Diploma Watch

Some political inevitability....

2008-01-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Collaborations

2007-11-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

So right now I'm in the middle of co-writing our consortium's bid to deliver the Creative & Media Diploma for delivery in 2009. The application process is tediously complicated (I wish we could do it as a viva!) but it raises some interesting questions for media teachers involved in diploma delivery. In theory, one of the themes of the diploma is about a partnership (exchange, even) of resources, so a student would be able to access all the relevant parts of the diploma that they are interested in from within the consortium that they learn in. Say that you are a Level 2 student -GCSE equivalent, in old money - who wants to do options in audio, video, game design and graphics. In an ideal world your current institution would provide them all and you would stay exactly where you were, with industrial people coming to you to supplement the good work that your regular teachers were doing. About as likely as those CDs with all our child benefit info. turning up you probably think. And you'd be right, which is meant to be why the diplomas are being delivered in consortia, so that the student can go to the nearest possible institution to get the curriculum that they want. Except, except........ This second situation is also really unlikely to happen as well, because the prospect of 14-19 students being allowed to wander round your locality just "on their way" to their radio class is something that fills a lot of people with dread.
So what will happen? It seems that there are two likely outcomes, and both have a kind of "plus ça change" feel to them. For example, I was sat in a meeting about diplomas today in which I was effectively told that the students in our school would not be able to access the best facilities in the consortium because our institution was geographically too far away from the college they are . We are about 3 miles away, and schools that are closer will be able to form some kind of working partnership with those facilities because they are. We then, will probably be left to deliver the bits of the partnership that we can, and probably giving some students less choice in the process. The other outcome is that colleges of FE will do the bulk of what is loosely termed "Specialist" learning (as opposed to "principal" learning, which seems to be the boring stuff like functional skills -i.e. Maths and English). This is of course, exactly what happens already, and does nothing to give vocational education a real place in schools, which would convince parents and students of its value.
But lets be positive as well as negative.As a Media teacher , it seems that you have to think about what you can deliver and think about what you have available to you. You might not have great facilities, but do you have an existing partnership that could be put to good use; say with a HEI or an industry contact. Do you yourself have industrial experience in the creative sector. These kind of things seem to be important.
Looking on the bright side, if you don't have them, diploma delivery could be a good way of justifying that work shadow you wanted to do recruiting that extra member of staff. Whatever the case partnership and looking outside your own institution are going to be essential if the Creative and Media Diploma is to be any success at all.

A word on Consortia

2007-11-13T05:39:00.000-08:00

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

Diploma Specs

2007-11-09T14:20:00.001-08:00

I thought that a good place to start this blog properly might to look at the specs. In the meetings I've been going to at the borough council, we've been loking at the OCR version, though apparently there are Edexel and AQA formats too. If you want to see the level 2 specification (which is what I am personally most interested in, you can find them at http://www.ocr.org.uk/Data/publications/key_documents/Diploma_Creative_Media_Level_2_Specification.pdf

What should strike you at first is how generic they are. "Plan a creative project for a chosen idea. Use one of the ideas generated to plan a creative project, considering constraints". This vagueness is quite deliberate, because the diploma is meant to fit into whatever medium or art form that you are working in. Those students doing film making are working to the same structure as those doing fashion design. Some of you might be thinking that therein lies the problem, but we'll come back to that later. This is meant to be the strength of the Diploma and it is also meant to allow, especially at Level 2 to work across different media and art forms quite easily and to combine them into single products or projects. Ok so far so good, but remember that the student isn't just doing this kind of task in one art form or medium - at level two they are meant to be doing it in at least four across the diploma and at least two in each unit. Budding filmmakers can't just work in film, they have to be doing game design, audio production and music promotion (or whatever) as well.

In terms of assessment, the other slightly sneaky thing appears to be the stipulation of "controlled conditions" for all but two of the units. Some teachers might have been making favourable comparisons with BTEC courses in the way in which the diploma requires students to produce evidence that they have met the assessment criteria. That is until they see the frequent appearance of the following statement

"Wherever possible, all assessment evidence must be produced under controlled conditions so that the overall level of control ensures validity and reliability, provides good manageability for all involved, and allows tutors to authenticate candidates’ work with confidence."

Presumably this is going to be checked by some kind of external verifier, but it seems clear that this is not going to be like my current BTEC First Diploma class where I have different students working on different units for different asessment all at the same time.

I believe in accentuating the positive though and the benefit of the diploma is meant to be that it allows you to play to your strengths as teachers, schools and students. If you have a very strong tradition of teaching film making in your centre, then the idea is that you teach the diploma through that medium. The concomitant part of this is that other centres in your consortium have strengths as well and you send your students there to receive tuition in those areas. This is where the real controversy with diplomas arises. Schools are meant to be acting as part of a consortium, so the succesful delivery of the diploma relies upon a whole load of planning factors that schools and colleges have to get right. Choice of subjects, common timetabline, shared facilities, transition from Level 2 to Level 3, transport links, staffing etc etc. The list goes on. This planning bit is where I am at personally right now, as next Thursday I am meeting with managers from partner schools in our consortium to put down on paper exactly what we all have to offer and what our individual strengths are. It should be interesting.......

SC

Welcome....

2007-11-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

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