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Transcript

00:00 Talking head 1
We've created these web courses that you use on your principal learning day for doing your Diplomas. How do you find them? How do you use them?

00:07 Talking head 2
Erm it's really good because it's got things like video tutorials and stuff like that to help you and run you through what you're doing.

00:12 Talking head 1
We're delivering the course to you over five hours so you've got one principal learning day …

00:16 Talking head 3
The Diploma structure lends itself to developing a different form of learning for young people. For the last year we've been developing a different sort of framework based upon the Diploma structure. Youngsters can learn for a whole day on their principal learning. We've used a BTEC as a precursor to the Diploma structure and we've found that to be extremely valuable. The feedback from youngsters through student voice has been very positive and staff have adjusted extremely well to the idea of working with youngsters for a whole day or part of a day rather than the more traditional one hour lesson.

01:00 Talking head 1
One challenge we faced was how we would enable students studying the ICT Diploma to see what the progression routes were from the Diploma and how it fitted in to industry, so we wanted to enable students to go out and to university and see what courses were available and what they would study and we wanted students to be able to go into industry when they're doing certain topic to see how that topic fits into industry.

01:24 Talking head 4
I like the fact that we interact with other businesses in the area instead of just working from the classroom.

01:29 Talking head 5
The students will all be allocated business mentors and these will be from local businesses and they will be able to approach them if they have any issues within any of their studies.

01:44 Talking head 1
The challenge we had with the principal learning day is that we had five hours of one subject and we wanted students to make sure that they were actually getting to use those five hours in most productive way.

01:55 Talking head 6
We’re being taught Mandarin Chinese which means that we're actually going to be using it in a performance of ours and we also go into internationalism, we learn about different cultures, and we use everything that we learn into our performances which I think makes them much better quality to watch.

02:12 "Thank you. Alice … "

02:13 Talking head 7
We are doing a performance piece that they are going to be using Mandarin Chinese in, so they are learning that and they're also learning about the culture of another country, at the same time they're doing dance work. Within the same day they might be doing performance, dance, technical, make-up and language learning in various ways, so the ways that the manner of structuring that day is crucial to it being exciting and motivating for students.

02:39 Talking head 8
We've done many performances in the past, and they've all been fantastic, but we work as a professional theatre company, and I think that enables us to have a better relationship with our teachers.

02:52 Talking head 1
We've created web courses that basically enable students to move onto the next level of learning or the next topic when they're ready, so they've got buttons that allow them to navigate to the next task, they've got buttons that allow them to navigate to the next level of criteria so they know what they need to do to get a higher mark, and we've got it all loaded up over the extranet, which is a cross-partnership extranet so it can be used in any of the partnership schools.

03:19 Talking head 9
Some of the work on the extranet isn't just on the computers, it's working in groups and on pieces of paper, not just all on computers.

03:27 Talking head 10
One of the challenges we faced in setting up the Year 9 pre-Diploma course was having three classes on all at the same time and staff with very varied ICT backgrounds.

03:37 Talking head 11
I like using the extranet because you can use it on your own time, but we can also write it down, so it's so much simpler.

03:45 Talking head 12
The solution that we came up with was to use our extranet to prepare a series of lessons that all three of us could deliver. It has all the resources on that we need, and it can be accessed by the pupils as well as the teachers. We can also use the extranet to submit the work so that we can mark it on line but we can also compare what we are doing in each of the three groups to make sure that we're having a consistent message.

04:08 "And I want you to decide out of these which should be in a first aid kit …"

04:13 Talking head 5
The first aid training is part of the employment enrichment skills that we are delivering to them on a Wednesday afternoon. In September we give them a challenge in which they had to raise £250. For the £250 that was to pay for the first aid training with St John Ambulance. This forms the part of the course that they are doing within the school, the Finance Academy, which is built up of three qualifications at A level standard.

04:41 Talking head 3
Evidence that we've got so far is that our students wish to follow specialised programmes. At the moment in our present Year 10, 90% of youngsters have opted for specialised programmes in a range of BTEC programmes. In 2008 we would expect 100% of youngsters to be on specialised programmes.

05:05 Talking head 8
Our group has been brought in from different people around the school, people that we didn't use to do lessons with and people that we probably wouldn't speak to In like our normal school day, and we've got such a big bond now our group, they're has never been arguments and it's really professional.

05:19 Talking head 7
Members of staff have said to me that, even the Diplomas that have just come on line in the past two years, that they have found that their students are much more motivated and that they are able to study for longer periods of time so that they are getting into more depth and the quality of the work has actually got a lot better.

05:37 Talking head 6
Most people dread Mondays whereas everyone here says that Sunday nights is they're sort of like "Ooh it's not school tomorrow, it’s actually performing arts" so we look forward to going to school.