Please follow us on Twitter @guroofs and like us on Facebook at guroo.functionalskills. Congratulations to everyone planning to get married this week and like most of the rest of the country, we too will be off again on a long weekend. The next newsletter is likely to be Tuesday May 10th - if you have anything you'd like us to know about, just get in touch jwells@guroo.co.uk
April 26th - the functional skills newsletter
Training Providers' students still struggling with Functional Skills
A headline piece about Functional Skills was run in the TES (FE Focus) on 22nd April. It was difficult to get the gist of the report which basically said that foundation learners studying at training centres were struggling to come to terms with Functional Skills because they were harder to pass.
There was interesting support for Functional Skills from the Association of Colleges who said that colleges had embraced Functional Skills “Functional Skills are certainly seen as more academically rigorous, and there may have been some initial resistance from students on courses not traditionally associated with high levels of literacy and numeracy.”
Now that the Federation of Awarding Bodies and Association of Colleges have come out in support of Functional Skills over Key Skills, only the Association of Learning Providers remains as supporters of Key Skills.
The DfE confirmed is was looking again at the postponement of Functional Skills in apprenticeships following the Wolf report where Professor Wolf described Key Skills as offering "no progression" and "valueless".
Employability Skills part 2
We ran this story about employability skills last newsletter and we've decided to leave it in again with even more links from academic journals - it was clearly very useful for lots of readers.
A really interesting link was from Psychology Today entitled "Whose Children Will Get the Best Jobs in the 21st Century?" and subtitled "The best jobs will go to applicants who can think". It's a good read and what really caught my eye was this;
"This assembly line, test prep system doesn't prepare today's children to what the best job employers are already seeking - the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts and apply that knowledge along with critical analysis of new information, judgment, creative problem solving, and the ability to evaluate and select which new data and tools can be applied in new ways to solve new problems and create new outcomes."
Now where have we seen that before I wonder? Here's a selection of links:
Functional Japanese?
I have no idea how, why or where I came across this and indeed, I'm not entirely sure it's for real but if you go to Amazon Japan, you can buy Functional English books and resources published by Pearson (edexcel) and OCR!
Just ￥8,377 will get you the OCR Pilot CD ROM for E3 and L1/L2 or if you're feeling a bit richer, why not try Pearsons Functional English teaching and learning resources CD for ￥51,099.
So far, there are no reader comments against each of them so why not be the first. For info, £1 buys you ￥135 so if they do sell in quantities, both OCR and Pearson will be very happy and if you do buy, do let the newsletter know what Amazon recommends next time you log on!
Lynn celebrates
Our independent judge had a tough time but when the crunch came, she judged this as the best entry in our Take That competition.
Guroo works by being an ideal evolution of a training solution!
Congratulations to Lynn Preston of YH Training in Scarborough. She's already brushed off the "I love Robbie" T shirt and will be joining us on May 31st in Sunderland - pics to follow!
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