ESB News Winter Edition 2022

All of these resources will be easily accessible – for free – to our approved centres, via the ESB website (we are almost ready to launch a Level 2 ESOL Skills for Life online learning resource – keep an eye out for this on our News Page on the Website!) We are also currently working on an improved reporting system for ESOL Skills for Life Reading and Writing assessments. This will allow our centres to pull down reports from the Customer Hub regarding their learners, including pass rates and specific assessment criteria that learners may need to work on. The Educational Delivery team continue to work closely with our Business Development team to offer bespoke centre training. Centre training is delivered by our Senior Assessors or one of our highly experienced assessors to support centres with their specific training needs. On a personal note, I can’t wait to get out and visit some of our centres and watch their learners go through the assessment process. This has been hampered somewhat by the pandemic. However, during an easing of restrictions last year, I did manage to get out and observe some Speech assessments at Stoke’s Ormiston Sir Stanley Matthews Academy, a recipient of our Christabel Burniston Fund, set up to support centres and learners in bridging the disadvantage gap. Watching our assessors ‘in action’, putting learners at ease and enabling a positive assessment experience was fantastic and the students themselves were a credit to the school – watching their initial pre-assessment nerves turn into a newfound confidence post-assessment was just great – more of the same this year, please!

The Educational Delivery Team—(Left) Anna Domaszek, Lauren Kearney, Isaac Hart, Ben Jackson, Anthea Wilson and Suzanne McKittrick (right)

The Team

This leads nicely on to my next topic – the ESB team and its key stakeholders. Everyone I have met and worked with in the last two years – both internally and externally – has been so welcoming, supportive and incredibly knowledgeable. Although we are a small organisation, the ESB ethos and investment in what we are striving towards, allows us to achieve so much – as our CEO Tina Renshaw often says – ‘Small but mighty!’ developed and released an online resource for teachers delivering our Level 2 (Grade 4) Speech Pathways qualification; developed and released an online learning resource for learners taking our Level 1 ESOL Skills for Life qualifications; developed resources and improved and rebranded our suite of qualifications for learners with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and; improved our Qualification Specifications for our suite of Speech qualifications to make them more user-friendly and focused on the national curriculum and Ofsted outcomes required by our centres.    Primarily, we hope to have a year not impacted so significantly by the pandemic. This means that learners will get the opportunity to display the skills they have developed, in front of our wonderful assessors – actual face-to-face! Our Product Development team are working hard to grow our bank of teacher and learner resources to support the delivery of our qualifications. This will include things like schemes of work, sample activity worksheets, sample lesson plans and more! The last two years have not all been about reacting to Covid-19 either. We have also:  We’ve been busy! So, what ’ s next?

Ben with ESB’s Quality Assurance Manager, Anna Domaszek (left) and ESB’s Product Development Manager, Anthea Wilson (right)

13

Made with FlippingBook PDF to HTML5