Functional Skills summer 2020 update

Awarding organisations which offer legacy and reformed Functional Skills qualifications have been working together through the Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) and with the regulator Ofqual to establish common requirements for calculating grades in summer 2020.

The aim is to enable as many students as possible to receive a result for assessments they planned to take in spring/summer 2020.

Issuing calculated results

The government has confirmed that students due to take assessments for Functional Skills components before the end of the summer should receive a calculated result where possible.

Therefore, if you have students who were expecting to complete assessments between 20 March and 31 July 2020, we will work with you to provide a calculated result.

We will provide you with more information about what further information we will need from you and how we will issue a calculated result shortly.

In order to prepare for this:

1. Please do not make any more claims for any legacy or reformed Functional Skills qualifications. We will no longer be accepting new claims from 18 May 2020.
2. Do not schedule any more Level 1 or 2 tests until further notice.
3. Do not submit any more claims for internally assessed components until further notice.
4. If you have submitted claims since 20 March, we will still aim to process these. We may contact you to confirm some details about how the assessments were conducted.

Assessments later in 2020

There may be some instances where:

• Students are not eligible for a calculated result in summer 2020;
• A calculated result is not possible; or
• The calculated result does not provide the grade they need.

We will provide an opportunity to complete any remaining assessments in autumn 2020 for those who need to take a live assessment.

Extension to legacy Functional Skills

In order to support you, we have extended the final certification date of Entry Level, Level 1 and Level 2 English and maths legacy Functional Skills qualifications (which were due to finish in August 2020) until 31 December 2020.

This will allow additional time for students who were already enrolled on Functional Skills programmes before 1 September 2019 and are working to complete the legacy qualifications.

Reformed Functional Skills

Given the current circumstances, we will not be offering the paper-based test window which was scheduled for 30 June–2 July in reformed English and maths.

We will provide an opportunity to complete any remaining assessments in autumn 2020 for our reformed Functional Skills qualifications.

Next steps

We will issue further guidance on calculating grades and more details about our future assessments in the next couple of weeks.

If you have any queries, please call our Customer Support Centre on 02476 851509 or email us at vocational.qualifications@ocr.org.uk.

Qualifications

• ICT Entry Level - 09873, 09874, 09875
• ICT Level 1 - 09876
• ICT Level 2 - 09877