Hello and welcome to this ÃÛÌÒapp blog focusing on our ESOL offer. This blog looks at feedback from the research that we carried out with our ESOL providers in June 2025.
Who Responded?
The chart below shows that the majority of respondents worked in an FE college. It was also positive to see respondents from schools as well as local councils and private training providers (shown as ‘Other’).
What type of institution do you work in?
ESOL department at an FE college - 62%
International department at an FE college - 4%
A school - 17%
Other - 17%
The key focus of the research was to gauge the response to the changes we made to our assessments and what support and resources centres felt they needed.
Amendments to ESOL Assessments
We made changes to the ESOL assessments for the start of the 2024-25 academic year.
In the research, we asked about the effect the amendments had had on learners and on centres’ assessment practices.
The feedback was resoundingly positive. Looking at the changes overall, one respondent said:
‘Learners were doing better in some tasks due to clearer questions and instructions’
Another agreed that this change was needed:
‘This was a good change. Within our teaching group we felt the old exams were repetitive’
Moving onto more specific details, we made a few changes to our Speaking and Listening assessments; changing the set up for Entry 1 to help avoid confusing learners and giving learners at Level 1 and 2 free choice in topics for their assessments. Both of these were well received.
Feedback for Entry Level 1
‘The E1 speaking and listening tasks have greatly improved in the similar sense that learners can more clearly and confidently understand what they have to do and produce and demonstrate the wanted language.’
‘They make more sense than some of the questions previously used, especially in the Speaking and Listening assessment at Entry Level 1.’
Feedback for Level 1 and Level 2
‘Permitting seen presentations for Level 1 and Level 2 is a great change.Ìý I wasn't sure how this would play out when we got the spec but it has been a real game changer for learners.’
‘The Speaking and Listening assessment changes have had a massive impact on our students. Enabling them to prepare a presentation on a topic that is meaningful to them has made it more interesting, less worrying and daunting and has given them some more confidence.’
‘The L2 speaking and listening is much better. The students can actually talk about things they are interested in and truly engage.’
In addition to the changes to the Speaking and Listening assessments, there was also praise for the changes to word counts.
‘Removing the minimum word count in the writing exam has been very positive. I have had students fail in the past because the minimum word count was not met, yet their level of English merited a pass. I feel as assessors we can make a solid judgement on whether a student is good enough and has written enough to pass.’
‘Removing the word count for Level 2 has been great.’
Not all the comments were positive, with a few respondents commenting about errors in the sample assessments. We can only apologise for this and have since worked on correcting and re-uploading these to the website.
Further Support
As well as asking about the changes to the assessments, we also asked what other support respondents would like to see from ÃÛÌÒapp. One thing that came up was for more exemplar responses from learners.
‘It would be great to have sample model answers for the marking of the Speaking and Listening mark schemes, and sample videos for the Speaking and Listening.’
‘It would be helpful if there was a more detailed breakdown of the marking criteria provided. Examples of good and poor answers. Assessors require more detailed explanations/examples, especially on what is acceptable and what isn't, to avoid ambiguity and unnecessary debates between assessors and the potential for inconsistent marking across centres.’
I am happy to say that we do now have exemplar videos available on our website, which can be downloaded below:
In addition, we will be looking to create some exemplar marked learner work based on the 2024-25 live assessments later this year.
I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who took the time to engage with this research. It's great to see that the changes we made are hitting the mark with learners. I'm really excited to dive into creating more new resources and training to support you and your learners. Speaking of training, the Festival of Functionality is now live, and once again it's got some great ESOL training. You can find all the details on our Festival of Functionality page.
