The Year In Review

The 2024/25 academic year saw changes for Functional Skills; not in terms of the qualifications, but in terms of the learners. Changes to the requirements in adult apprenticeships saw Functional Skills being removed as a compulsory component. Now learners and their employers could decide whether they thought Functional Skills were necessary. In addition, Multiply funding for developing adult maths skills came to an end in April. Both of these have had an effect on the number of adult learners taking Functional Skills and the overall outcomes. Adult apprentices no longer need to sit Functional Skills to achieve their qualifications and those that do, do not need to pass.

Despite this, this was another strong year for Functional Skills, with thousands of learners developing their skills and achieving qualifications to support their progression in study, life and work. Apprentices used it to help achieve their apprenticeships, adults to develop their skills for work, 16–19-year-olds to get qualifications to aid their progressions and careers and pre 16s to support their academic development.

Functional Skills continues to lead the way in terms of accessing assessments with both onscreen and paper-based on demand being utilised by centres. Adaptations such as Remote Invigilation, employer invigilation and a much greater use of online tools such as Teams and Zoom for Speaking, Listening and Communicating are now a common occurrence in Functional Skills helping to ensure that the assessment options suit the needs of all learners. For 2025/26, Pearson are continuing this forward-thinking approach and are investigating the use of AI to support centres with their Speaking, Listening and Communicating assessments.

Finally, the Interim Report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review was published and heavily featured post 16 English and maths and Functional Skills in particular. We eagerly watch this space for the full report to see how this develops.

How Pearson Works Out Pass Rates 

This year, we will be presenting two sets of pass rates for Functional Skills; one based on assessment outcomes and one based on learner outcomes. For assessment outcomes the pass rate is simple, the number of passes as a percentage of the number of tests taken. For learner outcomes it is simply how many learners achieved a pass out of those who took an assessment. As an example, albeit an extreme, impossible one, if a learner takes 100 assessments and passes on assessment 100, the assessment outcomes pass rate will be 1% and the learner outcomes pass rate will be 100%. Please bear this in mind when looking at pass rates. Historically, for comparison, we have previously only published the assessment outcomes pass rate.

Learners Achieving Less Than 30%

Another new aspect of the data we have is that we can now see the percentage of learners achieving less than 30% on an assessment. This has always been an aspect of the cohort analysis on ResultsPlus and now we can look at this nationally.

Entry Level Assessments and Speaking, Listening and Communicating

Pearson does not report pass rates for Entry Level learners in general and for the Speaking, Listening and Communicating component specifically as these are all internally assessed. For these learners we only see the claims for success and not the other attempts a learner might have had.

Pearson’s Assessment Pass Rates 2024/25

The following graphs and charts show the percentage of assessments that were passed, the percentage of assessments where the learners achieved less than 30% of the marks available and the percentage of assessments where learners achieved more than 30% but did not pass.

Functional Skills Maths Level 1

Functional Skills Maths Level 2

Functional Skills English Reading Level 1

Functional Skills English Reading Level 2

Functional Skills English Writing Level 1

Functional Skills English Writing Level 2

Functional Skills Digital Entry 3

Functional Skills Digital Level 1

Below are Pearson’s assessment pass rates. These are for all learners and are not filtered by age, gender or provider type.

Individual Learner Pass Rates

Pearson’s Learner Pass Rates show the outcomes on a learner level. Looking at the graph below, what this means is that 85% of all the learners who took a Level 1 Reading assessment achieved a pass. This might have been on the first attempt, or it might have been after a resit; what this data does is cut out multiple assessment attempts and focus on the outcome for the year for each learner. These outcomes show a truer picture of the value of Functional Skills for learners and that while, for some, resits are necessary, learners do make real progress.

Analysis

There are a number of things that strike me about this year’s results:

• While the cohort for Functional Skills is broad, the demographic make up of this cohort is different to that of previous years. The changes to adult and apprenticeship funding and the general cost of living means that there are fewer 24+ learners. In tandem with this, there has also been an increase in the number of 14-16 learners and learners from alternative and SEND provision. This has the potential to affect pass rates.

• Employer Providers, such as the army and the NHS, have the strongest pass rates of any provider type. This shows the strength of an organisation valuing English and maths developments and Functional Skills in particular. 

• First-time success rates continue to be strong, showing when skills are supported and developed, there is reason to be positive.

• Our new data on learners achieving less than 30% on their assessments is an area for concern, especially for maths and digital. Our maths Chair of Examiners Reports have raised these concerns for a number of years, but now we can show the data. There are a significant number of assessments where the learners are not fully prepared to take them. This could potentially have a knock-on effect on the learners’ confidence and ability to progress. It is also vital that learners are taking the right level of assessment for them.

• Centres would benefit from continued use of ResultsPlus to identify a learner’s strengths and weaknesses prior to resitting. If ResultsPlus shows that a learner achieved less than 30% on their assessment, this suggests the learner may not have been fully prepared for the assessment or may have been entered at too high a level. We recommend spending more time with these learners, wherever possible, to facilitate their success before re-entering them.

• The difference in pass rates between maths and English is still there, which is, in part, due to the differences in size of the curriculum.  

• Our new data on learner outcomes shows that learners are being successful when it comes to Functional Skills, especially when resits are used judiciously. The data for 16- to 18-year-olds in Further Education demonstrates this well. Bearing in mind the Condition of Funding meaning the vast majority of grade 3 GCSE learners resit GCSEs, the outcomes below from learners with, on the whole, grades 1 and 2, show the true value of Functional Skills for some learners.

• The final element of this is attendance at assessments. The data Pearson uses for pass rates does not include non-attendance, but our figures show that approximately one in six Functional Skills assessments were not attended. While the flexible nature of the assessments means that they can be easily resat, this is increasing the burden on exams teams within providers. We would like to take this opportunity to remind providers that our paper-based assessments do stay live for five days to allow absent learner to sit them without rebooking.

Functional Skills Overall Pass Rates By Year

The graph above compares the overall assessment pass rates for the past four years. Pleasingly we can see that there has been a generally positive trend in pass rates for maths and for digital. The trend for English is a little more disappointing, though the rates are still high.  What is interesting is that our papers stay live across academic years, so the trends show more about the learners than the assessments themselves, so the changes in demographics mentioned above could well have had more impact.

Paper-Based vs. Onscreen Assessments

Generally, there is very little difference between onscreen and paper-based pass rates, though they are slightly higher for onscreen tests at Level 2. This is not about the accessibility of the assessments, but more about the age of the learners taking them. The majority of onscreen assessments take place in work-based learning, where, as you can see below, the learners have a much higher pass rate compared to the norm. These learners are typically older than those in other provisions. 

Onscreen maths assessments are performing well, and it may well be the added functionality of the assessments is supporting achievement here, especially the onscreen calculator reducing transcription errors.

Comparing Provider Types

For the first time we are including Employer Providers separately as part of this data. The learners in that setting have performed exceptionally well. The graph shows that work-based learning providers continue to outperform both schools and Further Education colleges. There are a number of reasons behind this:

• Age of the learners: as we will see below, learners in the 19+ demographic have a far higher success rate with Functional Skills, especially at Level 2. 

• Motivation of the learners: For learners on an apprenticeship programme, Functional Skills is a was a mandatory part of the training programme for part of the year (where necessary) as it is within Further Education. However, the key difference is that learners could not complete their apprenticeship without passing their English and maths and this helps drive the learners towards success.

• Funding: There is no condition of funding for work-based learning learners, so providers are free to choose the most suitable maths and English course for their learners. This means there were more learners with grade 3 GCSE maths and English undertaking Level 2 Functional Skills qualifications. There is also a trend for grade 2 learners in Further Education to be entered into GCSE programmes despite the success rates being lower than those of the equivalent age taking Functional Skills. Many learners are leaving Further Education without a Level 2 qualification in English or especially maths. Encouraging grade 3 learners to take Functional Skills Level 2 in their second year of study would greatly remedy this and likely see an increase in Further Education success rates. We can see from the learner achievement rates above for 16- to 18-year-olds in Further Education that Functional Skills Level 2 outcomes far outstrip the equivalent GCSE grade 4 outcomes on a percentage of learners basis. 

• Loss of learning: Younger learners are still struggling with the lost learning of the COVID lockdown years. This is something we will need to support learners with for many years to come. In addition, this year’s cohort of 16-year-olds did not take SATs, so this may well have been their first external assessment.

• Schools are continuing to improve their performance too, albeit with less learner numbers and we can see a strong performance in both Level 1 English and maths

Comparing Age Groups

This is the second year of publishing assessment pass rates by age. We can see again that 16- to 18-year-olds have predominately the lowest outcomes. The majority of these learners, though by all means not all of them, were studying in FE Colleges. It does feel that the Condition of Funding is doing these learners a disservice, meaning they cannot study on programmes at their level of needs, rather is it based on past attainment. We can see without that limiting factor in other age groups that learners tend to be more successful.  

Once again, we can see the success levels of pre 16s for Level 1 English are the highest and they are catching up at Level 2 and for maths too.

Further Education Pass Rates 2024/25

Schools Pass Rates 2024/25

Work-Based Learning Pass Rates 2024/25

Employer Provider Pass Rates 2024/25

Functional Skills Marking Times 2024/25

For 2024/25, Pearson has carried out a detailed analysis of our marking times for Functional Skills.

These marking times are based on test booking date. This means that the overall average and the paper-based average are inflated as this includes the “5-day window” for paper-based assessments to be taken and the time it takes for assessments to be returned to us. Without this, these figures would be much lower. There are spikes in marking time, especially in November, March and May for onscreen and July for paper-based. What is key though, is these figures are lower than previous years.

These pass rates continue to show the success of our learners, success that we should be celebrating. To continue this, Pearson will be supporting you all the way with up-to-date information and support throughout the year.