Bacc guinea pigs

Barry Comprehensive School Builth Wells High School Cardinal Newman RC School Coleg Glan Hafren Coleg Gwent Coleg Llandrillo Coleg Meirion Dwyfor Coleg Powys Coleg Sir G�r Deeside College Neath Port Talbot College Pen y Dre High School Pontypridd College Porth County Community School St. Albans RC High School St. Cyres School St. David's Catholic College Swansea College Tredegar Comprehensive School

Education Minister Jane Davidson is at a school in Powys to name the institutions which will test the new approach from next September.

It is the latest departure by the Welsh Assembly from education policy in England.

Ms Davidson is also scrapping tests for seven year olds and has already relegated school league tables to history and re-introduced a means-tested university study grant.

The Welsh baccalaureate is being rolled out in response to calls for a more modern, multidisciplinary schooling for sixth-form students.

In the six-year pilot, students at the colleges will continue to study for GCSEs, AS and A-levels, BTECs and NVQs alongside a new, mandatory core curriculum incorporating:

• Key skills of communication, numeracy, information technology, working with others and problem-solving.
• Contemporary Welsh life, Europe and the world, including a language.
• Work-related, personal and social education programmes.
• Employment with local enterprises and in the community.

The assembly has charged Welsh Joint Education Committee with delivering the new programme and gave the body �600,000 for the trial.

Students will now have core topic to study for

Launching the pilot institutions at Builth Wells High School, the education minister said the baccalaureate would be "distinctive, modern and proudly Welsh."

"Equal value will be placed on vocational and academic qualifications," she said.

"It will be structured to make it possible for students to combine and move between different types of existing qualifications," she said.

"It will allow centres to pursue issues and activities which interest their students."

The bacc is a key component of the Welsh Assembly's drive to create "a learning country" and was mooted by the Institute of Welsh Affairs think tank as far back as 1993.