Factors affecting Key Skills Achievements in Further Education - Essay Example

During the last years the attention is paid to the key skills development though they are not considered to be popular. Indeed, it was pressure from employers that resulted in the Key Skills standards being revised in QCA’s Phase 1 Report, and recommendations were made in September 2001. The research showed that sometimes the Key Skills are even more effective than the professional ones. That is the reason for Key Skills to be an integral part of the educational programmes. There are some different views as to “key” skills, but The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has stated some number of skills which are considered to be “key”.

These are such skills as: problem solving (defining the problems, choosing the alternative solutions to the problem, planning the actions to be taken). The most important of them are: communication, application of number, and information technology. Nowadays a great attention is paid to such a notion as “functional illiteracy”. But this notion should not be confused with the notion of ignorance. In today’s changing environment employers are demanding different skills from their employees.

The Moser Report: A Fresh Start, improving Literacy and Numeracy (1999), opened with the statement: ‘Something like one in five adults in this country is not functionally literate and far more have problems with numeracy and one of the reasons for relatively low productivity in our economy’. This suggests that individuals do not have the functional skills and may be the reason why QCA’s current project may result in a name change from Key Skills to ‘Functional Skills’ According to Alexander Alexander’s (1999 p117) the statistics of the U.N.O.

shows that 99 per cent of citizens of the USA, Germany, Great Britain and other European countries are literate people. The problem of functional