The Diploma in Public Services

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Introduction

There are many areas of Public Service expertise and many routes into the sector. The Public Service has the advantage of covering a huge variety of careers from Law to Facilities Management, from Veterinary Surgery to Policy Advice, from Health to Town Planning to Law Enforcement. To adequately reflect this breadth of opportunity, HEIs can offer students courses such as languages, philosophy, accountancy, economics, agriculture to prepare young people to embark on successful careers in the Public Service alongside those more obvious courses which have an explicitly public service dimension such as town planning, librarianship, social studies. Indeed, it is worth remembering that most Permanent Secretaries (heads of central government departments) took undergraduate courses in humanities rather than Public Service specific subjects.

This presents certain challenges for the Diploma in Public Services when engaging with HEIs and young people.

Advantages for HEIs and young people

The Diploma in Public Services keeps many options open to young people as to their career choice or course of study at HEIs. This widens the participation of a pool of potential candidates at undergraduate level and helps to retain in education some of those able candidates who may otherwise have gone directly into employment. The Diploma also arms them with vital knowledge and understanding should they look for employment after completing their HEI studies. The employability skills such as finance, teamworking, management, project management and marketing/communications will give them a head start over their peers both during their undergraduate studies and during the graduate recruitment round. In an era where student debt is high and only going to increase, such considerations will become commonplace for many young people and HEIs will receive more applications from Diploma in Public Service holders as the qualification becomes increasingly embedded.

Challenge to HEIs

There are very few, if any, HEIs who do not already belong to the supply chain of Public Service recruitment. The Diploma in Public Services recognises and builds on this point to the mutual benefit of both young people and HEIs.

The structure and content of the Diploma in Public Services is different to other Diploma lines in that it doesn’t (and isn’t necessarily meant to) lead directly into a particular set of public service related degree courses. With the right Information from HEI admissions tutors about what ASL and what UCAS points are required for entry, the Diploma in Public Services could provide a welcome source of quality students entering a wide variety of courses. As such, Admissions Tutors are encouraged to consider this qualification as a potential entry route and bear in mind those degree courses that would benefit from the presence of students who had done a Diploma in Public Services

How HEIs can support the Diploma in Public Services|