Plan of Action for your event: Step 3 Embedding Skills for Life

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 and promoting 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, a Family Learning taster sessionmay help to get reluctant parents through your doors.

The Famliy Learning Festival Website has a whole section on Skills for Life. Some key points to remember when organising an event that involves Skills for Life activities are:

Targeting your audience

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

SfL activities can be enjoyed by everyone, for example: 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

• Don’t make it obvious that the activity involves English, Maths or ICT – this may put some people off

• Don’t promote the activity as basic skills – some people may not feel they need additional help

• 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’)

  • Use a font size that is 12 points and above 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’t try to paraphrase

  • You may want to use a readability test

Follow up

• If you have an evaluation form ask staff/volunteers to ask the questions and fill them in rather than handing them out.

• Ask a SfL tutor or support person from your local FE college or Local Authority Adult Learning Service to advise adults that need support.

• Do signpost further help such as the Get On number 0800 66 0800 and website www.direct.gov.uk/geton, however don’t single people out

Longer term Skills for Life

• 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.

• Think about motivators that may encourage different audiences to learn - ‘helping kids with homework’; ‘getting a pay rise’ or ‘help manage your finances’.