The Apprentice again shows attitude and enthusiasm wins out

I've had this in my mind a for a few days now but it really came to the fore when I was at a conference on NEETs earlier this week.

Think back to the winner of the Apprentice this year - Lee McQueen. Track down to a previous post of mine (the only one with a comment as well) which is about how employers see attitude and ethusisam as being much more important than qualifications, indeed, it's the primary decision factor.

Lee is exactly that person, a poor presenter who enthusistically treid to get better (and did), a can do attitude to everything, but not that many qualifications, not traditionally seen clever.

AQA say that GCSE passes will drop.

The head of AQA has been talking this week about borderline students and the impact of Functional Skills on them. Quote Mike Cresswell "It's clear that there's a significant impact on the number of people getting a grade C" He goes onto say

"Looking at the information we have now will lead you to beleive that there will be quite a lot of students would otherwise get grade C who will not do so well when this has to include Functional Skills"

He's talking about 2010 when FS become an integral part of GCSE. The first league table reports will be published 2012.

Is it any coincidence the Government has brought forward the target of improving schools from 2012 to 2011?

Let's be clear about this......

One of the letters in the TES caught my eye. Prof Sa'ad Medhat made some excellent points about Quality vs Quantity on the new Diplomas especially in relation to the Sept takeup being around half of the "target", a figure I concur with from my own research by the way.

He argues that progression routes are essential to encourage the Diplomas effectiveness.

I woiuld argue that we should get off the fence and stop argueing that Diplomas are "rigourously academic" which confuses the student, the school, the employers and the Univerisity and make it clear that:

Academic = A levels
Vocational = Diploma

How hard can that be?

Work Experience

This is an interesting subject, at least I'm interested in it!

There's one corner that says that unless work experience is directly related to the Diploma of study, then it's worthless, the other corner declares that employers value "generic" work experience.

In terms of the diploma, very clearly work experience in a particualr area can never be guaranteed. How can it be? So standards have to allow for generic work experience or indeed work in a "setting".

But the reality is that most students, certainly most schools and I'm sure Connexsions will all be doing whatever they can to organise the best placements for the student and that means starting the search in the area of interest.

I just that the scare stories are exactly that.

Scare stories again

Front page of the TES this week brings another scare story.
Becuase the Diploma says that work experience should be in the line of learning "where possible" it is possible that experience may be outside of the Diploma area.
But the reality is that it's unlikely as Connexions, Schools and Colleges will be wanting to get youngsters experience in the right area and this clause is there to cover for problem areas where it is difficult to get the right experience.

The bigger issue is probably that with 10 days minimum instead of the 5 days now, and a need to get the right experience, Connexions will face a large increase in workload which i know (from talking to heads of the service) are not being funded.

Another issue are the Health and Safety requirements of areas such as Construction. If it really is a requirement that every employee that comes into contact with a student (could be everyone) has to have CRB clearance, then no-one in Construction could ever have a student on site due to the transient nature of many contractors. Now that really is a problem in my view.