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Functional Skills the good things
Professor Wolf is hugely supportive of GCSE maths and
English for post-16 students, and with Functional Skills now
representing 45% - 55% of the curriculum that can only be a very good
thing. Combine this with (as yet) unpublished reports that
doing Functional Skills at KS3 provides an excellent platform for
GCSE success at KS4, and there are excellent reasons for centres to
support Functional Skills.
Professor Wolf highlights some difficulties in teaching
Functional Skills, such as the need for a wide experience of contexts
and the fact that most vocational teachers are not maths and English
experts. While accepting that the best practise does achieve it, she
says teaching Functional Skills in
a mass system is ambitious and demanding.
She finds no reason to dismiss Functional Skills
qualifications, and says that for many post-16 learners, the jump
straight to GCSE may simply be too much; the inference being that
Functional Skills could be adapted to be a suitable intermediary
qualification to support students towards the GCSE attainment goal.
Professor Wolf is uncertain as to whether FL is an
appropriate framework for those unable to access a level two
qualification, despite the support of the framework by the pilot centres,
which she dismisses as she says most pilot sites who are bound to be
enthusiastic! For the lowest attaining learners, including
those who are highly disaffected with formal education (and many with
LDD), English and maths plus work experience (as opposed to the
accrual of qualifications) should form the core of their education.
Functional Skills the not so good
things
Professor Wolf describes what she calls serious conceptual problems
with Functional Skills, focussing on the massive challenges of
teaching skills in a wide variety of contexts, to different learners
in different centres, yet being subjected to a set of exam questions
that is the same for every learner.
This, combined with a lack of standardisation across
Awarding Organisations is her key concern with Functional Skills.
This opinion is based on the results from the pilot. In
September 2010, a significant number of changes were introduced to
the qualification, assessments and standards that are not referenced
in the report.
In terms of pass rates, Professor Wolf notes that
Functional Skills have much lower pass rates than Key Skills and from
that concludes that they may be setting higher standards, but the
contextual message remains very much one of attacking Key
Skills.
There is little real discussion of Diplomas (which does
seem strange in a review of vocational education), perhaps due to the
very small contribution the qualification made to the latest
available (2010) results statistics.
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