It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Edge Foundation was writing about ‘the rise of the BTEC’ and how this qualification was gaining currency amongst universities on a par with A-levels.

There is definitely an air of pyromania in the National Apprenticeship Service’s latest campaigns to promote apprenticeships.

With the festive season in mind, I recently read that for each of the world’s two billion children to receive one toy at Christmas, Santa’s elves would need to produce four toys per hour, 16 hours a day, 364 days a year and it would require a work force of around 85,851.

Henri Matisse said, ‘Creativity takes courage.’ As teachers are increasingly burdened with the demands of the EBacc, Progress 8 and a whole host of measures to record, resisting the pressure to ‘teach to the test’ and employ creative pedagogies, probably does take some courage.

In Camilla Turner’s Telegraph article last week, Nick Hillman, HEPI Director is quoted: "It is a good thing that these people [BTEC students] are going into higher education. But they do have clearly a slightly different background to people who have done A-levels."