Diploma debacle

ED BALLS is hardly unaccustomed to being in the wrong. But even the Shadow Chancellor must feel particular embarrassment when it is recalled how, as Children’s Secretary, Mr Balls forecast that the National Diploma could become young people’s qualification of choice.

In the event, so unwieldy and unattractive were these courses – launched with great fanfare three years ago – that fewer than 1,000 pupils in Yorkshire opted to take the National Diploma during its first year and only 3,000 in 2009/10. Yet, in this region alone, almost £13m in public money was spent on developing the qualification.

However, while there was no shortage of cash going into the scheme, it seems that this was accompanied by very little thought, particularly about the way in which rural areas such as North Yorkshire would cope with a project that grouped schools together, meaning that children were continually having to be bussed from one school to another.

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Yet perhaps the most damaging effect of the diploma – which was supposed to combine academic study with vocational training in a variety of industries – was its potential to skew school league tables because the former government deemed it to be worth an astonishing seven GCSEs, even though it only involved two days’ work a week.

However, even though the National Diploma was so poorly designed and implemented, the intentions behind it were good. Indeed, its short, sad history stands as a salutary lesson for the Government as it strives to establish its own ways of ensuring that vocational education tackles the scourge of youth unemployment.