Functional Skills

It is a course in which you will learn the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is not a GCSE subject. The course aims at improving your social and academic English language skills and to support you in attaining your target grades in your GCSE subjects.

This course is for students whose first language is not English 

• and they will find the work in GCSE subjects extremely difficult at this point in time 

• or who join the school in late year 8 or Year 9 and their English language skills are still insufficient to study the full range of GCSE courses. 

Please note that in some cases it is possible to move a student to a GCSE option if their language improves sufficiently to understand and complete the work in that option and it is early enough in the GCSE course to catch up with the work already done by other students. 

This is an option subject so you get the same number of lessons as other option subjects. You will be learning English by reading a variety of texts from a variety of contexts, discussing ideas, completing written assignments as well as doing listening and speaking tasks. Provided that you engage fully in all this work, it will allow you to improve your English sufficiently to move to a GCSE option at a later date or stay in the course and work on achieving or exceeding your target grades in other GCSE subjects. If you are in the FS option in year 11, we will additionally cover the skills for work, applications for colleges and we will help you with your GCSE work as well. 

You will need to complete and submit assignments, which will be in the form of controlled assessments.