What to do for year 12? (Subjects for one year before applying to college).

[SurroundedByFruitcakes]

We’ve been trying to figure this out for a months and we’ve a plan so he can do the course he wants (in 2024) but have no clue what to do for 2023/24 school year.

We are rural and actually live on a farm. Despite me trying to encourage something different so he didn’t feel he had to stay in farming, DS wants to do agriculture and one day take over the farm. (Which I’m actually secretly happy about).

The agricultural college offers a City&Guilds Level 3 Advanced Technical Diploma in Agriculture.
Takes 55 minutes door to door in the car.
It’s 2hour 35min on unreliable public transport (3 busses), so very likely one will be late or cancelled, and has to leave the house at 0515 to get there. Erm, no. Getting up early he will cope with, 5am get ups are a daily occurrence and have been for his whole life. 5 hours+ travelling a day and it’s not worth it.

So the plan is, do something, anything, for one year as he has to stay in education or training, get his driving test passed ASAP (which will be between April and August 2024) then he can drive himself to agricultural college to do the course he wants to do in 2024-2026. We will also qualify for the rural transport college bursary so that will help with him running a car.

Entry requirements for the agricultural course: 4 GCSEs at grade 4+ to include any English, Maths and 1 science. So basically, English, maths and combined science all at grade 4.

He’s on target to get all 4/5/6s in 8 GCSEs.
English language (5)
English literature (4)
Maths (5)
Combined Science (5-5/6-6)
Geography (6)
Food and Nutrition (6)
Business (6)

So he’s good for the college course but struggling with what to do for one year.
Open to any and all suggestions.

We have three schools with farms in the county. It is nice.

Our farm schools went out of fashion when the government removed all the land based subjects from qualifying in the performance tables.
This dissuaded schools from offering the subjects so the school farms went. It’s a real shame and I do think it’s what’s caused the problems with our land based colleges because it wasn’t just children from farms who would come, it was others who had experienced land based education in school, taken agriculture/forestry/horticulture/land based technology BTEC or similar and wanted to study it further.
Its caused havoc, not just with the colleges, but with people no longer coming into the industry. In todays world with food shortages and recent studies showing the majority of children do not know where food comes from, it’s really short sighted of the government. Hence the reason I’m so involved in campaigning to get land based education back.
I could go on forever about this, but, I’ll stop.
Sorry OP for derailing your thread.

That’s really interesting about farm schools. My northern comprehensive school had a farm. We were in a rural area, and quite a few children lived on farms. I’ve just looked it up, and my old school doesn’t have a farm any more.

Nobody checks that they're in education; my son dropped out after a few months of college and got a full time job, as did most of his mates. Nobody cares. So he could do one year and then just work. I think it would be good for him to go to college though if only for the social side of things.

Our school has doggedly clung on to its agric qualification. Two fingers up to dfe and Ofsted!

Sorry everyone, extremely busy day, only just managed to sit down, so I haven’t read anything from today. Will read, digest and reply properly tomorrow night.

I did just want to quickly throw one question out there that did occur to me.
If DS does end up doing some sort of level 3 course at college or sixth form or elsewhere next year, will that affect him applying for the Level 3 agriculture course? I read somewhere that you have to pay for level 3 if you already have level 3? Or was that just for over 19s?

If he wants to work on the farm for a year before college I see it as you having two options to allow that to happen

1 - Register as home educated
Although, you will probably loose your child benefit unless you register him as home educated before June (but this might, more than likely will, impact his GCSEs so I wouldn’t say it was advisable).
Does he have any SEND e.g Dyslexia, ADHD, physical? I don’t actually need to know the answer to that, but mentioning because you don’t loose child benefit when registering an over 16 as home educated if they have SEND.
Another thing is, I don’t think you can pay him for the work he does, you must only educate him. (That’s not to say he can’t have cash in hand).
Heres some legal stuff about home education and child benefit if you’re interested.
https://educationalfreedom.org.uk/child-benefit/

2 - Full time employment/volunteering and part time education
Full time employment/volunteering is classed as 20 hours per week for 8 or more consecutive weeks
Part time study is 280 hours a year (roughly 9 hours a week for 30 weeks) for an approved qualification. An approved qualification is probably anything your local college or 6th form is offering.
Child benefit also is a bit funny with this and depends on your individual circumstances so can’t provide any solid advice on that
Link to some legal stuff
https://childlawadvice.org.uk/information-pages/participation-of-young-people-in-education-employment-or-training/

That probably hasn’t really helped with subject suggestions, but hopefully has provided/cleared up some legal stuff which might help him to do something he’s interested in rather than wasting the year.

Forgot to mention, no, you don’t have to pay for level 3 courses for under-19s, even if they already have a level 3 qualification. Education is free, up to and including level 3, regardless of how many qualifications taken, up until the academic year in which they turn 19.
For your DS, he will get free education up to, and including, the academic year 2025/26 (assuming he turned 16 this, 22/23, academic year).

I don’t know. I will ask them though. We will get the transport bursary regardless of mode of transport so we could just give them the bursary.

For interest, I just ran the journey through through taxi price compare, set it for a Monday with the approx times he would need to leave home and set for return. Let’s just say I was shocked at the price. I can’t see the LA paying that. One day was almost the entire transport bursary!
I am aware those prices on taxi compare are massively inflated and the LA can negotiate rates but it was honestly a shockingly extortionate sum of money.

@Piggywaspushed, no we have no farm schools. They’ve all gone now unfortunately. I couldn’t even tell you where there was one. Same things happened here as Tractors experience.

@OrangeApples thank you for the information and links, that has helped clarify some things. Will look into how home ed might work. Also, thanks for almost clarifying the under 19 funding. @TeenDivided mentioned there would be no funding for part time? Is that all part time, or, if we did Oranges option 2 (20 hours work/volunteering and 280 hours education) would he get funding then? It’s one of the routes suggested/allowed by the government so surely he would?

@PerpetualOptimist, some good suggestions there.

Yes, annoying about transport, but it’s what the bursary is for. Students are so spread out they can’t run a college transport bus. It also doesn’t help that we are in the most awkward place to get to anywhere. If we could go in a straight line it would be half the distance, but someone put some really annoying geographical features in the way that we have to go around so doubles the distance. You really have to be proactive here to get anything done.

Thank you for the sympathies and support. It means a lot to us. 😊

@Tractorsandsheeps, don’t get me started on performance tables and that dreaded EBacc. It’s caused more problems with agriculture education that it’s worth. 😡
I can see both sides of it though, it does allow kids to experience different subjects rather than feeling forced onto agriculture. On the other hand, you’re completely right about how others are no longer getting to experience it so aren’t coming into the industry.
For my DS, who wants to do agriculture, it’s a right pain, although he’s experienced other things (which is good), we could just do with the local college or 6th form offering agriculture like they used to do. For my DD (just turned 13), she’s more of a technical/engineering person, so can see how all the new qualifications would benefit her as she could go and do engineering outside of agriculture if she wanted to rather than being shoe horned into land based engineering, on the other hand, it’s the land based engineering she’s really interested in (fixing tractors, spreaders, electronics in milking parlours etc), so again, needs the specific agriculture ones.
My DS2 (also just turned 13) he’s more into enterprise, business (he’s actually the brain child of our recently opened farm shop) and he’s outdoorsy so can see him being in the tourist industry running his own business or taking people on outdoors activities adventures or something. For him, land based quals would be no good so the EBacc and new quals are actually a good thing.
I suppose it’s horses for courses. I do think there needs to be some sort of compromise, if they reintroduce land based quals into the performance tables that would be a nice balance and the schools can offer both which would solve a lot of the problems we’re experiencing.
As for land based colleges, well, you summed it up perfectly.

That’s my 2p on the issues anyways. I’m going to PM you, sounds like we might be in roughly the same area. We also lost all our land based colleges and the college he’s interested in going to is a satellite campus of another major college.
Also interested in picking your brains about the apprenticeships.

@Summersunshinee Very good call about dry stone walling. Funnily enough, I’ve just last week booked a dry stone walling course for DS, myself and one other employee because we have a couple of dry stone walls which need to be properly repaired. Should have done it years ago before we lost the person who had the skills, but it’s getting desperate now. I have some rough knowledge which has helped us get by but I needed to learn properly so booked us all on it.

LOVE IT!
Wish more would do the same.

I don't know re funding if you threw in other stuff around it.

This one is more out of left field, and probably not an option.
How far away is your nearest agricultural college that actually does have boarding?

I really hope you find a solution that works. My DD is at an agricultural college 'down south' doing animal care and it is fab for her.

You can normally get 3 years of level 3 funding, from 16-19, including restarting a course/starting a new course. I know at the school where I work, students could, for example, get a foundation diploma BTEC and then start A-levels or similar.

If you enrol in a new level 3 course which you'd finish after you were 19, you wouldn't be funded/might have to pay.

Is there any option to consider something further afield that offers weekly boarding e.g. somewhere like Bicton (although that may be the wrong end of the country?). They offer an accommodation bursary if you meet certain requirements.

They offer a range of agriculture courses: https://bicton.ac.uk/courses/?level[]=16-19&level[]=apprenticeship&area[]=agriculture-countryside-management

Even further west, but Duchy College also offer limited accommodation, with the same bursary to help.

Apologies if this is all completely the wrong end of the country!

It would depend if the local college/sixth form would accept this, unfortunately.

FE colleges don't have to accept part time students under 19- they can insist they are all doing full time study at the college (in some cases with a work experience program agreed by the college depending on qualification).

@SurroundedByFruitcakes Out of interest, what did you end up doing?

Im asking because earlier today I was discussing in a meeting about support for 16 year old school leavers in rural areas and transport to colleges further from their home area which might open up more opportunities for them. Among other things, we discussed how it must be hard for rural 16 year olds to get to agricultural colleges, which might put them off going, when actually they are the people the colleges are aiming at. We were looking at whether there should be more support for this group of young people to be able to access education.

I remembered commenting on this discussion a while back and mentioned this to provide a real world example of difficulties faced (I didn’t mention names or places or anything like that, I phrased it in a general way e.g This family had transport problems because of farming commitments, distance to the college and 16 year olds can’t drive etc)

So I thought I would ask how things turned out and what you decided to do in the end.

He ended up as an apprentice - General farm worker level 2.

We had lots of conversations with the agricultural college and they helped us set up as an apprenticeship placement. They also put us in contact with another farm/family in a similar position to us about 15 miles away and between the three of us (college and 2 farms) we have developed a 12-15 month programme of learning. Our farm is cows/dairy and a few chickens. The other farm is arable.

We have DS and another girl who come to us for 2 days a week, they then go to the arable farm 2 days a week alternating between a week of 6am-2pm and 12pm to 8pm. They get one day a week which alternates between doing college work/training/portfolio on week 1 (they are allowed to organise their own time but expected to do it as we do check and read over the write ups) and going to the agricultural college from 8am - 6pm on week 2.

They started the apprenticeship in July, started the 2-weekly college in September, and will finish between the end of July and end of august next year depending on when they are ready to do their end point assessment. They will end up with a C&G level 2 agriculture, health and safety certificates, pesticide use and awareness certificates and a lot of practical experience. In effect they are the Guineapigs, but it’s going well so far.

It makes transport easy for us. We take DS to the other farm 2 days a week and pick him up and the girls family drop DS and the other girl off at the agricultural college and we pick them up.

DS still aiming to do driving test early next year and go and do the level 3 C&G tech diploma at the agricultural college next September.

That's really inspiring, OP!

Great update OP. Glad it’s all worked out for you and your DS.

That’s great @SurroundedByFruitcakes. Thank you for the update. Sorry I haven’t responded earlier - busy couple of weeks.

It sounds really positive. I am so happy you have managed to make this work for your DS, for your family and that the college have worked so well to support you - this is a very positive outcome!

I wish your DS all the best for his apprenticeship and the college course he wants to do. I also hope the apprentice scheme/placement you’ve managed to get up an running works out for the long term!