What are Functional Skills qualifications?
Becca
Last Update a year ago
'Functional Skills' is a suite of qualifications that range from basic literacy skills to the equivalent of a GCSE. They are often required to improve employment chances and to access apprenticeships, college courses and even to get into University.
There are five levels of Functional Skills but the most popular are Level 2 Mathematics and Level 2 English. They were designed to give you knowledge and skills which you can apply to real-life situations in your work, study and personal life.
Much like GCSEs, Functional Skills are assessed by exams. You can find out more about how they work here.
What will I learn?
Functional Skills were written to be practical - so that is what you will learn. They'll teach you things that you can apply to your life and work, such as how to work out the area of a room so that you can buy the right amount of carpeting or flooring, or how to make sure those supermarket deals are really saving you money.
In English you'll learn things like:
- How to contribute discussions and deliver a presentation to your peers
- Understand pieces of writing, how to compare them and form opinions and arguments
- Create pieces of writing to get your own ideas across clearly
In maths you'll learn to:
Understand and solve simple maths problems
Use maths to check information
Interpret numbers in a real-life situation