Creative Education was commissioned to manage 15 collaborative projects that improved the readiness to deliver the new Functional Skills specifications from September, 2019. Working with 34 providers from across the education and charity sectors, our Functional Skills Collaborative Projects Programme ran from September 2018 to June 2019 and directly or indirectly engaged with almost 2,200 practitioners and learners.

Each of our project partnerships first identified an element of the new specifications that was likely to present a challenge to their staff and learners. These challenges ranged from the higher demands of the non-calculator paper to the growing gap between ESOL qualifications and Functional Skills English. From this base, each project developed an experimental approach that allowed them to trial new ways of addressing these issues.