League table qualifications

I have it on very good authority that Functional Skills is what's termed "collateral damage" in the Government's efforts to remove the vocational qualifications from the league tables they don't want to be there.

It brings an interesting question forward:

The Government accept that Functional Skills is rigorous, does have and does lead to progression, and is a valuable qualification, but because it doesn't have a grading system and is treat as a half course, they currently do not meet the requirements for inclusion in the league tables from January 2015.

I predict that will change. Just as some of the key diplomas (Engineering in particular) will be upgraded to reflect their complexity and value, Functional Skills will find their way into the tables. They will do so because they will treat English and maths as a single and you will have to pass both to count plus we will see some development of the qualification to introduce grades.

So you read it here first - Feb 2012 Jonathan Wells of Guroo Functional Skills

Guroo shortlisted for Business Awards

The North East Business Awards are being held in March.

Guroo has been shortlisted in two categories in the Durham and Wearside region - Small Business of the Year and best use of Internet/ICT for our Functional Skills resources.

Let's hope we win this time!

BETT Thursday

Day over - nowhere near as busy with visitor numbers than previous years in my view. Lots of International visitors first thing (they will have stayed over from Wednesday).

Peak times it was busy - we have 5 pods on the guroo stand and all were fully utilised with queues waiting but in a similar way to Wednesday, it sort of died at about 3pm.

I did get a chance to walk the show and look for other Functional Skills resources. BKSB are here of course and after the show finished yesterday, we did get a chat and a drink with them which was nice. Vision2learn have one level 2 English resource, Promethean Planet has some functional skills resources that are free to download abd indeed, TES has lots as well.

Boardworks have lots of Diploma resources and I personally like them, although they don't have anything for Functional Skills yet - I do hope we can help them out with this!

What was surprising for me was that i haven't yet spotted any tiny companies (like we were three years ago) popping up and doing things in the Functional Skills resource areas.

On our side, Guroo 2.0 is going really well. New customers like it, becuase it's a complete product with no gaps in the essential areas. Existing custoemrs like it becuase it now does what they asked for - so telling your suppliers what you want really does work.

I do feel that friday will be good - more tomrrow!

BETT stand build picture

This is what a BETT stand looks like at 4.30pm on Monday with a full day to go of building.

I think you could say it's pretty clear what our stand is all about!

We're up for an award

I must admit that I'm not great at entering awards - it always seems to take such a long time to put together something that's worthy of an entry. But I do manage it sometime and over the summer I was told about the Northern Marketing Awards as I'm a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

So I entered Guroo in the product launch category, using the name Guroo Functional Skills Resources.

And we've been shortlisted - which is really nice, what's even better is the fact that we're up against some pretty big organisations such as the Great North Museum (a multi million pound launch if ever there was one) and Kingston Communications.

We find out next week more about this so lets wish Functional Skills Resources by Guroo good luck in the Northern Marketing Awards.