On course for the hard sell

The retail and distribution services vocational A-level helps students understand the dynamics of the high street, says Anne McHardy

Poised on networks of motorways, with huge shopping developments drawing in the customers and with growing numbers of call centres, Trafford, in Greater Manchester, and Telford, in Staffordshire, epitomise the reasons for creating a vocational A-level (otherwise known as an advanced vocational certificate of education or AVCE) course in retail and distributive services.

That explains why South Trafford College and Telford College of Arts and Technology are among the pioneers of this single-award course, taught, in both cases, through their business studies department, in tandem with a business AVCE.

South Trafford has offered retail and distribution services as a separate course since AVCEs were introduced two years ago. Its first batch of students is waiting for its exam results this summer. The course was taken by 30 of the 40 AVCE business studies students to give them the potential for a total of 18 advanced level points on the UCAS scoring system. Business studies is a double award, worth 12 points, the equivalent of two A-levels. Retail and distributive services is a single award, worth six points. The other 10 students took other six point choices, including language or maths at A-level or an alternative AVCE.

Telford has been offering retail units as part of its double-award business AVCE, but from September it will also offer the single award retail and distributive services as a separate course. It hesitated over the course at first because many of the big stores, such as Sainsbury's and Tesco have their own training programmes, mostly geared to taking either students with lower qualifications onto their own NVQ programmes or graduates as management high-flyers.

Retail and distributive services is a good option because it provides skills that employers find attractive, according to Jim Hitchin, who runs the course at South Trafford. In addition it offers a lighter workload than other single-award courses taken together with the business double award, because of the overlaps between its required units and those for business.

Students taking AVCE courses have to complete six units for each single award. Both colleges split the units, offering three in the first and three in the second year, but they can be done in one year. Some students choose just to take a one-year course, using the single qualification to help them with job-hunting.

Units for retail and distributive services include business management, marketing and display and direct selling, and shopping on Teletext, shopping channels and the internet. Continuous assessment is a large part of the final mark, plus there is an external examination. Students have to do work experience, either in two-week blocks each year, or offered one-day a week.

The great strength of the AVCE, with its practical and vocational focus, is that it offers students virtually a modern apprenticeship, says Hitchin.

At Telford, course director Roger Bull is an enthusiast for AVCEs. "They offer breadth and lots of flexibility plus all the transferable skills that the Government is now trying to attach to academic A-levels." At the end of their AVCEs, he says, students know that they will have enough UCAS points to qualify for a university course in a wide variety of subjects, not just in business or marketing. They also know that if they choose to go straight into work, they will have the skills that employers want. About a third of his current cohort are going to university, many to Wolverhampton, which has a Telford campus, some to Aston, in Birmingham, and others further away.

Many companies either cannot afford or choose not to offer their own in-house training. A college like Telford can persuade students of the value of education and give them a good qualification. For those who have done badly at GCSE, there is a GCSE and literacy and numeracy support programme, Bull says.

"We are in partnerships with literally hundreds of businesses," Bull says. The college has built on the strengths of the area, which has a long industrial history dating back to the Industrial Revolution and a very modern existence, as a new town at the hub, distributing goods around Britain. Scoot, the rival to the Yellow Pages, has just moved in, as have several other call centre organisations.