News

Launched this month, Communicating the Curriculum is a resource that supports primary schools to define and monitor children’s progress in spoken language. 

Today (6 November 2015), Pearson publishes annual data for nearly a million (974,000) Level 2 (First) and Level 3 (National) BTEC qualifications taken in the last academic year.

New standards and high level assessments continue to be released under apprenticeship reform.

A research project involving UK nurseries and schools is being carried out to develop assessments of children's thinking, reading, spelling and maths abilities.

David Phillips, Vice President of Pearson Work Based Learning and Colleges, speaks about Traineeships.

We'd like to invite our FE and skills partners to participate in this survey about how you are managing e-assessment.

Pearson's Lesley Davies has been awarded an OBE in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours List, in recognition of a lifetime of service to the education sector.

From September, A level Economics students will be required to learn about the global financial crisis for the first time.

They will learn about:

• factors that contributed to the crisis (including moral hazard, speculation and market bubbles)
• the role of banking regulation 
• monetary and fiscal policy instruments, including quantitative easing
• policy responses to the crisis, comparing and contrasting these with policy responses to the Great Depression of 1929.

Students of Pearson'€™s Edexcel syllabus will also study the use of 'national wellbeing' and '€˜national happiness' as measures of economic growth for the first time. They will compare and contrast these measures of economic performance with more traditional methods, exploring the limitations of both in comparing living standards between countries and over time.

On 7 April 2015, we published our new, draft specification for Edexcel History GCSE, to be taught in schools from September 2016.

Pearson will be offering a single, unified specification, designed to offer maximum topic choice and flexibility for teachers across three exam papers.

The new course will include topics that teachers will know and recognise to choose from, such as ‘Russia and the Soviet Union (1917-41)’, ‘Weimar and Nazi Germany (1918-39) and ‘The American West, c1835-c1895’, as well as new topics, including:

• Spain and the ‘New World’ (1490-1555)
• British America: Empire and Revolution (1713-83)
• Conflict in the Middle East (1945-95)
• The reigns of King Richard I and King John (1189-1216).

The new requirement for a study of the ‘historic environment’ has been embedded within the thematic studies paper, so teachers can choose from:

• Victorian London’s East End, under ‘Whitechapel: crime and policing (1870-1900)’ in the Crime and Punishment through time thematic study
• Conditions in which the British wounded were cared for on the Western Front, under ‘The British sector of the Western Front: surgery and treatment (1914-18)’ in the Medicine through time thematic study
• Life in London during the Blitz, under ‘London and the Second World War (1939-45)’ in the Warfare through time thematic study.