GUILDHE Route B meeting

David Ballantyne’s notes from the meeting between Foundation Course Staff with the Delivery Partnership Chair of the Art & Design Working Group.
22 October 2008 Guild HE, Woburn House, London.

The meeting was led by Chaired by Professor David Vaughan, Chair of the Art & Design Working Group of the Delivery Partnership. and Alice Hynes of Guild HE

The other meeting participants included a number of Admissions staff from different HE institutions, two representatives from UCAS, an HE Fine Art BA course leader, staff representing organisations involved with widening participation and a large amount of Foundation course leaders.

David Vaughan began the meeting by outlining the circumstances which led to the moves to simplify the Route A / Route B application system. Very simply they were as follows:

About 5 years ago the Government called for HE institutions to plan for the eventual implementation of post qualification applications. This would mean that all students applying for university courses would do so after they had received the results of their current course qualifications. Therefore an A level student would not apply for their chosen university courses until much later than the current route A or Route B systems – currently this would be sometime in August. The idea of this proposal was to make the application processes more straight forward for students in that they would know that they had the qualifications for the H.E. courses they were applying for. This would make the process more transparent and cut down wasted application time thus making sure that students went to courses they were best suited to.

The Universities were concerned about this initiative and set up working...