Developing wider skills in the Level 3 Award in Education and Training (AET)

Regardless of where you teach even the Level 3 Award in Education and Training, in schools, colleges or in the workplace, you must plan to help to develop your learners English, Maths, IT skills and wider skills. When we talk about wider skills, we are talking about teamwork, organisation, problem solving, leadership, critical thinking, emotional intelligence. The idea is to develop the learner preparing them to be the best version of themselves and not solely just on the subject or topic that you are teaching.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training wider skills

We teach the art of incorporating these skills within the Level 3 Award in Education and Training but we advise you to find naturally occurring opportunities to embed the skills of English, maths, ICT and wider skills within your sessions and not try to force it. This will enable your learners to see these skills as part of the subject, not as a separate lesson.

English includes reading, reading, writing, listening, speaking and discussing. Maths includes approximations, estimations, calculations, and measurements. ICT or IT as its known mostly involves using smart phones, computers, tablets, laptops, emails, and apps and wider skills are skills that employers need in a job role.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training functional skills

Lets give you examples for English, this could include reading recipes, magazines, writing lists, goal setting, talking down the pub and discussing where I shouldn’t leave my shoes. Maths might be calculating the time you’ve taken to complete the Level 3 Award in Education and Training, the cost of your lunch, measuring children’s heights and football scores. ICT includes researching things on the interview, watching YouTuber videos, typing on a compute, using apps on your phone. In this day and age, technology is something that must be encouraged otherwise learners and staff will get left behind in their careers and employers will be hindered by this lack of skills which will affect productivity.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training employment skills

Wider skills should be a main focus and is often overlooked especially during employment. You are reliant on your employees to deal with problems, come up with solutions, organise their work, build relationships, managing their own time to enable the business to serve their customers and keep up with trends. Employers use the excuse of the cost to train employees and then worry that they’ll leave after but think about the cost of not training and then them staying so you should worry too much about what could happen, think about the current cost to the business if they are not trained. As Richard Branson says, ‘train them well enough to leave but treat them well enough so they stay’.

In the Level 3 Award in Education and Training, you are taught about how to include wider skills within your sessions. This may be how your teaching and learning activities are planned or could be how they are developed in the assessment criteria. You need to use a range of different skills but don’t overdo it as it will be detrimental to the flow of the session and your learners will be asking what the relevance to it is.