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.