Worth waiting for, essentially.

What are essential skills? Why do you need them, and how do you get them?  We’ll try and talk you through the basics of the new Essential Skills Wales qualifications.

Essential skills are the skills that you will need to get on in life, no matter what career path you choose to follow.  Without the ability to read, write, communicate and use Information Technology, you will find it much harder to achieve your ambitions.

The new Essential Skills Wales qualifications are being introduced to ensure that everyone in Wales has the skills they need to succeed in life.  A similar suite of qualifications is being rolled out in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Different countries place a slightly different emphasis on which skills they teach, and how they assess students, and because of this there are lots of different names for the qualifications.

What’s the difference between Key Skills, Basic Skills, Functional Skills and Essential Skills Wales?

It can get confusing, so here is a breakdown of some of the more common names you might come across when you are looking for Essential Skills Wales resources :

Key Skills : this was the commonly used name for “Essential Skills Wales” before 2010 (or 2009 in some countries).  These qualifications were taken by students aged 16 - 19.

Basic Skills : this was a similar set of qualifications to “Key Skills”, but designed for adult learners returning to education, rather than 16 - 19 year olds.

Functional Skills : this is the name given to the new set of essential skills qualifications in England.  With both  Functional Skills in England and Essential Skills in Wales, there is no distinction between students aged 16 - 19 and adults - there’s just one set of qualifications for everyone.  So if all of these names are confusing you, you can think of Essential Skills Wales as Key Skills and Basic Skills rolled into one - and Functional Skills as the name given to the Essential Skills Wales qualification in other countries.

Click the links in our Essential Skills category to find out more about how the qualifications are structured, what you’ll study and how you will be assessed.