PbyP Skills Ladders

The PbyP approach is built around skills ladders. These are a set of statements that can be understood by the learner and evidenced. The statements allow learners to see the progression in any skill. Institutions can use numerous sets at the same time.

Here are the skill ladders we currently have available:

Early Years and Foundation Stage Profile

This set of 13 ladders covers from birth to the first year of primary school and is based on the 13 scales of the EYFS profile used in all English schools and nurseries. As children of this age are largely unable to manage their own e-portfolio, this ladder set sits inside a special version of PbyP called 'PbyP Foundations' which allows the teacher and parents to upload and assess work on behalf of the child but also allows tools including video clips to help the child take progressively more ownership. When they are ready to make the transition they can be moved over to full PbyP at no extra cost.

Functional Skills

This set of 11 ladders covers the requirements of the new national curriculum and the existing requirements of UK key skills in the core areas of 'fuctional literacy', 'functional numeracy' and 'functional ICT use'. This set is included if you decide to use the PLTS set or UK key skills set (see below).

Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS)

This set of 24 ladders covers the six skill areas defined by the new national curriculum in England which is compulsory for12 year olds and those on diploma courses from September 2008 and will extend to all areas by 2012. The Rose Review of the primary curriculum recommended a central role for personal, learning and life skills in its final report published in June 2009.

UK Key Skills

This set of 20 ladders covers all of the functional skills together with the 'Wider key skills' of working with others, evaluating your own and others performance and problem solving. This set will be superceded by CfE in Scotland and PLTS in England by 2013 but is still currently widely used by primary, secondary and adult learning institutions using PbyP.

Curriculum for Excellence ( CfE )

This set of 24 ladders covers the requirements of the new Curriculum for Excellence competencies in Scotland and is built around the four capacities.

Bespoke Ladders

As an assessment framework, PbyP is extremely flexible and can use any ladders which you would like to create. We just insist they arenot prescriptive, are able to be evidenced, can be understood by the target ability range and build from what you would expect an average five year old to achieve up to professional standard. The following sets are each in use with less than five institutions.

Building learning power - we worked with Guy Claxton to develop these 17 ladders
Multimedia skills - we worked with a games manufacturer to create these 12 ladders
Arts Mark - we worked with a consortium of three schools on this qualification set
GTC - we have teachers working on sets based on the general teaching council skills for their own professional development
IOE international team building - a developing project for teachers doing a masters course
Corporate PDR - a large corporation is investigating the use of PbyP for its 14000 employees.
Chinese language ladders - a new project to allow children in China to have their english voice files assessed by english children and vice versa

Mix and Match

You can choose 20 ladders from all of those currently written to create your own unique set. We do charge extra for this service.