The Staffroom: Helping learners develop their writer’s voice

For my chapter in Great FE Teaching, I explored teaching adult literacy in a women’s centre. Here, I want to show that the ideas I set out about learners developing their writer’s voice are relevant to any setting, and that we can use writing about the familiar to remove some of the learning burden when learning new or different ways to write.

Within functional skills qualifications, learners are expected to be able to write in different styles, such as business writing (emails and reports), personal writing (emails and letters) or persuasive writing (blogs and articles). Therefore, an important aspect of teaching writing is a consideration of the format of a text, as well its purpose and audience.

When an adult learner first joins a class, as they may have been out of education for some time, there could be a significant amount of learning and adjustment to make, in terms of teaching and learning practice. This could then be further compounded by being asked to complete unfamiliar classroom writing tasks.

This is true for any new learner, as well as for those who are not exposed to these formats in their daily lives. There is a significant learning burden – or cognitive load – when thinking not only about what to write but how to write it. If we remove the burden of the content, by asking learners to write about familiar things, then that can reduce the load and enable learners to focus solely on how to write in that particular style or format.

This is scaffolding: as learners gain in confidence and as they develop their own voice, they can be asked to write on less familiar topics. The scaffold is removed as they develop their writing ability.

Eventually they come to believe in the value of their voice

As learners gain confidence in their writing skills and ability, they start to develop confidence in their own style, often known as ‘voice’. If we think about literacy as an ability we use in our everyday lives and which is shaped by our everyday lives, we can understand that our use of literacy changes depending on what it is we want to achieve. In turn, this encourages us to think of learning literacy as more than just developing a skill.

As we started to engage in real practices in my women’s centre classroom, the value and worth of all of our everyday literacy practices, such as poetry, sermon notes and reading for pleasure became more important. Something far deeper than just ‘skills’ was being developed. The women were able to develop their ‘voice’, to move their writing through genres and styles, writing for different purposes and for different audiences. This meant being able to more confidently access different types of reading and learn different types of writing.

This, I think, is useful frame for any teacher’s understanding of how we can support learners to develop literacies that are meaningful for their understanding of all subjects. Literacy is often described as a ‘gateway’ into other subjects, hence the need to be able to write in different ways and different styles, known as writing ‘realms’.

This isn’t just relevant to thinking about what we use literacy for, but also how we carry what we have learned into different domains. For example, my adult learners might want to progress to a higher education programme, yet there is no ‘academic writing’ element of the functional skills qualification. Nevertheless, learning different styles of writing by starting from low cognitive load exercises focused on familiar subjects and building confidence in their individual voices enables learners to develop their own academic writing.

Eventually, they come to believe in the value of their voice and in the power of their literacy. They can use academic reading as a model, and experiment with ways of writing effectively in an academic style.

This approach reminds me of the saying about empowerment. Teaching literacy as a remote set of skills is like giving a man a fish or two. Enabling learners to develop their voice is like teaching them to fish for themselves. The key is to start in familiar waters.

This article is one of a number of contributions to The Staffroom from the authors of Great FE Teaching: Sharing Good Practice, edited by Samantha Jones and available from SAGE.

Keegan should stick to her guns and show BTECs both barrels

Six past education secretaries have spoken. They all agree that Gillian Keegan’s decision to stop funding BTECs and other vocational courses is horrendous. It [to channel my inner Liz Truss] … is … a … disgrace. Six! Blimey. They must be right.

In other news, six people who all did A levels and degrees have decided that our technical education system is doing swell.

The government’s decision to stop funding a load of technical education courses is making some people cross. Why is this? Maybe it’s because technical education in this country is already so good. That’s why people around the world speak of the ‘UK Technical Education system’; I mean you can hardly move in the DfE for Germans coming to learn from our model.

No, I don’t think so. The truth is that we have continually underfunded technical education for years. While we have protected the schools budget, we have cut away at the budget for FE and for technical training. We have a workforce that works incredibly hard and is often incredibly skilled, yet they remain underpaid without some of the investment that has gone into the school workforce. We have also failed to give them the tools to do the job. Teachers have to ultimately cover the curriculum and prepare students to complete their qualification.

The qualifications that teachers have to work to are not good enough. (Yes, BTECs, I’m talking about you.) Why is this? It’s because for too long technical education has been for “someone else’s children”. Those in power have not been serious about reform and it pains me to see normally wise ex-politicians continuing to make this mistake.

For too long technical education has been for ‘someone else’s children’

So what exactly is wrong with the existing qualifications? Here’s the thing, good technical education does one thing: it prepares young people to get a skilled job. BTECs have not been designed with this goal in mind. They do not even include a mandatory on-the-job element. Instead, they have become a general-purpose qualification that gives children some job knowledge, but also doubles as a source of UCAS points to getting into university. (Whisper it: They do have another purpose, which is to make Pearson quite a lot of revenue.)

If you travel the world and visit really world-class technical education systems, this is not normal. Instead teachers work with qualifications that are designed to prepare young people to get good jobs.

It is time for change. That change is to T levels – a qualification designed for a good job, with a work placement required.

I know what you’re going to say. Why not keep them both? If T levels are so great, why not allow them to out-compete BTECs? If students want to do them, they will.

It sounds like a winning argument. But here’s the issue. Most colleges won’t be able to offer both T levels and BTECs in all subjects. Class sizes would be too small and the costs too high. And so the choice won’t be made by the child at all, but the college.

If you’re a college principal – one who has learned to survive and hopefully thrive in a world of unpredictable low funding – what will you choose? The qualification you have been delivering for years, or the new one? The qualification that children and parents recognise, or the new one? The qualification that doesn’t require you to find a work placement, or the new one?

I would want to choose the T Level, but I think I would choose the BTEC.

Thankfully the present education secretary also has a choice. She can listen to her six predecessors and keep the existing qualifications in place – the ones that most of us (in our heart of hearts) suspect are not quite good enough.

Or she can strike out on her own and start to build a technical education system to be proud of by turning off the existing qualifications. I know what I hope she does.

Spring budget: Time for politicians to put money where their mouth is

The end of 2022 was a difficult time for college leaders to be optimistic about the future. Like leaders in every sector, they were trying to deal with soaring energy costs, high inflation, industrial unrest and political tumult. For colleges, though, it was worse than that, with the chancellor using his autumn statement to talk about the need for investing in skills – while then only increasing school funding.

The anger and dismay this caused was only topped by the unnecessarily hasty imposition of new borrowing controls, following the ONS decision to reclassify colleges as part of the public sector. Over 50 projects were thrown into abeyance as colleges were instructed to seek consent for commercial borrowing in the middle of well-thought-through and strategically important capital programmes. Many are still waiting for the green light.

None of this is new. Many warm words have been spoken about skills in the past few years. In 2018, Teresa May launched the review of post-18 education and funding at Derby College, resulting in a report which simply and lucidly concluded that post-18 education in England is “a story of both care and neglect, depending on whether students are among the 50 per cent of young people who participate in higher education (HE) or the rest”. The next prime minister pledged to support more people to learn technical skills and launched the misleadingly-named Lifetime Skills Guarantee, which sounds a lot better than it really is.

Liz Truss didn’t say much about skills, but then she didn’t have much time to. Her successor, on the other hand, has said lots. In his new year speech he (rightly) said that “….we need to stop seeing education as something that ends aged 18 – or that sees university as the only option. With more technical education, lifelong learning, and apprenticeships.” The chancellor also got into the spirit of warm words when he set out a clear need to do a lot more for “the 50 per cent of school leavers who do not go to university” and for the “nine million adults with low basic literacy or numeracy skills”.

Hope springs eternal that politicians will face up to the realities

Hope springs eternal that one day, one of these politicians will properly face up to some of the realities. Realities which show how far backwards we have gone over the past decade on investment in all of the things the government says it wants to prioritise. At today’s prices, the adult education budget was around £4.4billion in 2010. Today, it is around £1.5billion. Even the poster-boy apprenticeship programme has seen what the Sutton Trust called a “staggering decline” in numbers, falling by almost a quarter between 2017 and 2018, with higher falls in areas of high deprivation. There are many more similar statistics.

At the same time as the drop in overall funding, the funding rate per learner has not changed in over a decade. The average funding per adult learner in colleges is about £1,000 (compared with around £9,000 in universities). If that had risen with inflation since 2010, it would now sit at over £1,400.

No wonder we can all agree that “more needs to be done”. Our submission to the treasury ahead of the spring budget sets out the case and asks for actions in four areas: staffing challenges, financial viability, capital financing and borrowing, and realising the opportunities created by public sector status.

It’s a realistic and proportionate set of requests at a time when, quite simply, we want the chancellor to put his money where his mouth has been for some time now.

Colleges are vital, efficient and effective anchor institutions that need proper long-term investment. Yet they have been starved, overlooked and squeezed for 12 years. It really is time to do more for them, so that they can do more for the millions of people who rely on them for achieving their ambitions, realising their talents and getting on in life and work.

Digital skills: Gaps and shortages mean it’s time to scale up to level up

We’ve heard a lot about levelling up in recent years, and politicians of every colour appear committed to addressing social mobility in regions considered to be lagging behind. Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, recently submitted views to the All Party Parliamentary Group enquiry on the Levelling Up White Paper, setting out how we believe high-quality technical qualifications and apprenticeships hold the key.

According to Tech Nation, tech pay is on average 80 per cent higher than salaries for other jobs in the UK. And there are certainly jobs to go around: currently, around 600,000 tech jobs go unfilled every year due to a gap in digital-trained workers.

One key problem is supply. Over half of secondary schools in the UK were not even offering computer science as a GCSE in 2021, and the number of 14-to-19 students taking technical IT or computing qualifications has fallen by one-third since 2015. We should not be surprised that fewer than half of British employers believe young people are leaving education with sufficient digital skills to access the industry.

Another is access. Just 19 per cent of the sector’s employees come from a lower socio-economic background.

So what can the government do to ‘level up’ tech and how can apprenticeships play a role?

Nurture the pipeline

Since our launch in 2016, Ada has been on a mission to fill the tech skills gap overall, and to empower young people currently who are underrepresented in the industry.

We run targeted outreach activities at schools and work with local authorities where we feel change needs to be made. We use industry experience days to give students opportunities to build networks they could not typically reach. And we offer students coaching to build confidence and tailored support to navigate company recruitment processes and access high-quality employment opportunities that might otherwise not be available.

These tactics are bearing fruit: 38 per cent of our students come from lower income backgrounds and we are the top of the country’s BTEC computing results. If other providers could emulate our approach, this impact could be amplified.

A role for industry

Dismal job vacancy rates indicate tech training is not meeting sector needs. So there’s an obvious opportunity to get industry more closely involved in qualification design.

Ada works intensively with employers’ technical teams on the design and delivery of our education programmes. Our degree-level apprenticeship programmes, validated by the Open University, are designed with dozens of the biggest names in the tech industry – including Salesforce, Deloitte, Bank of America, Siemens, Cazoo and Clear Score.

As a result, these apprenticeship programmes are seen as an aspirational alternative to university. And they lead to high-quality jobs: 95 per cent of our apprentice alumni are in permanent employment in the tech sector or enrolled in higher education courses.

Prioritising industry partnerships in the design and delivery of tech qualifications is clearly something worth building on.

Expand the footprint

Talent exists across the UK, so we need to expand tech training out of London.

Under the umbrella of the Greater Manchester Institute of Technology (GMIoT), Ada has ambitious plans to refurbish a former free school and create a new hub in the north west. Identifying under-utilised public buildings like this means we can establish new campuses more cost-effectively. And the investment is a no-brainer: at capacity, we will be able to work with around 1,300 young people a year and deliver a quick return to the local and national economy, as many learners will be salaried apprentices earning over £20,000 a year.

This expansion does not need to be unique to Manchester, or Ada. Where there is a good volume of employers with technical teams, there is an opportunity for Ada to establish a hub, or for others to emulate our success. The aim must be to open up pathways for aspirational young talent by putting opportunities to learn and work within their geographical reach.

This National Apprenticeship Week, when the power of technical training is top of mind, we need to scale up to level up. Technical skills are in demand everywhere, and we must support a wider pool of young people from every region to access these rewarding careers.

DfE announces new £12m T Level employer placement fund

Fresh funding has been announced to entice employers into offering T Level placements – following the failure of previous sweeteners to get businesses on board.

The Department for Education this morning revealed that a £12 million fund will be available to help employers offering placements in the 2023/24 financial year, which can be used to cover the costs such as set-up expenses, equipment or staff training.

In addition, all providers delivering T Levels – the flagship new qualifications designed to be the technical equivalent of A-levels – in the 2023/24 academic year will get a one-off grant of up to £10,000 for additional careers guidance for students.

T Levels include a mandatory industry placement of 45 days or 315 hours with an employer.

The DfE guidance confirmed that any employer offering a suitable T Level placement is eligible to claim for “legitimate costs” for placements that start from April 1, 2023.

Placements that start before then are not eligible.

The money is set to be paid via T Level providers for their students. The guidance said that T Level providers will be allocated a sum of the cash based on their T Level student numbers.

Employers will then be required to provide basic information about their business, and submit a declaration form that includes evidence of the costs they are claiming for.

The providers will then be responsible for validating claims from employers, making the payments to employers either once a start date has been agreed or a placement begins, and then report back the claims paid out via a DfE online tool.

Full guidance will be published in March 2023 – just weeks before eligible claims can begin.

The DfE would not be drawn on how much a single employer can receive, explaining that full details will be published in the coming weeks.

In November, FE Week reported that just £500,000 from a previous £7 million employer support fund – 8 per cent – was used during its previous run from 2019-2022.

That scheme offered firms £750 to cover tangible placement costs in four regions of England, upped to £1,000 per placement in 2021/22.

An evaluation report published last year found that just 843 placements were supported against a target 32,466 with the fund.

Research from earlier in 2022 found that three quarters of employers had not heard of T Levels and only 7 per cent of employers not interested in offering T Level placements would change their mind if offered a £1,000 incentive.

Employer bodies, such as the Federation of Small Businesses, have however called for the reintroduction of employer cash bonuses for T Levels.

Skills minister Robert Halfon said: “As the cohort continues to grow year on year, it is great news that extra support is being delivered to schools, colleges and employers to enable them to meet this increasing demand and provide the highest-quality training to their students.”

He added that T Levels will “set them on the path to success” regardless of whether students choose to go on to higher education, apprenticeships or employment.

On the careers guidance support, the DfE confirmed that all providers delivering T Levels in the 2023/24 academic year will get the one-off grant to ensure students understand T Levels and the T Level transition programme offering.

It said that larger providers will receive £10,000 while smaller providers will get £5,000, although it has not yet been made clear what the threshold will be between small and large providers.

The DfE added that providers will not need to do anything to claim the cash, but a grant letter will be issued in the future with details about how much they will get and how the funding will be paid.

The announcement, made on the inaugural T Level Thursday, follows last month’s 16-to-19 funding band confirmation which included a 10 per cent uplift in funding bands for T Levels for 2023/24.

Jennifer Coupland, chief executive of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which oversees the design and rollout of T Level courses, said government needed to ensure employers and providers are “fully supported to deliver outstanding results for students in schools, colleges and through the substantial work placements,” which “really make them stand out from other qualifications”.

She added: “This extra funding will provide a big boost to training providers and businesses. T Levels are the new gold standard for classroom-based technical education.”

Cath Sezen, interim director of education policy at the Association of Colleges said that the funding announcement will be welcomed by colleges, and hoped businesses will be engaged to offer placements that in turn will help meet their own skills gaps.

Sezen said the 10 per cent funding uplift will help with staff recruitment, but warned that “to make real impact funding needs to be a permanent fixture”.

She added: “Funding alone will not address college concerns that T Levels will only meet the needs of those young people who have achieved good GCSE grades at 16, rather than those who have lower starting points but flourish on current qualifications which are going to be defunded.”

Improving social mobility demands better data on FE outcomes

As Interim Chair of the Social Mobility Commission and a college principal, I am acutely aware of the value of high-quality technical and professional education and training. Further education colleges provide huge economic and social value to their communities, but their qualifications are sometimes not as well-known and less frequently recommended to students. There can also be a lack of reliable information about how the qualifications translate into value in the labour market. This is something that needs fixing.

Today, the Social Mobility Commission has released a report looking at the effect of pursuing a further or higher education qualification on a student’s earning potential. The evidence clearly shows that further education qualifications in general are associated with an increased income, and that this is true at each higher level of FE qualification.

The data by subject is less easy to access. HE qualifications have better data overall, but our report shows that some university courses seem not to boost incomes at all, implying that some students may be better off going to FE than HE.

The fact that FE qualifications in general are associated with higher earnings needs to be more widely disseminated in schools. These qualifications should be an option that more students actively consider and society celebrates.

However, our survey of current students shows that one-third of those considering an FE qualification did not know whether information about typical earnings they could expect after studying a particular course was available, and that this information would be an important factor in their decision about what and where to study.

This lack of information is preventing students from making informed decisions, based on the factors that are important to them. This is a problem which affects everyone.

Those from lower socio-economic backgrounds may be less likely to have strong networks to help them navigate education and career choices, and are impeded from understanding which courses and institutions offer the best opportunities for higher earnings later in life, and the chance to improve social mobility. But even those with supportive networks may struggle if the path they are considering is different to those of family and friends.

Lack of information is preventing students from making informed decisions

Our research clearly highlights a relative lack of evidence about further education qualification outcomes. This is different from the evidence relating to the earnings by level of study.

There are large-scale graduate surveys looking at the careers and salaries of recent higher education graduates which provide robust data on their average earning outcomes. The same does not exist for further education, limiting the data we have available.

The significant changes made to further education qualifications in the past decade have also had a detrimental impact on the usefulness of historical data for prospective learners. With the creation of many new qualifications and the reform of existing ones, we lack consistent information on comparable outcomes. The huge variety of courses also means that information is incredibly fragmented and sample sizes can be too small to provide statistically significant conclusions.

It is essential that we find better ways of collecting and representing data on the value which a particular further education qualification adds to earnings. This will allow students considering a further education qualification to make better, more informed decisions and make further education qualifications feel like a realistic and attractive prospect for an even wider range of students.

Our aim at the Social Mobility Commission is to use this report as a springboard to encourage the production of better data around labour market outcomes for further education qualifications, in order to help learners make more informed decisions, and help them better understand the link between individual qualifications and career progression.

Through this work, we want to break out from a narrow focus on a small number of learning pathways and highlight the many opportunities available to help learners find and apply their skills.

Third ‘outstanding’ in a row for Catholic sixth form college

A Catholic sixth form college has been awarded a third straight ‘outstanding’ rating by Ofsted.

Manchester-based Loreto College was granted the top rating across the board in a report published today, 13 years after it last achieved the feat.

Since the college’s last inspection, Ofsted has introduced an enhanced inspection framework which places less emphasis on exam results and instead focuses on the quality of teaching and curriculum, in addition to a new skills element which assesses how well colleges meet the regions skills needs.  

At the time of this inspection there were 3,591 students aged 16 to 19 who were following a fulltime study programme with most students studying A-levels across 34 subjects.  

Inspectors praised a culture of “continuous improvement” suffusing the college at all levels, alongside “passionate and committed” governors and “high-quality” education.  

SEND provision was lauded throughout the report, with inspectors finding that the programme is planned “carefully and incrementally” to enable students to develop “independence and advocacy” skills.  

The curriculum for those with high needs and SEND has been “developed ambitiously enough” and parents of students with SEND feel their child is “safe and happy”.  

This provision was hailed as enabling students to “become confident young people who can contribute to society very successfully”.

Elsewhere, inspectors praised the high priority placed on staff mental health and well-being which includes workload. The report notes that “staff can access counselling services, chaplaincy support, and the employee assistance programme, including physiotherapy, financial advice and mental health support”.

In addition, the watchdog found that the curriculum is planned and taught very effectively by teachers so students can develop the skills they need for the future.  

“For example, they work with local universities to ensure that the mathematics curriculum prepares students for their next steps in mathematics, such as integration by substitution, early in the programme. As a result, students practise these skills to ensure fluency and to prepare them for pure mathematics components at degree level.” 

The college makes a ‘reasonable’ contribution to meeting skills needs, according to Ofsted.

Inspectors flagged that leaders do not use external expertise well enough to “develop education programmes tailored to local, regional and national skills needs.” Alongside this, leaders and managers do not involve “employers sufficiently in the design of the curriculum for supported internships”.

Although the report also highlighted how students benefit from “relevant and high-quality” career advice and guidance from their personal tutors and college careers advisors.  

Principal Michael Jaffrain said “We are extremely proud to serve our local community and the region of Greater Manchester and we are delighted that our long tradition of excellence and success is reflected in our most recent Ofsted report. We would like to thank all students, staff, parents and carers, governors and all those who have contributed to our Loreto community for their support.”

DfE and Ofsted staff will strike again on budget day

Staff at the Department for Education and Ofsted will go on strike on the day of the government’s spring budget, in a second day of action over pay and job security. 

The Public and Commercial Services union has announced walk-outs on March 15 across 123 government departments in England, Scotland and Wales.

The strike coincides with the government’s budget day and planned National Education Union teacher strikes in England.

DfE and Ofsted staff walked out last week, joining teachers in the biggest co-ordinated strike for a decade.

Civil servants on the picket line told FE Week that “morale is at an all-time low” and issues had been “building up” for years. 

The PCS is in dispute with the government over pay, pensions, redundancy terms and job security. 

In the ballot announced last month, 911 DfE staff, or 88 per cent of the 1,031 employees who cast a vote in the ballot were in favour of industrial action.

The 1,816 PCS members at the department equate to 24 per cent of its total workforce.

Of the 161 Ofsted employees who voted, 88 per cent were in favour. In total, 291 staff members – 16 per cent of the inspectorate’s workforce – were entitled to vote.

Staff at the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, as well as workers at the Office for Student will also strike next month.

Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, said members are “suffering a completely unacceptable decline in their pay.

“Rishi Sunak can end this dispute tomorrow if he puts more money on the table. If he refuses to do that, more action is inevitable.”

Empowering young people through a
personalised approach to learning

Exams dominate the UK’s education system. They have come to define what is taught, how it is taught, and young people’s educational experience. The grades race exacerbates inequalities and detracts from developing the kinds of qualities and skills that young people need to thrive in learning, work and life.

Education leaders and employers are increasingly looking beyond exams, considering how to provide a well-rounded education for their learners and how to find out more about an employee’s potential and what kind of person they are.

ASDAN has an established history of developing young people’s competencies and personal qualities to build their confidence, wellbeing and personal resilience. Through advocating personal and social effectiveness, ASDAN is driven to inspire confidence in young learners and prepare them for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

In response to the abrupt changes in education and society that 2020 brought, ASDAN began updating their personal effectiveness courses. Continuing the focus of preparing young people for their futures, they developed new qualifications to meet their needs in an uncertain world.

The Personal and Social Effectiveness (PSE) qualifications were designed to develop modern and future-facing competencies in communication, collaboration and emotional intelligence. Aimed at learners aged 14 to 19 working at Level 1 and 2, the PSE qualifications offer a unique and personalised approach to enabling individual progress, assessed by a portfolio of evidence.

The ASDAN Award in Personal and Social Effectiveness covers three skilled-based units at Award level:

• Developing myself and my performance

• Working with others

• Problem solving

Learners can advance to the Certificate in Personal and Social Effectiveness by delivering a project linked to a topic covered in one of the three units. These cover a wide range of topics such as health and wellbeing, science and technology, the environment and independent living.

By selecting to study topics that interest and motivate them, learners can create experiences they find meaningful. Their positive engagement with the subject matter provides a solid framework for developing the targeted skills, attributes and values of the core units. This approach to learning can help improve behaviours and grow confidence, crucial for young people’s future development.

The qualification was created in close collaboration with education practitioners and ASDAN members, incorporating their input to guide its development. Employing this pedagogical approach to feedback, ASDAN’s PSE evaluation project continues to gather rich insights to reflect on and help shape learning processes.

Offering a unique flexibility for teachers, the course is equipped with intuitive and adaptable resources to design their curriculum in a way that reflects and meets the needs of their learners. The Scheme of Learning provides support in planning and managing the course delivery, and accompanying resource packs include over 30 hours of robust teaching resources.

Susannah Harlow of ASDAN is a co-author of the PSE qualifications and notes how they are “incredibly flexible and adaptable and can be tailored to a variety of curriculum models in education settings.” She adds how PSE can motivate and assist with existing studies, giving “learners the personal effectiveness to transfer into their core subject GSCEs.”

Carolyn Rolleston, Head of Department (Vocational) at Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School, Gloucestershire, was one of several members who collaborated with ASDAN to ensure the qualification met the needs of both teachers and learners. She noted how the PSE qualification engaged and motivated her learners, as well as increasing confidence.

“The personalised learning aspect is crucial for learners’ future development,” Carolyn said. “It is totally a unique course that is valued by the learners, their parents, and the staff delivering it. I value it immensely.”

Read more about the Personal and Social Effectiveness qualifications: ASDAN Website | Personal and Social Effectiveness Level 1 and 2

Get in touch with an ASDAN advisor to discuss the benefit to your learners: 0117 941 1126 | info@asdan.org.uk