Each learner, whether before starting a course or whilst on the course, can visit the Antrec office at any point to collect various resources to help you prepare for training.
As part of our initial enrolment process, each potential learner completes a functional skills assessment in both Maths and English. This helps us assess what level each learner is working at before they start training. Don’t worry if you are not currently working at entry-level, we can signpost you to other organisations that can provide you with the support needed to improve your functional skills.
Antrec caters for those learners that may require extra support. If you suffer from any form of disability that may prevent you from completing this initial assessment then let a member of the team know and we will be here to support you. Our Teaching Support team are on hand to help when completing an assessment and we encourage learners to engage with Tutors in order to guide learners through our training programmes.
Here are some useful resources which may come in handy when preparing for your functional skills assessment:
For free and impartial financial support please contact the Money Advice Service either by visiting their website moneyadviceservice.org or by calling their helpline on 0800 138 7777.
To help plan and arrange travel around Merseyside and the North West region please visit the Merseytravel Journey Planner by clicking here or calling Traveline North West on 0871 200 22 33.
For all the latest information on you health and fitness please visit the ‘NHS Live Well – Healthy living for everyone’ website.
Built-in accessibility options are available for the main smartphone operating systems including Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. These include colour changing, magnification, text to speech, word prediction and, for Android and Apple, voice recognition.
Alternatively use web-based services like SensusAccess, Evernote or GoogleDrive to turn images of text into editable text that can be listened to with text to speech.
http://www.webbie.org.uk/ – provides a free suite of utilities designed for blind and visually impaired people to provide access to digital news sources such as RSS and radio, including a browser based in Internet Explorer which can display web page as structured text.
http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm – This fully featured text-to-speech and text to MP3 tool is free to use with pre-installed computer voices (eg the default Windows voices or other free or commercial voices).
Users can adjust the text display then read aloud and save in most popular audio formats. Files can be split into more manageable ‘chunks’. Text can be highlighted as it is read, making it suitable for supporting reading skills.
https://www.atbar.org/ – ATbar is free and allows you to change the look and feel of webpages, increase and decrease font sizes, have text read aloud, use coloured overlays, readability and a dictionary to aid reading. Spell check forms and try word prediction when writing. It is a simple tool which is available for most popular browsers.
Please be advised that the Antrec Bootle office has closed - for any enquiries please contact 01388 436262 or visit learningcurvegroup.co.uk