March 8th – in this issue

Just one item of news this week – The Wolf Report. You may well have read other general commentary on the Wolf report in recent days; this one focuses on how the report deals with Functional Skills – and by extension maths and English.

The full report can be obtained here.

Well, the proverbial elephant in the room is certainly getting talked about now! The elephant in this case is those “very easy to pass” qualifications that serve the funding requirements of providers rather than the needs of learners or employers. In this context Key Skills – both Application of Number, and Communication – bear the brunt of Professor Alison Wolf’s criticism.

Professor Wolf wants to see all students under 19 progressing towards GCSE A*-C passes in English and maths by pursuing a course that leads towards ultimate GCSE success. She is particularly scathing about Key Skills saying it “should not be considered a suitable qualification in this context” and that something needs to be done about this in apprenticeship frameworks.

Professor Wolf questions the value of ‘equivalence’ qualifications that schools offer on the basis of points score – especially where grade C in maths and English is not achieved. She finds that funding incentives deliberately steer institutions (and therefore students) away from stretching qualifications in English and maths. She says “the UK (including England) is effectively unique in not requiring continued mathematics and own-language study for all young people engaged in 16-19 pre-tertiary education”.

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 Combine this with (as yet) unpublished reports that doing Functional Skills at KS3 provides an excellent platform for GCSE success at KS4, and there are excellent reasons for centres to support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.

Functional Skills – opinion

This report was not about Functional Skills. Professor Wolf had much bigger fish to fry within her remit, and it seems she didn’t have a lot of time to investigate Functional Skills in depth. For example, we understand she was presented with substantial evidence linking Functional English and maths at KS3 with improved GCSE results (an outcome she clearly favours) yet she didn’t reference this at all in her report.

Professor Wolf repeatedly champions the value of GCSE A*-C passes, yet nowhere makes the connection between that qualification and Functional Skills – either as a component of the pass, nor as a means of progression to it. Her report also fails to address the issue that a GCSE A*-C pass does not guarantee to either an employer or to FE/HE that the student is competent in the subject because passing is more often about compensation. Nor does she put forward any suggestions as to how students reach the GCSE goal.

Perhaps most significantly, Functional Skills is not mentioned at all in any of the 27 recommendations, yet many of us could argue how it would successfully contribute to many of them.

The Red Face Awards

I suggest two groups of people may be shuffling their feet in embarrassment following this report.

The first is John Hayes, who as Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, only a few weeks ago allowed an extension to Key Skills in Apprenticeships – when Professor Wolf says the answer for apprentices is to ensure they receive relevant teaching and “not to continue with frameworks that require only the current key skills accreditation.”

The others are the industry bodies (AoC, ALP etc) representing training providers, colleges and awarding organisations who are described as making “vociferous protests” in support of Key Skills that Professor Wolf describes variously as “valueless”, “easy to pass” and “in no real sense equivalent to the GCSE grades with which they enjoyed and enjoy formal equivalence”.