I listened in to an on-line debate today held by Cambridge Assessment about exam standards. A couple of things jumped out at me from the summaries at the end.
Anastasia de Waal, Director of Family and Education at Civitas said that exam bodies were "very good" at responding to the need for weaker qualifications that could be successfully passed. I agree!
Professor Roger Murphy, Centre for Developing and Evaluating Lifelong Learning, University of Nottingham. Assessment should follow curriculum, it shouldn't lead it. Too often assessment messes up education by placing teachers under pressure to "teach to the test". A major issue!
Thursday 29 April 2010
Monday 26 April 2010
exam spending
Astonishing figures these. Schools spend £281m on exam fees , that's a 7% rise in one year and an 82% rise in 6 years.
AQA is the biggest recipient in schools with 42% market share followed by OCR 26% and edexcel 25%.
Take into account all income from all sectors and edexcel earn £205m from exams, AQA earn £144m and OCR £121m - so the big three have revenues approaching half a billion pounds and that's before you get into all the specialist awarding bodies.
Frustrations with my local college
The Principal of my local college appears in print today saying that she is doubtful about Functional Skills. She defends Adult Literacy and Numeracy and perhaps, if this qualifications had not been abused and offered to people under 19, she might have a point.
But it has.
Offering young people a 40 question multiple choice test paper which they can take as many times as they wish does not prepare young people for employment, further academic study or community development.
Functional Skills does.
Monday 19 April 2010
Functional Skills Newsletter April 20th
Our bi-weekly look at the world of Functional Skills.
L2 maths student needs your help, an excellent video featuring functional skills, DCSF policy statements, news comments from The Times and a thank you to all our readers for making my April 1st!
Can you help? This newsletter starts with a plea for help. A young reader of the forum is getting very frustrated. He's passed everything except L2 Functional Skills Maths (even GCSE) and doesn't know what's going wrong. Follow this link to the full question and lets see if we can collectively help out.
Functional Skills in Apprenticeships videos. Many of the QCDA sponsored videos miss the mark, but this one doesn't. Concise, clear and with plenty of student comment. Also check out the National Apprentice Service videos featuring Marco Pierre White.
DCSF Policy statement - it came, it went, it's come back. Lots of people asked me for the link to the DCSF policy statement which mysteriously disappeared a month ago. Well, it's back and it's here!
The Times on Functional Skills. It isn't very often a specific report makes the nationals. But it did on April 9th. A little bit of doom-mongering from the national agencies mixed with good support from employers. Read it in full here.
And finally - thanks to everyone who acknowledged our "special edition" newsletter on April 1st. It's always gratifying to know we have so many readers with a great sense of humour and if any exam boards are reading this, I can assure them there is a market for a GCSE in Social Networking. Click here for the escalator video again.
Struggling to get your students engaged with revision? Try GCSEpod for fantastic iPod based revision resources.
Assessment bodies for Functional Skills - 1st ones
Jonathan Wells writes that Ofqual can confirm that 20 Functional Skills qualifications have been accredited ready for teaching from September 2010. I understand that this is just the start of many such announcements and don't read anything into the short list of the fact that AQA didn't get anything or that English level 2 won't be assessed. It's because only qualifications that fully meet the required standards can be accredited by Ofqual whereas in the past many were accredited "with conditions". That's changed now.
More Functional Skills qualifications will be accredited as awarding organisations submit revised specifications that meet the criteria and it is expected that significantly more will be approved by May.
Learners wishing to start their Diploma in September can be confident that they will be able to start as planned and the required component qualifications will be available.
Notes:
Functional Skills in English, mathematics and ICT are stand alone qualifications available to a range of learners, designed to enable those individuals to work effectively and independently. They are also a required component of the Diploma qualification and of Apprenticeships and Foundation Learning.
Details of the accredited courses will be placed on the National Database of Accredited Qualifications (NDAQ), which can be found here:http://www.accreditedqualifications.org.uk/index.aspx
The qualifications accredited so far are:
- Edexcel, English, Entry 2
- Edexcel, English, Entry 3
- NOCN, Mathematics, Entry 1
- OCR, ICT, Entry 1
- OCR, ICT, Entry 2
- OCR, ICT, Entry 3
- C&G, ICT, Entry 1
- C&G, ICT, Entry 2
- Edexcel, ICT, Entry 3
- OCR, ICT, Level 1
- OCR, ICT, Level 2
- WJEC, ICT, Level 2
- Edexcel, English, Entry 1
- NOCN, English, Level 1
- OCR, Mathematics, Entry 1
- OCR, Mathematics, Entry 2
- OCR, Mathematics, Entry 3
- NOCN, Mathematics, Level 1
- WJEC, Mathematics, Level 1
- WJEC, Mathematics, Level 2
Mid election quietness
What a really quiet week in education, given an election and all that.
The biggest news seems to be that SATS are being cancelled and some consultancy outfit in education has decided that if every college was as efficient as the best 5%, they'd save £200m - WOW.
Perhaps the most important thing from Functional Skills point of view is that the School Report Card bill has died. What is interesting is that after all the panics of what it might include, there seems to be more panics about what might replace it!
Just goes to show that there was probably general acceptance of the SRC in the first place?
Monday 12 April 2010
Off message
Normally I write about Functional Skills, but it's my blog so every now and again I see or hear something that makes me smile.
Apparently Geordie people have the sexiest accent - now that's news!
Jonathan x
Friday 9 April 2010
Good article in the Times today
All about Functional Skills and it argues the case quite clearly.
I must add that I think it's a bit of a cheek for ATL say that no support has been given when in reality, loads of support has been given and is available but schools and colleges have been in denial that Functional Skills will arrive so have chosen not to embrace the change.
the text is below in full.
Company bosses have long despaired about the lack of basic skills shown by many school-leavers turning up at the workplace.
Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco and Sir Stuart Rose, the chairman of Marks & Spencer, have both spoken about the difficulty of finding literate and numerate recruits. And a report on functional skills for the CBI indicated that more than half of employers thought young people applying for jobs were inarticulate, unable to perform simple calculations or understand written instructions.
The concerns have forced the Government to introduce a Functional Skills qualification from September which will put English, maths and information communications technology (ICT) into real-world contexts — and try to make sure that school-leavers can read, write and add up.
Sandra Stalker, the director of general qualifications and life skills at the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, a government quango, says: “We have always taught kids to read and write and add up ... What has been lacking has been the application of the knowledge in real life and work style environments.”
Results of a three-year pilot qualification have not been released by the agency but it is pressing ahead with the launch and says that “on the whole” those consulted were positive.
Samina Khan, the agency’s head of lifelong learning and skills, says the qualification is necessary because of an existing lack of confidence among students when it comes to putting their skills into practice. “They will learn to do adding up or write a piece of extended writing, but employers want them to be able to apply all those skills.”
The best employees are those who can approach a problem and use their basic knowledge to solve it, she says, while the ability to write a business letter, tot up an invoice or keep a record of a meeting is the minimum that employers expect.
“The Functional Skills qualification will enable them to demonstrate to employers that they have mastered those particular skills,” says Ms Stalker.
The new exam will pose such real-life problems as:
It takes 1.75 metres of denim to make a pair of jeans. Denim costs £3.50 per metre. (a) How much will the material for the jeans cost? (b) If the price of denim rises by 5 per cent, how much will the material then cost?’
The CBI wants the exam to be assessed not on a pass or failure basis, but to display a mark for employers to see how well candidates have done. There are fears that fewer young people will succeed under the new system compared to the number who went through the Key Skills qualification, which it replaces.
Teresa Frith, skills policy manager at the Association of Colleges, fears the bar may have been raised too high. “We are told that the functional skills levels tend to be about half a level up from their key skill equivalent and we believe a lot of learners will find this quite challenging.”
Functional skills have already been introduced as part of the new diploma — the qualification that aims to bridge the gap between vocational and academic learning. They proved to be the stumbling block for candidates in the initial stages and Ofsted said that there was “little firm evidence of their achievement in functional skills”, in their first report into the qualification.
Almost half the teenagers studying for the new diploma were not receiving satisfactory teaching in English, maths and ICT, the inspectors said.
Ms Stalker says that the failings were only teething problems. “We have only had one year working through the diploma. Kids won’t do well in a functional skills assessment unless they have been taught properly as an integral part of the system.
“At the early stages that wasn’t happening because teachers hadn’t had the training.”
But business and teachers’ leaders warn that there will be similar problems this September.
Susan Anderson, the CBI director for education and skills, says: “Many students have only been entered for the test, rather than specifically taught these [functional] skills. Teachers need the support and time needed to teach these new modules — assessment only isn’t good enough.”
Adrian Prandle, a policy adviser at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that members of the union were worried about the widescale introduction of the qualification.
“Our members feel unprepared. We [told] the QCDA that teachers and lecturers needed more support but I don’t think that has materialised.”
As well as being able to apply mathematics, English and ICT to real life, employers need staff with “soft” skills that are harder to teach and difficult to examine.
The CBI’s report on functional skills quoted employers as saying that they were “genuinely more interested in attitude” than scores in an exam.
They warned that many young people lacked a good manner with customers, the ability to turn up on time to work and were unable to take responsibility for themselves and their appearance.
Until there is a qualification in adulthood, they may have to carry on sounding the alarm.
Thursday 1 April 2010
FS News - special edition 1st April
A stop press edition Functional Skills news.
STOP PRESS ..... STOP PRESS ....QDCA expected to make announcement about major changes to 14-19 today, changes to Functional Skills examination environment conditions and a final solution to manage cheating in assessments
QDCA expected to make major announcement about GCSEs today! To coincide with the official birth today of QDCA and Ofquals, we're expecting an announcement this morning about major changes to the 14-19 qualification structure to better accommodate and reflect today's lifestyle.
- The new GCSE "exam toolkit" will feature a pay as you go mobile phone loaded with 10 text messages and 5 minutes of voice calls. Students will be able to use these in all exams but the limited number will mean students will need to learn about priorities.
- A new short course "GCSE Social Networking" will be launched with support from Facebook and Twitter. As an experiment it will feature a new top grade A** for candidates who are able to attract more than 1000 followers before the final assessments which we understand will be taken on-line using mobile devices.
- A fifth suite of learning will be added to existing four funded suites (Apprenticeship, Diploma, GCSE/A Level, Foundation). Unnamed as yet, we understand it is based loosely around celebrity lifestyles, will be focused on PR and gossip and will be aimed at students who think the world owes them a living.
Changes to Functional Skills assessment conditions! To better reflect the real world nature of Functional Skills, the dates for all Functional Skills examinations will now be kept secret with students being told about them just 15 minutes before they start.
An employer's representative was quoted as saying "in business, we never know what's going to happen next but when it does, our bosses expect you to have the answer straight away so this change just reflects what happens in the world".
A final end to cheating! Functional Skills will also be used as a testing ground in a new effort to end cheating in exams. In a radical change, all rules will be scrapped to encourage peer discussion, practical use of technology and extensive use of contacts. Dubbed by the Daily Mail as "it's not what you know, it's who you know" exams, it's another change that reflects the real world nature of the qualification.
Problem solving in the real world! Continuing the theme of problem solving, we spotted this video and thought it would be a great starter to for all lessons on April 1st. Click here to view.
Enjoy! - from all the guys (and gals) at guroo - happy holidays!
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