A word on Consortia

I am meant to be meeting with consortium partners on Thursday to plan our bid for delivery of the Creative and Media Diploma for our borough. In this process we receive the help of the 14-19 team at the local authority. The consultants from our authority have been very helpful, but this aspect of the bidding process does make the development of the qualifications a bit more problematic. What isn't clear right now (and I would advise anyone in this position to find out about it fairly quickly) is what the role of the lead partner institutions are. My school is a lead partner institution, but for example, it wasn't made clear to me intitally whether or not that means I am responsible for contacting my partner institutions and organising a meeting to listen to their particular voices. Similarly, the extent of the "partnership" arrangement doesn't appear to be written in stone. Could we as lead partner institution impose our own version of the diploma on the bidding process if partner schools couldn't agree on what the consortium was to offer where? This is all a bit academic at the moment, as we haven't even got all the partners in one place, but it highlights the very difficult nature of developing this qualification, namely that with local authorities, schools FE Colleges and employers all having something to say, negotiations for who does what will be extremely complex .

SC