April 12th - back to our regular newsletter editions

April 12th - back to our regular newsletter editions

This week we find a very interesting quote about problem solving from NCETM, we summarise the many discussions and comments resulting from the British Chamber of Commerce statements, report on Edexcel support for Functional Skills and celebrate news about the multi-award winning Guroo guys!

NCETM says "success means becoming creative problem solvers!"

The QCDA Functional Skills evaluation was generally very supportive of teaching Functional Skills in KS3. One of the findings in 'Delivery of Functional Skills' was "FS provision can be accommodated and taught effectively within the context of the national curriculum
requirements at KS3 and KS4."

Also supporting this but from a completely different angle is NCETM who argue that doing too much, too quickly with the object of early entry in GCSE can be detrimental. They have a lovely quote which regular readers will indentify as something that warms my heart!

We want students of mathematics to aspire to the highest grades and to pursue the subject to the highest level. But this means becoming creative problem solvers rather than solely efficient examination performers.

Sounds to me like Functional SKills could (and indeed should) be part of the answer again!

Employability Skills

Just about every "heavy" newspaper has jumped on this issue since it was raised last week by David Frost, the outgoing Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce. Using emotive words such as "remedial, failure, victims and attack" pretty much sums up the newspaper views which focussed very heavily on the lack of skills of school and college leavers:

"School leavers do not have the skills needed for the world of work, forcing companies to spend billions of pounds bringing them up to speed"

"Firms forced to spend billions on remedial training for victims of education failure".

Here's a selection of links:

Daily Mail front page

The Telegraph

BBC Radio 5 interview

The Manufacturer

Edexcel on Functional Skills

One very significant change since the Wolf report has been how far the signatories to the letter requesting an extension of Key Skills to September 2012 have distanced themselves from that request.

The Federation of Awarding Bodies said "Increasingly functional skills are meeting the bill and the fact that the current model has created some problems for work-based learners should not detract from the fact that they are proving suitable for full-time students." And there's been no defence from ALP or AoC who both chose to ignore the issues about Key Skills.

Edexcel have always been supportive though and placed a comment on their functional skills website with the words "Functional Skills are challenging, worthwhile qualifications, denoting a marker of student excellence" We couldn't agree more!

Multi award winning Guroo

You know the saying about waiting for a bus then three arrive together. Well, the same can be said about awards up here at Guroo Towers.

Not content with winning the Sun-FM on-line achievement award on March 18th, the Guroo guys then won the Norh East Business Award (Durham and Wearside) for Internet and ICT and capped it all off by winning 2010 Small Business of the Year (Durham and Wearside) at the same event on March 24th.

Keep up to date with GurooFS by "liking" us on facebook here.

Stewart Hutton and Jonathan Wells pitch side after collecting their winners awards at the Stadium of Light.