Doubts over direction for Diploma
Posted on | September 22, 2009 |
Report on BBC news written by Mike Baker
This month thousands of new students enrolled on Diploma courses. They, and their parents, have put their faith in a new qualification, which they are told can lead to either jobs or to university.
The early indications are that Diplomas are motivating many young people who otherwise find little inspiration in what schools offer.
Just last month, the education inspectorate, Ofsted, reported on the first year of the reforms for 14 to 19 year olds, of which Diplomas are the centre-piece.
It said they have achieved “increased participation and achievement” among young people who “might otherwise have been in danger of disengagement from education”.
But now a dark cloud has floated over the Diplomas. The Conservatives have said that if they win the next election they will review the future of Diplomas.
Now let’s be clear - because young people’s futures are at stake here - the Conservatives have not actually said they will abolish the first 14 Diplomas.
Shock waves
A recent newspaper report under the headline “Tories poised to dump Diplomas” sent shock waves through schools and colleges. However, the story was not as clear-cut as the headline suggested and contained no definitive statements from the Conservatives’ education team.
However, although Tory spokesmen were reluctant to speak to me on the record about the story, it is clear they believe the Diplomas must change.
As one told me: “Wholesale abolition of the diplomas is not an option but nor is leaving them alone.”
Conservative insiders regard the Diplomas as too expensive and insufficiently practical in content.
A clearer insight into this line of thinking came this week from the centre-right think-tank Policy Exchange.
Speaking at an education conference, its head of education, Anna Fazackerley, said the problem with the Diploma was that, by trying to be both academic and vocational, it was trying “to be everything to everybody”.
She argued the new qualification had been rushed in, its grading system was “alarmingly convoluted” and many of the courses were not properly vocational.
The Conservatives have already said they would not introduce the final three academic Diplomas - in humanities, languages and sciences - which are due to start in September 2011.
Enthusiastic recruits
So political uncertainty hangs over a qualification that many schools and colleges have been selling heavily to their students.
We will not know until next month exactly how many students have enrolled on the Diploma courses, which from this term are available in 10 different subjects, ranging from engineering to hair and beauty studies.
Take-up will probably be in the tens of thousands, including the 12,000 or so who are embarking on the second year of their courses.
The Lillian Baylis Technology School in south London is one place where students are responding enthusiastically to Diplomas.
It started teaching the engineering Diploma last year and has 45 students enrolled for the second year.
Determined that his students should not enter a demanding course lightly, the head teacher Gary Phillips, deliberately made it “as difficult as possible for them to apply”.
But he still had to “turn them away” because they liked the applied learning it involved, especially the fact that some of the classes were delivered at a partner FE college.
From this term, the school has started two of the latest diplomas, with 12 students enrolled on the information and computer technology course and the entire Year 9 starting out on the creative and media Diploma.
Of course, the real test will not come until Diploma students start to apply for jobs or for university places. They will not be doing that in large numbers for a couple of years at least.
But if, as Ofsted says, the Diplomas are motivating young people that is a very positive start.
Drop-out rate
A recent OECD report has just underlined precisely why this is so important. It showed that just 71% of 15-19 year-olds in the UK are enrolled in full- or part-time education. This meant Britain ranked 31st out of 34 countries.
There is no doubt that the government has had difficulty defining the sort of learning that Diplomas involve. Some of the language surrounding the qualification is impenetrable.
Ministers have insisted that these are not vocational courses. Instead they call them applied academic learning.
Their fear of Diplomas being written off as a second-class qualification is understandable, given the long history of qualifications apartheid in England and the lowly status accorded to anything labelled vocational.
But the reality is this: there is a need for qualifications that both engage young people by putting learning in an applied context and that still allow them the flexibility of moving on to a wide range of employment or higher education choices at a later stage.
So why get hung up on whether Diplomas are academic, vocational, practical or applied?
What matters is whether they offer the basic skills that employers and universities want.
There are signs that they do. Many schools are reporting that the requirement to pass Functional Skills in maths, English and ICT makes them much tougher in this respect than GCSEs.
Big employers like Microsoft have testified that Diploma students on extended work-placements have developed better soft skills (such as time-keeping, team-working and communication) than are gained on conventional work experience.
So perhaps it is time to stop worrying about comparing diplomas with GCSEs and A-levels in terms of UCAS points or league table values.
Instead of hanging labels on different types of learning, why not just give the students a bit of time to show what they can do with these new qualifications?
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