Last month’s GCSE results day prompted a wave of publicity about the merits of the government’s policy of making young people resit English and maths if they have not previously achieved grade C or above.
While acknowledging that the retake pass rate was not good - 27 per cent for English and 30 per cent for maths - some commentators, including Jonathan Simons in TES (bit.ly/ForcedResits), staunchly defended the practice.
The Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) strongly supports continued learning of English and maths until age 18 at whatever level. However, as far as GCSEs are concerned, the results were a body blow for many of the students who took them, and hitting these students over the head with the same form of learning and assessment is not the way forward.
We should be encouraging more young people to study for functional skills either as stand-alone learning or part of a training programme such as an apprenticeship or traineeship.
Preceded by key skills, functional skills have been embedded in work-based learning for a long time. It is true that awareness of them among employers is not as high as it should be. But the Trailblazer process for the new apprenticeship standards has reminded us how well-accepted functional skills are by hundreds of large and small employers. The vast majority of approved standards allow for attainment of functional skills as an element of programme completion.
Do we really want to write off 122,000 maths students as failures when there is an alternative route open to them in the form of functional skills?
Insistence on GCSEs as part of a training programme can be damaging for the whole learning experience. With regard to judging the quality of the experience, Ofsted assures us that attainment in English and maths will not limit the provider’s grade but our argument is that GCSEs can limit the learning experience for the young person.
The Education and Training Foundation is completing a wide-ranging review of functional skills and we need to ensure that such skills retain the ability to be assessed on demand.
At the same time, the government has asked Sir Adrian Smith, of the University of London, to review compulsory maths teaching for 16- to 18-year-olds, and the AELP will stress that GCSE retakes should not be the only option if GCSEs are to remain primarily academic rather than more applied for the world of work.
Our view is that the teaching of functional skills must be even more focused on relevance to the workplace while understanding the core principles of English and maths. For example, it should be possible to develop specific units for different sectors such as automotive maths or retail English.
The levels should be retained and maybe even extended to mirror the level 3 core maths qualification that has been recently introduced.
Both reviews offer the chance to build on the progress that has been made in establishing functional skills as key to offering employers a more productive workforce and they should not be wasted opportunities.
Mark Dawe is chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers
