Our plans for our Functional Skills qualifications
Our Functional Skills English and Functional Skills Mathematics qualifications will be coming to an end. The last cohort for first teaching will be September 2024.
Published
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Our Functional Skills English and Functional Skills Mathematics qualifications will be coming to an end. The last cohort for first teaching will be September 2024.
Published
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Our Functional Skills English (8720, 8725), and Functional Skills Mathematics (8361, 8362) qualifications will be coming to an end. The last cohort for first teaching will be September 2024. The final certification for will be in summer 2025, and there will be no resit opportunity.
We appreciate that this may come as a disappointment and want to explain the reasons behind this difficult decision.
Our aim is to make sure that we offer qualifications that meet the current and future needs of most students, and teachers. As an education charity, we also have to make sure we use our resources effectively, so we regularly review our qualifications to make sure we’re meeting those aims.
We redeveloped our Functional Skills qualifications for first teaching in September 2019 - even though the entries were already low - so we could make sure that we were able to provide post-16 learners with an alternative qualification for GCSE English and GCSE Maths resits.
Continuing low entries suggest we’re not meeting the needs of most students and teachers with our current qualifications. It also makes it more challenging for us to support this qualification, as the additional resource needed is disproportionate to the number of students who take it. So, while we do our best to respond to these needs by offering a broad range of qualifications, this also means not continuing with some.
We’ll of course continue to provide schools and colleges with the support they need to complete this qualification while it’s still available.
Alternative qualifications for your learners
For some of your 11-16 learners, a suitable alternative qualification offering a skills-based approach might be our Entry Level Certificate in English or Maths.
Our Unit Award Scheme also offers a unique way to boost confidence and engagement by rewarding achievement in smaller units mapped to the content of Functional Skills, Entry Level, and GCSE, as well as many other less formal units.
You might like to consider transitioning to the new Functional Skills qualifications from TQUK – an exam board that is part of the AQA group.
The TQUK Functional Skills portfolio covers levels 1 and 2 in both maths and English, and all qualifications meet the same subject criteria that all Functional Skills qualifications are written against. This means that teaching approaches and resources that you currently use do not need to change. Exams can be taken online remotely, online face-to-face, and as paper-based assessments, and results are available in six days*.
Please also take this opportunity to take another look at our GCSE assessments for your learners. In particular, our GCSE maths question papers have been improved in recent years with a focus on increasing accessibility for lower attaining learners, enabling us to better reward positive achievement.
We’ll of course continue to provide you with any support you need for your students to complete this qualification while it is still available.
If you have any questions, would like further support or to talk about alternative qualifications, please contact us and our teams will be happy to help.
*following the awarding process, where the pass mark is set. For more information, see the TQUK website.