June 21st - the Functional Skills newsletter
"A 75min exam with two questions? Are you serious?"
Our lead piece this week has been chosen to reflect a concern that has cropped up quite a number of times on Twitter; how students are being prepared for their Functional Skills exams. The title quote is from a student on Twitter from 4pm on June 15th after the exam.
On the same day I personally took a call quite late in the evening from a student (let’s call her Helen) who had bought access to www.myguroo.co.uk so she could practice and revise for her Functional Skills English Level 2 exams in a weeks time.
Me Good afternoon Guroo!
Helen I’ve just bought the cram4exam access for English and I want my money back
Me Oh, why is that?
Helen Because I’ve just been on the quizzes and they aren’t multiple choice
Me They aren’t meant to be - so what’s the problem?
Helen My teacher told me to go on Bitesize, Move On and Key Skills 4u to revise for Functional Skills and they are all multiple choice so yours must be wrong
Me No, we are right, your teacher shouldn’t really be telling you to practice Functional Skills using Key Skills resources because they are so different. Anyone expecting their Functional Skills exam to be a series of multiple choice questions is going to be in for a shock.
Helen So how do I revise then?
Me Tackle the Guroo Challenges - you can do them on paper or on-line
Helen But they all ask me to write loads
Me Yes .......
Helen And They're hard and take a while to do
Me Yes ……
Helen Is there not somewhere else I can go that just does multiple choice questions like Bitesize?
We strongly believe that students should not be preparing for Functional Skills exams by doing multiple choice tests designed for Key Skills. It's just wrong!
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Links to AO past papers
In the last newsletter we highlighted the annual qualifications market report from Ofqual. This generated lots of discussion and more questions including many requests for links to the AO Functional Skills sites. We have done our best to get as close as possible to the Functional Skills part of the each website below.
AQA - all subjects and all levels
Acentis - all subjects and all levels
City and Guilds - all subjects and all levels
Skillsfirst/EAL/IMI consortium - All subjects at levels 1&2
EDI - all subjects and all levels
Edexcel - all subjects and all levels
NCFE - all subjects and all levels
NOCN - all subjects and all levels
OCR - all subjects and all levels
SQA - English and maths levels 1&2
WJEC - all subjects and all levels
The Ofqual full report can be accessed here with the section on Functional Skills starting on page 63.
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A Challenge from Guroo!
Got an idea for a great Functional Skills practise scenario? We’d love to hear about it.
We’re inviting newsletter readers to help us design a new Guroo Challenge, covering all three subjects and adaptable for use at all 5 levels.
We'll do the work to produce the content; but we need your ideas for scenarios. Naturally, we will give you equal "billing and credit" in the finished item, and we'll make the resulting Challenge available to the whole Functional Skills community free of charge.
Our plan is to develop them over the next few months and launch them at BETT in January 2012.
So if you have a great idea for a new Challenge , especially if it addresses some of the harder to teach skills criteria, then email jwells@guroo.co.uk or call me on 0191 3055045 for a chat.
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Enhancing Literacy and Numeracy conference - Next steps for SfL and Functional Skills - July 6th in London.
A quick reminder about this conference due to take place next month in London.
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