The Year In Review

The 2025/26 academic year continued the change in demographics for Functional Skills that had been seen over previous years. Fewer apprenticeship learners (and their employers) were choosing to develop their English and maths skills through Functional Skills. An article in FEWeek just recently published showed that adult learner participation in English and maths has halved in the last ten years.

To offset this, there has been an increase in younger learners taking Functional Skills and schools using the qualifications to provide support for SEND learners. The flexibility and accessibility of Functional Skills makes it an ideal programme for SEND learners that leads to a recognised qualification and improves progression prospects.

With this in mind, 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. In 2025/26, Pearson continued this forward-thinking approach and developing the use of AI to support centres with their Speaking, Listening and Communicating assessments.

How Pearson Works Out Pass Rates

This year, we will continue to present 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 rates prior to last year.

Learners Achieving Less Than 30%

Another fairly 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 2025/26

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.

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 82% 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 development 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 data on learners achieving less than 30% on their assessments continues to be 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 data on learner outcomes shows that learners are being successful when it comes to Functional Skills, especially when resits are used judiciously. Just to truly show the value of the progress, here is the learner pass rate in direct comparison to the overall assessment pass rate. The difference is up to 19 percentage points.

• The data for 16- to 18-year-olds in Further Education also demonstrates positive learner success. 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. While they are not a direct comparison, these figures do compare positively with Level 2 GCSE English and maths outcomes in the same age range.

• One of the questions tutors ask about Functional Skills is are the assessments changing or getting harder? We can categorically say that we have not changed anything with our assessments. In addition, as the assessments stay live for a period of time, we have data that shows that the assessments perform consistently across different academic years. Across 2024/25 and 2025/26, we can see that the assessments that were live over the two years had very similar outcomes, with maths performing slightly better in 2025/26 and English slightly better in 2024/25. Level 1 maths outcomes were six percentage point up and Level 1 writing was five percentage points down. The only difference here was the cohort.

• 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 just under one in five 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.

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, as we already stated, 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.

The learner pass rates (below) show the same trends, but with much better outcomes. Across both graphs the fall in success with reading is the most concerning, especially when considering the assessments are templated.  

For the first time we are seeing a significant difference between paper-based and onscreen pass rates. 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 have two sets of data for provider types: overall assessment pass rate data and learner pass rate data. 

First of all, we can see that Employer Providers have performed exceptionally well. The graph shows that work-based learning providers continue to outperform both schools and Further Education colleges, even outperforming Employer Providers for Level 1 Writing. 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: Functional Skills is no longer a mandatory part of 19+ apprenticeships; employers, learners and providers have to agree to do Functional Skills. This means that the learners taking Functional Skills alongside apprenticeship programmes have chosen to do Functional Skills and are highly motivated to succeed.

• 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. 

• Similarly, the way schools are judged means that the majority of learners take GCSE maths and English. A considerable number of the learners taking Functional Skills in schools are either in Alternative Provision or have additional SEMH or SEND needs.

School performance continues to improve, with them outperforming Further Education in overall assessments outcomes across a number of the qualifications. What is interesting is when we look at the individual learner outcomes (see below graph).

Looking at this on a learner-by-learner basis, Further Education outcomes are much better than those of schools and much better than their own overall assessment outcomes. Part of the reason behind this is resits. Further Education makes much better use of resits than schools do. Thirty percent of all the assessments in Further Education are learners getting an additional opportunity to succeed, and for many of them, they do succeed. There is a twenty-percentage point difference between the overall pass rate and the learner pass rate for Level 1 maths, and that is not even the highest increase. These learners are benefiting from an assessment plan that incorporates resits into the plan. In comparison for schools, twelve percent of all the assessments were resits.

As per previous years, we can see again that 16- to 18-year-olds have predominately the lowest outcomes based on number of assessments, but this vastly improves when we look at outcomes on a learner-by-learner basis. Again, this shows the value of resits. We also need to remember that the majority of these learners, though by all means not all of them, were studying in Further Education 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.

For 2025/26, 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, February and April for onscreen and March, June and August for paper-based.  

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.