Pearson Level 1 and below January 2026 newsletter
Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed the festive season and had a chance to relax and recharge. As we kick off 2026, now is the perfect time to review your programme allocations and registrations to ensure everything is up to date.
Checking registrations
If you haven't yet heard from a Standards Verifier, it's worth taking a moment to confirm that your programmes are registered on Edexcel Online. Simply navigate to 'BTEC & Functional Skills', select 'Candidates', then 'Search by Course', and click 'Next' to view your current year registrations.
Haven't registered yet? No problem – just complete your registrations and a Standards Verifier will be allocated to you within 10 working days.
Planning any changes? If candidates need to switch courses or add additional programmes, we encourage you to make these updates as early as possible. This helps your Standards Verifier sample effectively across your provision and ensures timely certification for your learners.
Need a hand with registrations? You'll find step-by-step guides on Making vocational registrations.
Home Cooking training event
We have recently run a Home Cooking training event to support all our new and existing centres in developing and delivering their Home Cooking Skills qualification.
Miss it?
Good news we have an on-demand training available for you to watch on playback below:
We also had some questions asked at the event which we think together with the answers would be useful to share with you.
You there is no set time to cook a dish. If you are cooking cheese on toast, it only takes so long. And if a child takes half an hour to do something that normally takes twenty minutes, there's nothing wrong with that, just adjust the time according to the learner need.
Now it can be a stepped one, but we would want some rough outline of a time plan, however how detailed that is is totally up to you.
The staff member can act as a witness to say that the student demonstrated something to them and shared their knowledge, so that's absolutely fine.
Yes, that's a good example, actually. As long as it's somebody who hasn't had anything to do with the assessment process, say a member of staff comes in, and they share their recipe with that member of staff, and they taste the food and give them feedback. That's a nice way of doing it.
Christmas Cracker!
We hope you enjoyed our Christmas Cracker give away event where we gave away a free resource every day in the run up to Christmas. If you missed it, you can access these via our advent calendar.
New content for January on the skills channel
Check out our latest Teaching and Learning Skills videos.
Our newest video covers Building Enduring Knowledge Through Desirable Difficulties. In this video we discuss effortful, challenging learning—known as “desirable difficulties”—which builds enduring knowledge that is deeply embedded, flexible, and accessible over time. We discuss strategies such as spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval-based activities helping learners retain and transfer knowledge across contexts.
You can watch the video if you are interested on YouTube.
Monthly Blog
This month’s blog is about Deliberate Practice: Unlocking Student Potential in BTEC Level 1 Intro Qualifications. This blog delves into what the practice of deliberate practice is and how it can be brought into the level 1 classroom in order to support students.
Wishing you a successful start to the new year!
With best wishes
Kelly Adams
Product Manager Level 1 Below Including Workskills and Personal Growth and Wellbeing.
