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Today is National Skills Day (#NationalSkillsDay) – an important day for building confidence and connections.
At EDClass our motto is ‘education for all’, because we believe that everyone has a skill they can showcase.
The event is part of National Careers Week. How are you planning to use and develop your skills today? Let us know in the comments below.
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Functional skills are important because they provide the skills, knowledge and understanding for young people and adults to progress in work, education and life.
It relates to transferring to learner’s ability to solve problems to real-life contexts. Functional skills are the fundamental English, Maths and ICT skills to aid their working and personal lives. People can study for these qualifications in practical ways.
This blog post explains what functional skills are and why they are important.
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Adult learning refers to education, courses and training that is designed for adults. It can also be defined as the provision of instructed learning events for adults who usually act or who have acted in working life.
Adult education may be arranged with specific individuals in mind. Alternatively, it may be sourced by the adult directly.
This blog post explains the benefits of adult learning and how it can help students achieve their potential.
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According to Apprenticeship statistics for England, in the 2017/18 academic year, 814,800 young people joined an apprenticeship scheme, nearly a quarter of whom were under 19. Any organisation educating young people under the age of 18 has statutory responsibilities under current legislation such as ‘Keeping Children in Education’ KCSIE. Your safeguarding responsibilities are no different than that of a school.
Due to their relative inexperience in the workplace apprentices may be particularly vulnerable to anxiety or struggle to cope with the transition. Systems can help staff recognise this and offer suitable support to those who need it. Organisations offering any kind of apprenticeship or traineeship to young people need to put processes in place to protect their learners.
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When will schools reopen? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Schools have now been closed for two full weeks. However there hasn’t been a Government-led approach to education in the interim, with schools largely being left to their own devices to allocate teaching methods.
It has led to some parents struggling to fill the day for their child while others have trouble balancing their own homeworking.
In stems the questions, how long will this period last for and what can be done to help?
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Part time learning was once accessed by tens of thousands of adults through night schools – but due to funding cuts, many institutions have had to close. Following Baroness Alison Wolf’s appointment as skills policy adviser to the prime minister, they could be set for a revival.
Flexible learning is an essential option in education with a large number of people hoping to improve job and career prospects through further training. However, night school cutbacks have also coincided with an increase in online learning.
What are the benefits of night schools and online learning? And why are night schools set to be revived?
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The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) has launched a subcontracting consultation, with plans to cap business spending and ensure only local or digital consultants are used by contractors.
The ESFA has issued ten recommendations on changes to subcontracting rules – with the aims of reducing costs and eliminating poor arrangements. If you are a provider or subcontractor, please read the information below.
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V Certs are the most recent vocational qualification open to students who are 14 – 16 years old but could they really provide a solution for the skills gap in the UK?
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The requirement of schools to offer career guidance has become more important since the Education Act 2011 enshrined this in law. As a consequence, many schools have increased the impact of their in-house career guidance tools.
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Your students are ready to seek employment. After more than a decade of learning, their entire career could be influenced by the first job position they hold. There’s a lot riding on that interview – for which your pupils must be informed, calm and confident.
So how can you help them prepare for job interviews? Here are a few suggestions.
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“Are you going to be a teacher when you get older?” is a question that many English students will hear during their time at university.
Whilst it is true that a significant number of English students love the idea of teaching after completing their degree (and there is nothing wrong with that – this is an education blog after all!), there is a variety of potential career paths for English students.
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It has been a belief of many, for a great deal of time, that more time in the classroom means better grades.
However, this is not necessarily true, and there are plenty of examples to show that it is not true. For instance, compare private schools and state schools in the UK; as a whole, private schools have much better results compared to state schools, but they spend a lot less time in school.
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It has been suggested that a person’s aspirations are shaped by the likelihood of them being achieved. When linked with the concept that a child’s belief in their ability to achieve something is in part based on whether they see those they consider to be peers achieving in a similar way, then it is no wonder that the biggest challenge to raising aspiration in schools is socio-economic status.
The longer the negative messages received by a child go unchallenged the harder they are to overcome, which is why raising aspiration in younger children is increasingly an issue being raised by school leaders.
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It’s only a generation since classes used blackboards and the IT room was only really utilised by the IT teacher. The world of tablets, laptops, smartphones and whiteboards were future ideas in the minds of the technology world and certainly weren’t seen to be a definitive tool to be used on a daily basis within schools outside the computer room.
Technology now is everywhere; tablets for all pupils, the use of sites such as Facebook for social learning and text books replaced by interactive learning software. For teachers who have limited knowledge of current technology, it can be daunting to be presented with new hardware to use or be expected to teach a class skills barely understood themselves.
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Engaging teenagers in Maths and English can often feel like an uphill struggle – particularly if their levels of numeracy and literacy are low. It’s even more of a challenge to emphasise and convince them then that these are probably the two most important subjects to focus on when planning their career path.
Where being a celebrity is now a very popular answer to ‘what career do you think you want’ and then specific replies being that being either a footballer, model or reality TV star is at the top of the list, there’s a falling perception in some teenagers that Maths and English are of any value.
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With financial literacy now firmly part of the newly introduced curriculum for maths and citizenship, schools have to be focused on looking at the opportunity to equip their pupils with the skills they will need to manage money throughout life.
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Adult learning has evolved over the last two decades. Whilst still the place to learn self-improvement skills such as crafts and languages, the role of adult learning has a strong focus now towards enhancing entry level life skills, improving employability opportunities and all the time instilling self-confidence in each and every learner who steps through the door to sign up for a course.
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One fifth of all young people aged 16-24 don’t make the leap from school to work, a situation which can quickly become a cycle of failure and despondency.
The long term outlook for this group is one which will affect their wellbeing in a number of ways; their mental and physical health and their poor economic forecast. Typically, these pupils will come from a background of low-income and long standing issues and so there is a need for the best support possible to help this disadvantaged group to achieve as much as possible academically.
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From arriving at school on time to handing in homework when required, pupil time management is a key factor in their time spent at school. Getting ready for PE, changing back into their uniform for following lessons and arriving for school trips in a timely manner are all examples of how the time management of pupils is tested each day.
Children of all ages are easily distracted and combined with any thoughts of not wanting to be in a particular place at a particular time can quickly lead to lesson disruption and pupil and teacher frustration.
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Sheffield had an exciting event over the weekend to celebrate Britain’s gaming heritage and to inspire a new generation of gamers with Games Britannia Live! The event took place at various venues around the city with plenty to get involved with.
Arcade games lined the Millennium Gallery and gamers young and old gathered round the stalls to partake in workshops and test their design skills.
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The Department for Education has today published the revised ‘Careers guidance and inspiration in schools’ statutory and non-statutory guidelines. The documents are for governing bodies, school leaders, school staff in maintained schools, local authorities that maintain PRUs, academies and free schools.
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I don’t think anybody would be surprised by the notion that maths is often considered unpopular. Indeed one of the biggest barriers to engagement with maths seems to be the reputation it has in society.
In his book, Rethinking School Mathematics, Andrew Noyes identifies the social barriers pupils experience in regards to maths, and the fact that textbooks’ attempts to connect maths problems to real life situations often fail as “there is a real difference between what many teachers and textbooks perceive to be real-life mathematics and what people experience in their lives”.
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An article in The Telegraph at the beginning of January identified that 120,888 children are currently at risk of becoming NEETs because they “perform below national averages in the three-Rs” (The Telegraph, Jan 2014).
Statistics from June 2013 show that 15.5% of 16-24 year olds in England were NEETs (DFE, June 2013). With pupils now having to stay in education or training until the age of 17, moving to 18 in 2015, will this prove to be the magical solution for reducing unemployment for young people?
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