Will there be post-16 courses for Twenty First Century Science, and if so when?
There are no plans for advanced level versions of the project at the moment. We are, however, thinking about progression from Twenty First Century Science to post-16 courses.
From Science: the most obvious progression is to AS Science for Public Understanding (AQA). We expect to revise the AS course for students starting in 2008. The revisions will match the new general criteria that QCA is developing for AS/A2 courses. It will also be designed to build on single-subject GCSE Science. We have started discussions with AQA to see whether it is appropriate to develop an A2 course as well.
From Science plus Additional Science: this combination can lead to any post-16 science course.
From Science plus Additional Applied Science: this combination leads naturally to the new Applied AS/A2 courses. This combination can also lead to a variety of other vocational courses such as national programmes from OCR and Edexcel (BTEC). Students who have done well with this combination could consider academic science A-levels too. This might depend on which modules they have studied. In some cases they might need to take three years to achieve a full science A-level - but three year courses to a level 3 qualification are quite common now.
