I know plenty of people on the forum are interested in education, so with all the strange stories in the press about the value of Fish Husbandry, I thought I'd provide a bit of factual background - quite different from what the press seem to report.
The Government, just a few years ago asked the main exam boards to extend their subject range to cater for kids at school who were not finding conventional education straightforward. There had been for years a link between local employment needs and schools, so in an area where a specific shortage of skills was evident, the Government's Qualification and Curriculum Agency (abolished a while back) encouraged the various boards to create custom qualifications. It's a bit unfair the Fish Husbandry qualification was picked out - there were so many other very 'special' ones in the list. In most cases, only a handful of schools every did them - and always where there was a specific need. Indeed, the BTEC Uniformed Services course sprung up to assist mainly the armed forces - over half the recruits drop out after basic training, and it was very expensive - so having a course in a college for 16-18 year olds was a good way of giving them some of the training in advance, and the success rating from BTEC qualified recruits was better. The problem of course was that it expanded very quickly.
Schools also realised that the Level 2 courses often run in college for 16-18 year olds (with usually disaffected school GCSE grades) were things they could do too. So they started to run lots of these level 2 programmes and performing arts, dance and music are the ones that perhaps we're familiar with. The real snag of course was simply popularity. Offer 14 year olds dance or maths, or music or english, or drama or science, and it was pretty obvious what would happen. On top, as we've spoken about on here, some schools were simply not geared up for it. The story this week was actually not a surprise - the Wolf report was read by the exam boards months ago. What they decided to do is to re-write the courses to put in the content Professor Wolf felt was important. I was involved in writing the new Performing Arts units, and they're more like the drama GCSE - but there has to be a real end performance that is externally graded. In a way, they're not really tougher, but just cover more areas, and are a mix of vocational and academic. I have to say I don't like them as much, because the content is less appropriate to the industry - BUT as colleges will be carrying on with the Level 3 (A Level) standard programmes they can get the specialist stuff then - maybe the schools just tried to do college stuff too early?
The practical upshot is that the new versions are with the Government awaiting approval - so they can start this September, if schools wish - while the old ones finish in 2014.
So very little has changed in Colleges at all - that system works. The schools have to make decisions on what to do. There is no doubt in my mind many schools saw 'points making prizes' as the reason to do them in the first place, which is a shame. Lots of schools selected the very simplest versions of BTEC they could find, and put the weaker kids on them in the hope that they'd perhaps get a pass, and not a GCSE fail!
As far as I can work out - this is all that's happened.
paul
Vocational Education - recent news
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