About the provider

Bedford College is a large general further education college located in Bedfordshire. There are three main campuses, two of which are in Bedford. The other campus is in Shuttleworth and offers land-based programmes. The college offers academic and vocational courses to students from 14 upwards and runs a large number of apprenticeship programmes involving 1200 local companies and organisations.

About the Practitioners

The project team consists of three practitioner/researchers and a member of the IT Support Team.

Paula Hobday is the project manager. Paula is Assistant Director for Computing within the college.

Austyn Beeching-Smith is a Motor Vehicle lecturer who also has a focus on Functional Skills for learners on apprenticeship programmes. Austyn is particularly keen to develop digital resources for use in maths support.

Kerry Fellowes is an assessor and trainer in Health and Social Care. Kerry teaches one day a week and works the rest of the time as an assessor.

Paula, Nina and Austyn working on their action plan at one of the project workshops

Nina Sharp has responsibility for additional learning support and also has Functional Skills experience within the PPS areas (Business, Care, ESOL, Travel/Tourism….).

Nadine Neita is a member of the IT/Moodle Support Team. Nadine has been supporting the team with the development of the Functional Skills Moodle site which was originally developed by Tim Trodd.

The challenge

At the start of the project Bedford College had recently taken over the running of some engineering apprenticeships from a local private training provider. This presented some challenges as a significant number of those apprentices were nearing the end of their programme and some had not commenced Functional Skills training whilst others were not attending college.

The college have a well-developed Moodle learning platform and so to deal with this challenge the team wanted to incorporate a Functional Skills training package within Moodle to support the development of English and maths and provide remote access to apprenticeship learners. The diagram below given an indication of what was to be included within the developed package.

Click here to go to the next section of the case study in which you can read about the development of the Functional Skills Moodle site.