Roadshow events in November for Functional Skills

What would you like to see at the ForSkills/NCFE regional roadshows

We are planning a rolling programme of roadshow events with the first set scheduled for the week of November 21st. We'll be visiting three locations around the country during the week and we'll be inviting customers as well as those looking to upgrade to SkillsBuilder and SkillsPortfolio.

Each event will feature a range of highly engaging activities including:

• Hands on with the customer engagement team
• Making your investment go further - ensuring that your investment is delivering maximum benefit and value for money
• Learning from others - case study experience.

We'll have a range of subject and qualification experts at each event, but here's the crunch - what would make this event even more valuable for you? Please tell us what you would like to see at the regional roadshows by emailing me direct.

English and maths post-16 related events

Events

Things are starting to get going on the events front so time for a quick update:

Week of November 21st - ForSkills/NCFE regional roadshow
October 27th, Coventry, Apprenticeship Levy Conference
November 28th, London, Vocational Education
December 9th, London, Post-16 Maths and English

GCSE 9-1 assessments

GCSE 1-9 Assessments

The sharp-eyed (mainly colleges) amongst our customers will have seen that the assessments for GCSE now cover the new 1-9 curriculum with even the initial assessment producing a spiky profile and overall level for guidance.

As with ALL assessments from ForSkills, and unlike other providers, our assessment system is fully adaptive so learners are not asked irrelevant questions at the wrong level plus all our questions are taken from a bank.

Why is this important? It means that learners sitting next to each other never get the same questions AND when the same learner repeats the assessment to measure progression, it's a different test!

ForSkills SkillsBuilder - simple, straightforward, fair and reasonable, that’s what we‘re trying to achieve in helping you upgrade to SkillsBuilder.

Make an Enquiry

Newsletter 16 th Sept - edition 234

Another great weekly newsletter this week.

Lots of coverage of English and maths in the post-16 sector with articles on the Governments Skills Plan, Functional Skills reform and a job vacancy for English and maths engagement officer at ForSkills.

GCSE re-sit policy fails more than 70% of learners

GCSE re-sit policy fails more than 70% of 17 year olds

A very good piece of analysis was published by FE Week following the release of GCSE results data last week.

Just 27% of 17+ learners who took GCSE English achieved grade C or above leaving 93,000 failures who have wasted another year with Mark Dawe of AELP saying “Surely this is evidence enough that hitting students over the head with the same form of learning and assessment is not the way forward."

Maths was even worse with more than 120,000 failing again - just over 50,000 learners managed to turn their D into a C+.

The implications of the re-sit policy means that providers cannot offer the best or most appropriate qualification for many learners - the figures now show how big that problem really is.

Levy and FS reform - more

Apprenticeship levy funding video by SFA

SFA have released a 15 minutes video of a presentation by Una Bennett, the SFA's Deputy Director for Funding.

If you're used to the very high quality ForSkills training and resource videos, (more than 550 subscribers now, making the ForSkills channel by far and away the most popular in the sector), then you're probably going to be disappointed at the sound quality and relative dynamic method of presentation delivery, but all the information is there.

Click here for a link to the video.

Functional Skills Reform Programme

The final stage of the first phase of the Functional Skills Reform Programme gives awarding organisations, practitioners and others the opportunity to comment on proposals for the subject content for maths and English Functional Skills qualifications.

The opportunity to comment on the proposed subject content for Functional Skills represents the final stage of the first phase and is open until September 12th.

With revised qualifications due to be introduced in just 2 years time, now is a great time to get involved.