Some political inevitability....

Now that our consortium gateway application has all finished ( I was working out the other day that we ended up re-drafting 26 times before we finally completed it!) I have just been reflecting on what will happpen next. We wont find out if we have been successful until about March time, so there is plenty of time to wait and watch and see what is happening with the schools and colleges who are piloting in September 2008. I say this because I have just seen a really interesting (if a little scary) post on the OCR Media Studies forum, from a gentleman whose school is on the pilot from September and who has just been informed that all the existing courses that his school runs which might compete with the diploma are being axed and replaced by it (this includes the horrendous DiDA course, the demise of which should have all media teachers cheering from the rooftops,but also more worryingly GCSE Media Studies and GCSE Drama). This post reminded me of a conversation I had with the Media Courses Leader at our local FE college, who said he was a bit reluctant to become involved in delivering the diploma because he thought that students would always rather do BTEC. I hated to be the one to tell him, (but I did anyway) that I thought that the Diploma would eventually subsume and/or replace BTEC courses because a certain amount of political (and inevitably) financial pressure would be applied to schools and colleges to adopt it. I should make it clear that I think this is a great shame, as BTECs really are the best courses I have ever been involved in. However, there is too much political capital invested in the diploma by the current administration. Schools and Colleges, egged on by Whitehall will see the diploma as a way of re-packaging and re-spinning all pre-vocational education and that is why the days of some other exisiting courses may well be numbered.