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Foundation degree prospectus

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Contents

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Section one: The foundation degree
• Section two: Funding to develop prototype foundation degrees
• Annex A: Membership of the Foundation Degree Group
• Annex B: Key issues arising from the consultation
• Annex C: Aide-memoire for the development of foundation degree programmes
• Annex D: Illustrative models
• Glossary and list of acronyms

Foreword

By Tessa Blackstone, Minister for Higher Education

British higher education has a reputation which is second to none. Our honours and masters degrees attract students from every corner of the world. We are rightly proud of what our universities and colleges achieve.

In higher education as in manufacturing, maintaining that competitive edge requires us not just to develop and improve existing products but to diversify into new ones.

In February of this year, David Blunkett announced a range of bold new adventures for higher education. Key was the launch of the foundation degree.

I have been heartened by the reaction since then to our consultation proposals. There is wide acknowledgement that, as the British economy continues to expand, we need a flexible higher education sector ready to meet the skills needs of the 21^st century at all levels. The foundation degree has the potential to raise the skill level of our workforce, particularly in the new industries. It will forge new alliances between universities, colleges and employers. It will bring more people into higher education with a richer mix of backgrounds than ever before. It will fuse the academic and vocational paths to high-level qualifications. In short, it is a new qualification for a new age.

This prospectus, drawn up by senior academics and employer representatives, invites bids for the first prototype courses. The consortia approach that underpins these prototypes provides a marvellous opportunity to unlock vast potential and to generate creative responses to the delivery of higher education. We will want to watch and learn how these prototypes develop to help us to shape future plans for foundation degrees.

I urge all universities, colleges and National Training Organisations to come together and seize this opportunity.

Tessa Blackstone

Executive summary

Purpose

1. Section one of this document describes the framework of core features that will define the new foundation degree, while section two invites innovative proposals to deliver the qualification from 2001-02. The foundation degree is intended to help education providers supply the labour market with the high-quality graduates needed to address the shortage of intermediate level skills, as well as making higher education (HE) more affordable, accessible and appealing to a wider range of students – thereby widening participation in HE and stimulating lifelong learning. The Government envisages that a significant proportion of the future resource available to expand HE will be focused on foundation degrees.

Key points

2. A package of development funding and guaranteed additional student numbers (ASNs) will be made available to high-quality proposals to develop prototype foundation degrees. Bids to develop prototype foundation degrees must be made by a consortium comprising a minimum of: a higher education institution (HEI) with degree-awarding powers; employer representatives; and institutions that will deliver the foundation degree, typically further education colleges (FECs).

3. It is intended that the development of prototype foundation degrees will help generate good practice for dissemination, thereby enabling more effective and efficient implementation of this qualification by other providers. The prototypes will also be subject to external evaluation during both their design and delivery phases to inform longer-term decisions about the future development of foundation degrees.

4. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) intends to support the delivery of prototypes by approximately 10 to 20 consortia through an initial allocation of up to 2,000 ASNs for 2001-02. A further 1,000 places will be made available that year subject to student demand. The Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) will allocate between £3.5 and £5 million of development funding for the prototypes, in addition to funding national promotional and evaluation activity.

5. In addition, all HE providers – whether or not engaged in the prototypes - will be able to bid for ASNs for foundation degree places from 2001-02 onwards. Further guidance will be issued through the annual invitation to bid for ASNs, to be issued later this year. Such bids will be subject to the usual funding conditions and not those applied to the prototypes. All bids must conform to the guidance on core features provided in this document in order to be eligible.

Action required

6. Bids must be submitted by 11 October 2000 to:

For further information please contact Graeme Rosenberg on 0117 931 7487 or Nicola Dowds on 0117 931 7471, or e-mail us at foundationdegree@hefce.ac.uk. In addition, a regularly updated list of questions and answers will be available from late July on the HEFCE’s web-site, http://www.hefce.ac.uk, under the Learning and teaching section.