How do these qualifications differ from previous ESOL qualifications?

• Assessment tasks are designed to reflect the actual communication skills that learners need to live, study and work effectively in England. The context and content of assessment is based on the learner’s experience of life in England.
• Each qualification assesses achievement against the national standards for adult literacy and level descriptors for the level and mode.
• Each qualification is based on one or more of the modes: Speaking & Listening; Reading; Writing.
• Assessment integrates speaking and listening in the way this occurs most frequently in daily life.
• Assessment incorporates the text, sentence, and word level framework for reading and writing as set out in the ESOL Core Curriculum. At Levels 1 and 2 the assessment of reading is through the National Test in Adult Literacy alongside other assessments of Speaking & Listening, or Writing.
• The language content is aligned with the key grammatical features and the communicative functions for each level in the ESOL Core Curriculum.
• The new qualifications incorporate robust assessment measures to ensure they are valid and reliable indicators of learners’ achievements against the national standards for adult literacy.

The qualifications are designed to be flexible:

• Each qualification is organised in Units, to allow a learner to achieve at a different level in different modes, or to build up Units towards achievement of a full qualification.
• Where candidates take units at different levels, the overall achievement of a qualification is at the level of the lowest unit.
• Any Units achieved at a higher level are portable for three years.  A further whole qualification can be achieved at a higher level when the remaining units are achieved at that level.