The new deal for skills will mean a guarantee of opportunity for every adult to gain level 2 skills (equivalent to five or more good GCSE passes at grades A to C), Mr Brown said.
The UK has traditionally suffered in this area and since 2002 the proportion of the population with skills equivalent to GCSEs and A-levels has been roughly flat at less than 40%.
You can have a player who has an absolutely beautiful hit and can play 75-yard passes with complete precision and you can have others with the skills equivalent of [Lionel] Messi in football.
One student she knows, for example, had struggled at school, but at college studied a level 1 foundation programme (general skills equivalent to GCSE grades D-G), and then was able to go on to a higher level course.
"As a student you have to make sure that you are not excluded from obtaining the same skills, or equivalent skills, as everyone else in the class," says Imke Durre, a physical scientist at NOAA. "Part of that responsibility falls on the teacher, but it is also up to the student to say, 'This is how I could do it.'".
MMAs are recruited from the ranks of the ZDF to fill shortages in the number of health workers; they are initially trained to provide basic services, such as bandaging wounds and taking vital signs, but may eventually gain a skill set equivalent to that of an enrolled nurse.
They said that his adaptive abilities, including communication, self-care and social skills, were equivalent to an average 11-year-old and that the disabilities existed before he was 18 — a requirement to meet the Supreme Court's definition of mental retardation — based on school reports and family accounts.
This meant that to complete my already hefty application dossier, I also had to take this new test, which was described this way in news reports: Candidates will be tested on French culture and history, and will have to prove their French language skills are equivalent to those of a 15-year-old mother tongue speaker.
Increasing the skills is equivalent to increasing productivity which enables participants to apply for jobs associated with on average higher wages.
This programme offers high school dropouts the possibility to formally certify that their cognitive skills are equivalent to those of high school graduates.
