A diploma in beauty beats three A levels

You can always rely on the Daily Mail to get the heart of a story. That's the headline today - with "beauty" in quotes naturally.

They report that "students who do well in flagship diploma qualifications" will be counted as three and a half A levels, despite the fact that they take less time to complete. Of course it wouldn't be the Daily Mail if it didn't highlight the fact that suggested activities include printing banners for parties, stand up comedy routines and critically respond to computer games as well as micing in thw rods bereaucrats and confused!

But looking beyond this, key messages from the government are encouraging.

Ed Balls predicted they will become the qualification of choice and refused to guarantee the future of A levels after 2013. But a spokesperson for the Russel group of Universities said "..we are still not sure about the true credibility of the diplomas". Jim Knight, schools minister countered with "pupils can be confident they will study valuable, first class qualifications .... universities and colleges can be assured of their quality"

For the record Foundation diplomas will count as 5 A*-G passes, Higher level as 7 A*-C passes. I assume this refers to the current level 1 and level 2 qualifciations.

At least they are getting talked about!

FS - bit different to what we thought?

Here's an interesting one. We had a get together of custoemrs in the office the other day and one of the big things talked aboiut was the the type of student that would do functional skills.

I was very surprsied to find out that the construction diploma was actually much more acadmic that you'd imagine. I would have thought (and maybe this was my prejudice) that it would focus on practical crfat skills and would appeal to those studnets who want to become skilled tradesman - after all there seems to a huge demand for this.

But the general feeling was that it was much more academic and aimed at the designer/architect/drawing end of the market.

If this is the case then it needs to appeal to those students who traditionally wouldn't consider a vocational stuydy route at post 16 - and what about those studnets who do want to become skills tradesman?

I feeling v ery slightly uneasy about this - expectations have been set and I don't know if they will be met.

Functional skills search for twice as much as key skills

functional skills
1,577
76
£4.38

key skills
695
5
£0.17

E2E
353
3
£0.15

14-19 diploma
463
2
£0.08

14-19 curriculum
84
0


I know that I’m sad but look at the stats above and partiocualrly what people search for in Google.

Originally Key Skills took the outright lead as I mentioned in an earlier post but the last couple of weeks have seen an explosion in searches for diploma and funcationals skills.

Comments welcomed!

7 GCSEs!

So reports are suggesting that passing level 2 diploma will be counted as 7 GCSE.

Two thoughts on this really. Great becuase then kids who would otherwise stand no chance of getting 5 passes including Maths and English can focus all their effdorts on diploma and walk away with just one qwualification worth 7 GCSE passes.

However and it's a big one this......

Does this simply devalue the qualification. The problem with the Thomas Telford 4 GCSE pass in IT was that it simply wasn't worth - emploeyers didn't take it seriously, neirther did HE and even in colleges. A Thomas Telford qualification plus a a grade C in PE or Media (sorry nothing against these subjects at all just exmaples) is only good for school league tables.

So a big worry is that it becomes the easy option and overvalued which is NOT THE WAY to get diplomas and functional skills accepted as a qwuality alternative qualification.

Browns October speech in my view

"We need not just education reform but culture change."

"Opportunities are only meaningful if people have the capabilities, resources and the aspirations to make the most of them. So inequalities in aspiration and capability must be tackled." He talked as much about involving parents, increasing take-up of apprenticeships and university places and bottom-up development, yes he mentioned closing schools as well but it wasn’t the core of the speech.

"The very idea of personalising learning is about helping children become more aspirational: that we identify talent, we shape education around the unique needs and aspirations of the child, and we engage pupils in their own learning - giving them a thirst for education and knowledge that will stay with them long after they have left school." Is that a new definition for personalised learning perhaps?"

"This is my belief: that world-class performance comes from consistent brilliance from teachers in every classroom; professionals who seek continuous improvement, who teach better lessons tomorrow than they did yesterday because they are learning all the time; who when a pupil falls behind don't assume it is a lack of ability but instead ask - 'how could I teach that material better to enable my pupil to master it?'"

People occassionally tell me “I don’t need anything new or innovative because we’re really good now” perhaps I need a better answer than OK then!

More diplomas

Another three diplomas announced covering the rather generic areas of science humanities and languages.
Actually, I quite like this idea. If the diplomas do deliver the basics in Maths English and ICT then the rounded "humanities" in many ways is better than just discrete qualifications in each individual subject.
Looks promising as they say.

What's a GCSE worth?

Intersting conversation today.
Some schools are putting their pupils through the ALN tests which are really designed for adults - I guess that's why they are called Adult Literacy and Numeracy. But becuase they count half a GCSE it matters to the schools so they do it.
Functional English and Maths is worth 3/4 of a GCSE so this is another big focus area.
Part of the skill of developing materials and something which I'm cottoning onto quickly is that they have to convert to counting towards a qualifications - learning for the sake of learning doesn't count to schools.
It isn't quite the same in colleges but when functional skills in the diplomas takes over, it will!

New guidleines published

I always thought of myself as being reasonably well up to speed on devcelopments, especially for a commercial organisation. Clearly I'm wrong as I only found out today of last weeks chnages in functaional skills.

Now I know there's a change, I've got to work out what has changed if you see what i mean and that is surprosingly hard.

It's easy to find reams of paperwork, it's harder to find the summary or headlines.

Why can't someone do a fools guide to functional skills and send me the update with just the headlines?

NEETs

Copy of Key Skills post.
Ofsted say there are 200,000 16-18 year olds not working nor at college. That's a lot more than I thought and if my calcuations are right it's about 15% of the total. Given that around 55% of students get 5+A*-C GCSE passes or equivalent at school that leaves about 30% going to College still looking to get a level 2 award.

The Government wants to get 90% of all 16-18 year olds with level 2 qualifications. Not only do we need to improve the achievement of those at college but we also need to get at least half of those NEETs into college and working through the levels.

Which brings me to another point. Schools seem to have no ongoing responsibility for the kids they have failed - many of whom will become NEETs. There's abigger picture here that everyone seems to acknowledge but there's not a lot being done about it. Maybe it's time for schools to carry some additional respoinsibility beyond age 16.

Is it learning or a qualification that's more important?

It's a bit like another question I posted and it was stimulated by two recent meetings I had.

In one meeting, the question I was asked wasn't whether guroo would help students to learn, it was what they got if they completed it - in other words a qualification or specific measureable outcome. Now I understand this point of view very clearly and indeed in a previous life, I built a very successful company solely on outcomes but it also leads to a degree of frustration when you're dealing with students who struggle to engage in learning in the first place.

In the second meeting, I was asked a similar question and with some trepidation said that guroo was about improving underlying learning and engaging studnets in learning who have a history of dis-engagement. And the person who asked me the questions was very happy with this.

Definetly goes to show that there is room for both approaches - let's just hope that those who want an outcomes based approach also have some room for some straightforward learning as well!

It is proof that is important

I suggested in a previous post that in some circumstances, it is more important to prove that something has happened than it is to do it.
I was doing some lesson plans recently for a course I'm following at college and this comment really came home when I was told that although the outline of the lesson plan template was useless as gthere was no differention or extension, I had to use the template otherwise I could never proves to the assessemnt people that i knew what I was doing.
Bit frustrating but if it has to be done ......

Loads of offered help for e-learning

I get the newsletters of various organsiations, some of whom are trying to sell me things.
I've noticed just how important "white papers", "reports", "analysis" is in e-learning. There are just so many people who have the answer (so it appears).
So why don't we all just do these things and solve all the problems of engagement - it seems more is spent on discussing than doing.

Is doing something important, or proving it's been done?

In coversation with a college yesterday and this came up.

Is it more important that a student does some work, perhaps e-learning work that helps them learn, or is it more impoatnt that the student and college can prove that the work has been done.

In other words - is it enough that work has been completed?

I'll leave that one with you ......

Schools understanding

A significant opportunity exists with Functional Skills to get schools thinking along the same wavelength as College.

At the moment, the majority of schools focus exclusively on finding the 30 or so marks to get a students past the GCSE pass post. With the first trials of Functional Skills starting this term, we should see more emphasis on underlying learning and teaching in 14-19 rather than simply focussing on passing exams.

Be intersting to see how schools react to the demands of functional skills and whether it will impact throughout the curriculum.

Recognising how important it is

The East Midlands Dev Agenecy has a put out a tender that essentuially is for a company to "sell" functinal skills to employers in the East midlands area.

Fantastic - that's what i say!

It has a £500K budget over 4 years as well - not a huge amount but it's a start so well done to the Dev Agency.

The speed of life

We've just had another discussion in the office today - about the speed of life.
I guess the comparision is between me (late 40's) and teenage daughter. She'll sit on her computer with 20 or 30 different MSN conversations all going at once - it's completely bewildering to me who seems to have to focus on just one or perhaps a couple of things. She seems far more capabale of handling many tasks.

Then the conversation got onto speech - have you noticed how teengagers speak more quickly, maybe the age gap is actually a speed gap?

Building Schools for the Future

I've been talking to a few people about BSF recently as I expected the Functional SKills programme would already be incorportated as a key part of the projects.
I was a bit disappointed to discover they weren't - or are least aren't yet, and one of the key reaons given was that no-one in BSF knew much about them.

BSF is a long term project and as I understand it, once the initial capital spend is made changes in the first 4 years are quite limited, especially in the ICT infrastructure and software.

Maybe we're missing a trick here?

Make them important!

One of the key reasons why Key Skills is a cinderella subject at college is that students, staff and employers don't see them as important. Students don't need to do Key Skills, nor pass them (MA excepted). A level students at school don't even do them.

With Functional Skills we all have the opportunity to make them important. So let's make sure that EVERY student understands them, EVERY employer knows what they are and ALL college staff know why they are important.

If it was me I would treat Functional Skills like a brand new consumer brand and go about marketing it in the same way - viral marketing, product launch, recognition adverts, supermarket sampling, free trials, simple marketing messages.