Is your school looking at the AQA 14-19 Diploma In IT?

Is anyone else aware if their school is planning to deliver the Diploma in IT (starts 2009/2010)?
Diploma in IT | Diploma in IT | e-skills UK. If so, I wouldn't mind having a word.

Reading through the specification to see how well our current facilities could deliver it, my initial reactions are:

It does sound rather cool, with lots of interesting hands-on stuff
It will require capital investment
The required knowledge for IT Teachers to teach it effectively worries me.

The L3 version, that I'm looking at has "labs" components that would require a decent-sized workshop space (or possibly vmware images?) set aside for the practical aspects, as well as segregation of the labs networking from the main school network, while still providing an internet feed.

Based on our current IT teaching provision, with no dedicated IT teachers, I think we'd struggle to deliver it well and the jump from current GCSE IT to this is rather like throwing the students in the marianas trench.

the way that it is being set up is that you have to apply to run the courses and then the school is assesed to see if they can meet the requirements. also it is technically a pilot this year witht the full program being rolled out next september.

add to this the fact that the diploma HAS to be run across multiple sites in a trust type arrangement and cant just be one school deciding "we'll do that one"

and of course there is money attached to it!

My sources in medium-height places inform me the school/trust has already been approved to deliver the course :confused:. I've worked out a rough five-minute figure for equipment costs for the labs components (based on requirements for cisco courses, since requirements are a vague), but until we sit down with the other schools and work a few things out, my costings have the "these are 5-minute figures, I will deny ever providing them to you if questioned" disclaimer attached.

Part of the problem is we're in a very rural area with pathetic public transport provision. In addition we run a two-week timetable, whereas the other schools don't. To get from school A to school B for purposes of diploma teaching will involve one or more of:

a) Use of the school minibuses - not always available.
b) Timetabling classes around public transport times, to the detriment of other subject timetabling.
c) Students (who are 17 or older) with their own transport.
d) Lecturers / teachers moving from and to schools.

Each school may need to be able to provide (at least to some level) each component of the course, simply due to logistics.