QTS Literacy Test Tips to Help You Pass in 2016

Teaching can be a demanding career, requiring you to have up-to-date knowledge in many different areas.

Your numeracy and literacy skills will be tested to ensure you have the skills needed to cope with teaching. In order to be granted QTS, you will need to cover a number of literacy skills.

What the QTS Literacy Test Involves

The test has sections covering spelling, punctuation, grammar, and comprehension. All teachers must pass the literacy test, whether you consider yourself to have a specialism in English or not.

QTS Literacy Test Tips

Cover Common Misspellings

While you may consider your spelling abilities to be high, it’s worthwhile visiting some words you may get confused by.

You are expected to use spellings in British English. However, you are allowed to use verb endings with -ize or -ise.

Spellings will take the form of multiple choice. For example:

The businessman was _____

• Entrapreneurial
• Entrepreneorial
• Entrepreneurial
• Entreproneurial

Practice Your Punctuation

Do you know how to use proper punctuation all of the time? Cover when to use different punctuation, as you will be asked to punctuate a passage of writing in the proper way.

While it may seem simple, it can often catch you out as the passage can read receptively well. You will need to assess where a comma or full stop is necessary, as well as where colons, semi-colons or apostrophes are appropriate.

Revise Your Grammar

You will need to show your usage of grammar, by recognising poor grammar.

You will be presented with sentences that make grammatical sense, and others which have poor grammar. You will need to edit these, and insert the correct grammar to make the sentence make sense.

Research Comprehension

If you’re good at spelling and grammar, then you should be good to go. But comprehension is something many may have not come across before, but also come in the form of verbal reasoning.

You will need to ensure you can identify important points, draw the right conclusions, and distinguish between opinions and facts.

You will also need to ensure you can summarise information presented to you.

Read More

Whatever your weak point, reading more on a regular basis really will help you improve your literacy skills. Whether it’s specifically to pass this test, or for the future, reading more will help you become a better teacher in the long run.

Brush Up On Your Overall Literacy Skills

However you like to study, it’s worth taking the time to research common misspellings, grammar mistakes, or punctuation errors. You may be fine in these categories, but often people find it more difficult to assess a piece of writing, rather than to write it themselves.

Practice Makes Perfect

For all of the examples above, practice really does make perfect. You can swiftly improve your comprehension, grammar, and spelling skills in order to ensure you pass and become the best teacher possible.

In order to ensure you are fully prepared, it’s worthwhile practicing some literacy tests, so you know how to answer in the real test.

To help with QTS certification, we will be launching a practice testing system shortly. Bookmark this page and come back soon to ensure you are fully prepared – or get in touch to find out more on how we can help.