Functional Skills pass rates 2021-22

NCFE’s core mission is to shape smarter learning, with English, maths and digital skills being a core foundation to provide this.

One of the key elements of the reform programme was to ensure comparability across Awarding Organisations’ assessments, and this has generally been the outcome, with all the assessments held at a similar level of demand.

We’ve put a variety of support in place to ensure the learner has the best possible chance of achieving their Functional Skills assessments. By using this support, you enhance the delivery experience for your learners and put the best support in place for your learner to achieve.

There are different ways to work out the pass rate, but for this purpose, the overall pass rate is the number of passes as a percentage against the number of assessments taken.

We have not used any CAG or TAG data in the pass rate data on the basis that this is not a fair reflection of the assessment. TAGs were viewed as a measure of last resort by the Department for Education (DfE), and by default, all learners submitted would be given a pass grade. Given the low numbers of TAGs, we felt we could analyse the rates using only the assessments taken.

With the flexibility of Functional Skills assessments, learners are taking assessments at any given time and across a variety of learner backgrounds, which inevitably means that learners are taking assessments more than once.

We have broken down the pass rates using the following methodology:

What we’ve seen across the English and maths assessment is a general improvement in first time pass rates – particularly in maths – for our centres over the last 12 months. While the percentage achieving maths is not as high as pre-legacy levels, the feedback received from customers and learners has informed work to make our assessments more accessible, which is having a positive effect.

We’ve also done some data research on the impact of our Provider Development team, who provide free subject specialist support to tutors, and those centres who engage with the team have seen improvement in attainment by up to 5%.

We’ll be working with centres, through our Provider Development Team, to help support those learners who are repeatedly not achieving, which impacts the overall pass rates.

When we break down the first-time pass rate by provider types, Private Training Providers (PTP) have continued to outperform the other types. As with last year, a lot of learners within PTP are on apprenticeship programmes where English and maths is mandatory, which means that there is financial and employment motivations for the learners to achieve.

The PTP sector is the biggest by far, so our FE College and Schools sector have a smaller sample of assessments – meaning they are more likely to be affected by a large individual cohort performing poorly.

Due to the condition of funding, 16 to 19-year-olds at FE Colleges with a Grade 3 are required to complete GCSE resits, which means the learners who sit Functional Skills are those learners who came out with Grade 1 and 2 at GCSE. The switch from GCSE to Functional Skills can be a challenge, particularly with the large percentage of problem solving in the Functional Skills assessments.

Most of our school sector running Functional Skills are largely alternative provision providers who work hard with learners placed outside of mainstream learning. These learners have struggled with loss of learning during the pandemic, and lack of exam experience will add further anxiety to a challenging learning path.

The ‘Others’ sector features charities, local authorities and adult/community learning that produced a bigger sample size and a more mature learner age group. The pass rate was largely in line with the overall picture for English and ICT.

Based on the gender information provided by our providers, we’ve broken down this year’s achievement to gain an understanding on the performance by the different genders.

The data shows us that females are performing stronger than their male counterparts across all assessments. Females make up over 60% of our learners and the difference is most notable in Level 1 Maths.