Although there are all sorts of different types of qualifications offered by the further education sector, nine times out of ten students’ thinking on what subjects to take after GCSEs gravitates towards AS/A2s, the latest incarnation of A Levels, one of the British education system’s longest-running qualifications. Having taken on many slightly different forms over the years and dating all the way back to the 1950s, they’re a bit like the Doctor Who of study options.
The venerable old age of the A Level has ensured that it tends to dominate young people’s thoughts when it comes to deciding what to study. However, it’s certainly not the only one that you can take. And depending on what your career hopes are, what subjects you want to focus on and how you like to study, it might not necessarily be the best choice of qualification for you.
The thing about A Levels is that, as quite a traditional qualification, they’re built around the old-school disciplines that used to be the norm for teaching and training people, but which for some people seem a bit detached from the real world.
For example, if your goal was to become a mechanical engineer, under a more traditional approach to education your path to this goal would be to take A Levels in Physics and Maths (and probably one or two other things) before then going to university. The thing is that those A Levels in Physics and Maths aren’t designed specifically to train people as engineers, but rather to explore those subjects from a more academic and abstract angle.
Some people are happy with this, but others aren’t. For them, explanations of forces that aren’t grounded in real examples or applied to specific situations simply seem irrelevant. And for this group of people, being put off by the content of that A Level in turn puts them off their desire to become a mechanical engineer, even if they’ve got a real instinctive knack for understanding how machines work and would have been perfect for the job.
Somewhat unfortunately, the long shadow cast by A Levels can hide from these people’s views the fact that there is another qualification out there that will both allow them to achieve their career goals and be taught in a way they enjoy, with all the content of the qualification being designed to prepare them for that specific career.
Step forward the BTEC. This innovative family of qualifications has been going since 1984, making it much more spritely than the A Level. If it were a footballer, it’d be considered as being at its professional peak right now. And take it from us that if you’ve got hopes of one day doing a highly skilled job but don’t feel very enthused by the A Level options you’ve seen, it could well be the thing that gets you to that professional peak.
BTEC Extended Diplomas are available for about twenty different professional fields, ranging from Art and Design to Travel and Tourism. If you take a BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma instead of A Levels, all of your studies will focus around giving you the skills and knowledge you need for that field, while at the same time offering you a wide range of different options within it to focus on the parts of it that interest you the most.
And because they’re regarded as a really rigorous, in-depth qualification, they’re as good for getting you a place at university as A Levels. Getting the top grades in a BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma nets you 420 UCAS Tariff Points-the equivalent of 3 A-grade A Levels and 1 A-grade AS Level.
Oh, and did we mention that BTECs are a lot less based around exams than A Levels? Here at Leaving School we always like to save the best ’til last!