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Discover More About Your Skills
Skills for Life (SfL) are essential skills that can help families during their school, work and leisure time. They include functional English, Maths and ICT. The Government aims to increase the number of people developing these skills to 2.25 million by 2010, with the ultimate ambition of 95% of adults achieving functional literacy and numeracy skills by 2020.
Family Learning Festival events are an ideal vehicle for embedding Skills for Life activities, as they are non-threatening, relaxed and fun! Research indicates that helping children with homework is a great motivator to get parents back into learning. So if you are trying to get adults to sign up for your course open it up by holding a Family Learning taster session to get reluctant parents through the doors.
Key points to remember when organising an event that involves Skills for Life activities are:
Targeting audience
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Be aware that different types of learners will need to be treated differently. Some adults feel that learning just isn’t for them. Whilst others may be keen but feel their skills aren’t quite up to scratch.
Activities
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SfL activities can be enjoyed by everyone
Healthy living – working out calories used up for different activities
Halloween – using shapes to create a picture
Cookery – weighing, measuring, writing and reading to create a family cookbook -
Do make it fun – one Family Learning Festival winner produced a newspaper to develop literacy and ICT skills.
Promotion
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Don’t make it obvious that the activity involves English, Maths or ICT – this may put some people off
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Don’t promote the activity as basic skills – some people may not feel they need additional help
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When producing written materials remember:
- Keep sentences short and organise them in brief paragraphs
- Speak directly to the reader (e.g. use ‘you’ and ‘your’)
- Don’t use font smaller than 12point and spread text out
- Avoid using fancy fonts as they are often difficult to follow. Try Arial, Century Schoolbook, Plantin, Helvetica or Comic Sans
- Repeating appropriate words can be helpful so don’ try to paraphrase
- You may want to use a readability test
Follow up
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If you have an evaluation form get staff/ volunteers to go round asking questions rather than handing them out.
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Ask a SfL tutor or support person from your local FE college or Local Authority Adult Learning Service to advise adults that need support.
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Do signpost further help such as the Get On number 0800 66 0800 however don’t single people out
Longer term SfL
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If you are organising a longer term course make sure that you highlight the fact that it will include SfL as participants may see it as being dishonest if they are not made aware of the content.
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Think about motivators that may help different audience learn – ‘helping kids with homework’; ‘getting a pay rise’ or ‘help manager your finances’
Activity ideas
Financially Fit Lunch for families
SfL activities used for Learning at Work Day that can be adapted to use in a family setting:
Organising your work's summer party
Links
Organising your event
Start adding your events to the Family Learning Festival map
The Learning Revolution is here!
Find out how the Campaign for Learning is supporting this October's celebration of everything that's great about learning for its own sake and for personal, family and community development - and how you can get involved. Find out more
Campaign for Learning welcomes Ofsted report on family learning
Family learning, where children and parents engage together in learning sessions, leads to improved communication, confidence and interpersonal skills in children according to a recent Ofsted report. Children also settled in better in class and had improved relationships with teachers and other children following the sessions. The report found that family learning can also lead to qualifications and employment for parents and give them the confidence and skills to help their child. The Chief Inspector recommends that family learning should be promoted as a core school activity. Read the full report.
Time to brush up on essential skills?
The Family Learning Festival is an ideal opportunity to encourage families to brush up on their skills.The Campaign for Learning is working once again with Get On to help promote and support Skills for Life (maths and English) to families during the Festival. You can also find out more about supporting Skills for Life in our dedicated Skills for Life section, which includes all the latest updates on Skills for Life. Our themes section also has ready-to-run activities that embed Skills for Life and can be used for your Family Learning Festival events.
Updated planning guide
See our updated planning guide, which covers information and advice on planning your Family Learning Festival events
We need you!
As we're all aware, the economic conditions mean that everyone's budgets are stretched. So, we need your help to share ideas with new and existing organisers on how to get the most out of Family Learning Festival events. We'd like you to upload video clips about how to organise an event, your top tips or ideas for activities. If you have footage of event itself that's even better - please get permission from attendees before filming and uploading anything to a public arena.
Once you have your video upload it to www.youtube.com and tag it with "Family Learning Festival" and drop us a line to let us know at flf@cflearning.org.uk See what we already have on our channel youtube.com/familylearningtelly Need some help on making a video.
