January 8th - the Functional Skills newsletter
A very happy new year to all our thousands of readers.
January is conference and exhibition season and we have news of two
events - Implementing Functional Skills on Friday 25th January in Birmingham
and the Learning and Skills show on 29/30 at Olympia in London.
We also have news of an Ofsted Review of Apprenticeships that makes
slightly worrying reading, news about Progression Qualifications from OCR (we
like to call them "little bits of Functional Skills") and
details of tomorrow's webinar that will be all about Teaching Functional Maths
and will be centred on Guroo's new tutorial videos.
As always, your comments and thoughts are appreciated - let us know what
you'd like us to cover in the newsletter by emailing the editor - jwells@guroo.co.uk
Event Reminder (1)
Implementing Functional Skills
When: Friday 25th January
Where: Paragon Hotel, Birmingham
Cost: £99
Organised by EMSkills and supported by
(amongst others) Guroo, IQ, Runway Training, West Notts College, Forskills,
Nelson Thornes, Tribal and CIA Training.
Targeted at Functional Skills
practitioners and managers and featuring presentations and workshops by experts
in Functional Skills. The event also has all the leading resource
providers in attendance so you can compare offers from Guroo, BKSB, Forskills
and Tribal.
Event Reminder (2) Learning and
Skills Show
When: Tuesday 29th and Wednesday 30th
January
Where: Olympia, London
Cost: Free to attend exhibition,
various optional workshops and conference options
Attended by the leading providers of
resources in Functional Skills including Guroo (stand 231) Tribal (stand 268).
The BETT show is also on at the same
time and because of the clash of dates, Guroo have chosen to attend Learning
and Skills show which is much more relevant to the vast majority of our
customers in the FE, Adult Learning and Workplace Learning markets rather than
the primary and secondary school focussed BETT show. So if you go to BETT
and can't find Guroo, don't worry, we haven't gone away, just gone somewhere
else!
Ofsted review of Apprenticeships
We picked this up in the DFES Schools
Research Newsletter for December and it makes interesting reading with clearly
lots of issues to be dealt with. The full report and executive summary
can be downloaded from here.
The review highlights issues in several
areas:
- The lead contractor/subcontractor relationship
particularly in areas such as fees where half of lead contractors were
retaining more than the SFA's expected maximum fee of 15%
- A lack of quality assurance by lead
contractors on their sub-contractors
- Too much emphasis on paperwork auditing rather
than improving provision and in some cases, too much emphasis was being
placed on assessment of apprentices rather than their actual learning
A significant number of apprentices
thought they did not have real or sustained employment and did not consider
themselves to be holding a permanent job.
Progression qualifications are
"go"
We saw announcements from a number of
leading awarding bodies about "progression" qualifications – so what
are they?
Well they are aimed at adults and we
like to describe them as "little bits of Functional Skills". To give you a flavour, here's the link to the
OCR Progression Brochure.
Coinciding
with the accreditation of these adult qualifications, Guroo also launched a
series of tutorial videos that mix video teaching with animation and real life
examples that map very nicely to many of the progression qualification areas.
If you'd like to see more of these call Guroo and we'll tell you where
they are on the site or join us tomorrow for a webinar based around these new
tutorial videos.
Wednesday Webinar at 4.00pm
Teaching Functional Maths can be hard
for non-specialist teachers. All the evidence shows that both tutors and
learners can struggle with maths particularly at levels 1 and 2. A series
of brand new tutorial videos are now available from Guroo that cover many of
the key mathematical concepts at from Entry Level 3 to Level 2. They are ideal
for improving the confidence and competence of non-specialist teachers and as a
great learning aid for learners.
Join us on Wednesday at 4pm for a
webinar based around support for Teaching Functional Maths. Just email info@guroo.co.uk for joining information.
All previous webinars are recorded and
available anytime for playback - login as a guest and the password is password.
Simply click on the links below and don’t forget, if you’d like to have your
own 1:1 webinar looking at how Guroo can help you support Functional Skills,
just call us on 0191 305 5045 or email info@guroo.co.uk and we’ll take it from there.
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