Functional Skills 1

The post is a very brief idiot's guide to Functional Skills. It's the first of two and a bi-product of some background reading I've decided to do this weekend. There's a switchover to Functional Skills in August 2012 and they'll become increasingly important to our clients - particularly those independent training providers who deliver apprenticeships.

So what are Functional Skills? They're applied skills in English, Maths and ICT and they're broken into levels:

• Entry Level (further subdivided into 1, 2 & 3)
• Level 1
• Level 2

The 'functional' bit means that the skills are supposed to be applied in real-life contexts; so it's about giving learner skills that make them more independant, better problem solvers and better apply their skills on new situations.

Why the move from Key Skills to Functional Skills? Functional Skills are supposed to be more focused on learning in context that Key Skills were. There's more emphasis on teaching skills and then encouraging learners to develop them and apply them in new situations. Assessment is different also - task based open ended assessments rather than a portfolio of evidence and multiple choice questions. One of the important things is the concept of 'mastery'. An apprentice achieves mastery when they can use the right combination of skills to tackle problems in unfamiliar contexts.

What's the link with apprenticeships? From August 2012 they'll completely replace Key Skills and become an integral part of all apprenticeships. That means that an intermediate level apprentice has to get English & Maths (and usually ICT) at level 1 and an Advanced or Higher level apprentice needs to achieve English and Maths at level 2.

Where's the challenge? The emphasis on context is an important difference between Key Skills and Functional Skills. And because Awarding Organisations now have more flexibility around how they develop assessments, training providers and employers need to give more thought to the delivery of the learning and the subsequent assessment - how they develop an approach to teaching and learning that builds transferable skills and how they use the right assessment approach to measure what's been achieved. So choosing the right AO is potentially a little more complicated.

Of course the opportunities are there too. Employers will need more support and there's an opportunity to create new tools and resources that handle skills audit (context based possibly?) and deliver good context based learning materials. There'll also be a need for new good quality learning materials that support both on and off the job learning and set functional skills in context, particularly for people who work in sectors where the relevance of some functional skills may seem less obvious at first.