Functional Skills at The Motiv8 School
At The Motiv8 School, we deliver Pearson Functional Skills qualifications in English from Entry Level up to Level 2. These nationally recognised qualifications are designed to help learners develop the practical literacy skills needed for everyday life, further education, apprenticeships and employment.
Functional Skills provide a real-world, applied approach to learning, ensuring pupils gain confidence in using English in meaningful, practical situations.
What Functional Skills Include
English
- Reading, understanding and responding to information
- Writing clearly and accurately for different purposes
- Speaking, listening and communication skills
- These skills prepare learners for independent living and future work opportunities, including vocational pathways such as welding and fabrication.
How We Deliver Functional Skills
Functional Skills lessons are delivered through:
- Small-group classroom teaching
- Individual support and intervention
- Practical, real-world activities
- Project-based learning linked to trades and life skills
- Regular assessment and personalised learning targets
Our teaching is highly structured and differentiated to meet the needs of our SEND learners. We focus on building confidence, fluency and independence, with clear milestones and regular review points.
Learners are entered for the appropriate qualification level based on their starting point and progress, ensuring they experience challenge and success at every stage.
Why Functional Skills Matter
These qualifications help students to:
- Build essential literacy and numeracy skills
- Prepare for college and vocational courses
- Access apprenticeships and employment
- Develop independence and everyday life skills
- Improve self-confidence and communication
For many learners, Functional Skills qualifications provide a meaningful alternative to GCSEs, supporting progression to post-16 education and the workplace.
Toe-by-Toe Reading Intervention
At our school, we use the Toe-by-Toe literacy intervention to support learners who require a highly structured, multi-sensory approach to reading. Toe-by-Toe is a proven, systematic phonics programme designed to build decoding skills, reading accuracy and confidence, particularly for pupils with dyslexia, specific learning difficulties or gaps in foundational phonics knowledge.
When our learner’s start at our school they will do a Toe to Toe Reading Age Baseline assessment to allow us to have a raw chronological reading age score (such as 12years and 6 months), we will then use this as our baseline for their intervention, we will then reassess them after their intervention and their classroom teaching for English to allow us to show progress not just in their reading age score, but also in their English skills within all areas of their nwork.
The programme breaks reading into small, manageable steps and uses a repetition and mastery model to ensure pupils secure each stage before moving on. Sessions are short, frequent and delivered one-to-one, allowing staff to provide personalised guidance, clear feedback and consistent reinforcement.
Within our school, Toe-by-Toe is used as part of an individualised literacy support plan. Progress is carefully monitored and regularly reviewed, with pupils accessing the programme until key skills become automatic and fluent. We celebrate each learner’s progress and work closely with parents and carers to promote reading practice and confidence beyond school.
Our aim is to help every pupil develop strong, reliable reading skills, enabling them to access learning across the curriculum and feel successful and empowered as readers.
The Motiv8 School