Welcome....

Welcome to the Diploma Watch blog. As a member of the MEA executive I was asked to collect views and record my own experiences of, the new 14-19 Creative Diploma which is due for first teaching in some parts of the country from September 2008. We are aiming to monitor the progress of the new qualification, which has sparked much debate from people in both media education and the media industry.

My own interest in the diploma has recently been energized by the fact that I have found myself working in a school which is the leading institution in a partnership that is bidding to deliver the diploma from 2009. To this end, the blog will reflect my own experiences of that particularprocess, as well as raising questions and inviting comment.

The Story So Far
Up until last week, whenI found myself trying to organise a group of teachers I had never met into a coherent bidding group, I had thought of the diploma rather in the same way as I thought of Cold Fusion reactor. A great idea, but no one seemed to be able to explain what it was or how it worked. I had seen some documents produced by the Welsh Board which suggested that it's proposals would extend some of the good work it had done in A-Level media. (Though it seems that subsequently, WJEC have decided not to go down the diploma route.) I had also sat in a meeting where quite a senior liason officer from SkillSet (the skills council for the Media and Creative industries) said that the diploma was NOT a vocational qualification. I wondered if the government was going to say that to parents....I listened to colleagues from the Media Education community discuss whether or not the diploma would be compatible with, supersede or subsume BTEC qualifications. It was clear that there were so many questions and misunderstandings.For me, this state of affairs has to stop - at least in the sense that I and the people I am working with have to make our bid based on the notion of what we think the diploma will be. This blog will be a record of that experience. If you have comments, theories or contradictions, then post them here!

Steve Connolly