The government’s flagship diplomas need major changes if they are to have a viable future, the nation’s college heads were warned today.

Colleges must be granted the power to teach diplomas without having to form partnerships with schools, Dr David Collins, president of the Association of Colleges (AoC), told its annual conference.

Until this happens and the newcomers have proved themselves, older tried and tested post-16 qualifications must be kept going, he said.

“We support the new qualifications but there will need to be some significant adjustments if they are really to succeed on the scale that is envisaged,” he said.

“Most importantly of all, we must not allow recognised weaknesses in the 14-16 school curriculum to drive out existing successful provision post-16.”

A “skills element” must be introduced to the diplomas if they are really going to attract young people in the numbers necessary to get them properly established.

And government must relax the rule that diplomas can only be run by partnerships of colleges and schools, Collins said.

Some “excellent examples of good practice” can be found among the limited number of locations where the first five diplomas have been available since September, he said.

But as the take-up increases “it is difficult to see how the operational complexities implicit in the present arrangements can be sustained,” he said. “We must face up to that fact sooner rather than later.”

Launching the AoC’s 13th annual conference in Birmingham, Collins noted that colleges and not sixth-forms were now the first choice for most 16-year-olds. Last year, 737,000 16- to 19-year-olds chose to go to college and 460,000 to schools, and almost a third of colleges were judged outstanding on inspection.

He quoted John Hayes, the Conservatives’ further education spokesman, who said: “Colleges are the unheralded triumph of the education sector.”

And he welcomed what he said was unprecedented praise in a recent joint letter from the two education secretaries, Ed Balls and John Denham, in which they wrote of the “fantastic work” colleges do.

But the establishment of the two departments – children, schools and families, and innovation, universities and skills – were a funding headache, he said.

“The nonsense of having no additional funds for over-recruiting 16- to 19-year-olds - a government priority area - yet having money taken away in year if we fall short of our adult targets is an unnecessary threat to the viability of some institutions and one which we must challenge.”

And the ongoing funding gap between colleges and schools for the same work was “completely unacceptable”, he said.

“We will continue to press for an even speedier resolution of this issue than presently envisaged. Fairness and equality of treatment are fundamental values of our college system and the status quo in these areas run contrary to both.”

This September, 12,000 youngsters signed up to start the first five diplomas in engineering, construction, IT, media and health. But in some areas the take up has been very low. Official figures obtained by the Tories last week found that fewer than 10 pupils have signed up for the diplomas in some parts of England.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Research into drastic solutions to climate change such as cloud seeding, sun shades in space and ocean fertilisation risks hampering global climate negotiations by giving some countries an excuse for not agreeing to short-term emissions reductions, a UK government minister warned today.

The remarks by Joan Ruddock, a minister in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, appear to be a thinly veiled dig at the Bush administration, whose delegation attempted to insert a section into last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on developing technology to block sunlight and cool the planet. The proposed text referred to it as an “important insurance” against the impacts of climate change.

Speaking to MPs on the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills select committee, Ruddock was defending the government’s unwillingness to fund research into so-called geoengineering – large-scale, untested interventions that either soak up carbon dioxide or prevent sunlight warming the planet

“The concern is that people who don’t want to enter into agreements that mean they have to reduce their emissions might see this as a means of doing nothing, of being able to say, ’science will provide, there will be a way out’,” she said, “it could be used politically in that way which would be extremely unfortunate.”

She added that funding research on such projects would deflect engineers away from more pressing solutions to climate change such as carbon capture and storage – extracting carbon dioxide from the emissions put out by fossil fuel power stations and injecting it underground.

The science minister Lord Drayson added that many of the proposals – such as launching huge mirrors into space, adding particles into the atmosphere to deflect light or seeding algal blooms in the ocean using iron fertiliser – were extremely costly and had risks that were poorly understood. “Some of the projects that are being postulated under geoengineering do strike one as being in the realm of science fiction,” he said.

But Steve Rayner, professor of science and civilisation at the Said Business School in Oxford, pointed out that not all options were expensive. Some such as iron fertilisation would be within reach of wealthy individuals - he called them, “a ‘Greenfinger’ rather than ‘Goldfinger’.”

Currently, the research councils – which decide how public science funding is spent – do not fund any projects into geoengineering directly, although the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has allocated £3m for an “ideas factory” into potential projects next year.

According to Dr Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, who wrote the Natural Environment Research Council’s submission to the select committee hearing, around £50m of the government’s research spend is peripherally related to geo-engineering.

The select committee’s chair, the liberal democrat MP Phil Willis, said he was disappointed with the government’s position of adopting only a “watching brief” over the emerging field. “That seems to me a very very negative way of actually facing up to the challenge of the future,” he said. “It’s a very pessimistic view of emerging science and Britain’s place within that emerging science community.”

He said government should support many different avenues to tackling climate change. “There have to be plethora of solutions. Some of which we do not know whether they will work, but that is the whole purpose of science.”

But the chief scientific advisor to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Prof Bob Watson, said that funding should be focussed on the most immediate solutions. “I think the question is whether [geoengineering] is the highest priority at the moment given scarce resources.

“First [priority] is actually putting investment into current technologies and pre-commercial technologies such as carbon capture and storage,” he said, “Clearly I think this is something which has to be move quickly. I would call it an Apollo-type programme… we need to go in parallel and try multiple approaches simultaneously.” He advocated that the EU, US and Japan work together on research into CCS.

Some scientists and engineers will also be disappointed with the government’s dismissal of the field. In the introduction to a collection of scientific papers published by the Royal Society in September on the topic Prof Brian Launder of the University of Manchester and Prof Michael Thompson of the University of Cambridge wrote: “While such geoscale interventions may be risky, the time may well come when they are accepted as less risky than doing nothing… There is increasingly the sense that governments are failing to come to grips with the urgency of setting in place measures that will assuredly lead to our planet reaching a safe equilibrium.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds