functional Skills and mapping the skills to principal learning
• Learners were likely to understand the need to pass Functional Skills
• There continued to be some uncertainty about the best way to teach Functional Skills
• Consortia would benefit from further support and guidance on how to link Functional Skills with principal learning
• The perceived disparity between the assessment approach and the aim of Functional Skills should be considered and Awarding Bodies should be encouraged to review the level of difficulty of level 2 exams

Functional Skills in Foundation Learning. A new QCDA video filmed at Lewisham College. We particularly liked the English teacher towards the end who said "Functional Skills is much better, you can really, really teach and its enjoyable. Final word to the Principal "Functional Skills is the strong spine that supports the rest of the learning of the student". We couldn't agree more!

Superfast Guroo. Regular readers will know this newsletter just occasionally mentions Guroo - after all, they do pay the author! The company is delighted to say that a rack of brand new servers has now gone live with quad this and gigabytes of that. Basically it's all really fast now.

Choices, choices - more accredited awarding bodies. We did say it wouldn't be too long before Ofqual approved more Functional Skills exams and we were right. There's now 44 from Edexcel, NOCN, AQA, C&G, WJEC and OCR and there's more to come! A summary is below - full details on the ofqual site here.

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