OH540 Interview with Dick Willis (Youth Education Service)
Interviewee: Dick Willis
Interviewer: Vanessa Harrison
Date: Thursday, 19th June 2014
[00:00:05]
VH: This is Vanessa Harrison interviewing Dick Willis on May 19th, 2014 at 10 o'clock at 14 Frederick Place as part of the YES Oral History Project.
VH: Good morning Dick, thank you for coming along this morning. I'm looking forward to hearing the story of your involvement with YES. DW: Well, my involvement goes back a long way before YES really. So I was a student at the university here starting in ‘72 to ‘74 doing Zoology and at the end of that, having never had any idea of what I wanted to be with my life, I wanted to stay in Bristol another year and a convenient way of doing that was to train as a teacher. So I joined the PGCE course at the university here. And one of the things that they did in those days, they probably don't do it now, is to ask all of the PGCE students to do some sort of extra-curricular activity. And I can remember that we were all in this great hall somewhere in the depths of the Education Department and a parade of people came through asking for volunteers to work on their projects. And most of them were, you know, good, predictable projects like literacy projects or working with, I don't know, children, extra in schools providing additional support or something. And these two guys came in and they talked about working with kids, who were not attending local schools and what they really wanted were climbers and cavers and my arm went up automatically because I was a caver. I'd been completely taken over by caving when I was a student and that was the end of that.
A decent academic career and I subsequently spent 40 years doing big expeditions overseas. But anyway, my hand went up and the hand of my flatmate next to me, his hand went up as well, so we signed up for what was then called the ROSLA Project , the Raising of School Leaving Age. So this was back in the days when the school leaving age had gone up from 15 to 16 and ROSLA, as I understood it, then was a sort of social education project where you're working with kids from six of the big comprehensives who were non-attenders at school. And the model that they adopted was to accept that these kids weren't going to school and to bring them together as groups which were led by housewives effectively, mothers and housewives, women whose experience of dealing with teenagers was exactly that. They had kids of their own and they'd worked with teenagers. They knew the foibles of working with teenagers and they were supported by students from the Education Department and the Social Work Department at the university , what was then called Bristol Polytechnic. So I arrived at Frederick Place, this very building, although it was very different in those days. As a student I hadn't the faintest idea of what I was going to be doing other than the fact that they wanted my caving skills which sounded alright to me. VH: And what was the date of that? [00:03:28]
DW: Oh, that was in 1974. So a long time ago, 40 years ago and I was introduced to the other people working with this particular group. And then we were taken out to be introduced to the students with whom we would work. And we went to a church hall somewhere out in South Bristol, I can't remember where it was, anyway Churchill, and I met this bunch of kids and as I recall there were 14 of them, but as you get old your memory gets worse. Fourteen kids who were the sort of kids to whom I'd never experienced really. I was public school educated, it was what is now called an assisted place, direct grant in those days.
So these were kids that I'd never encountered before and most of them I've forgotten, but two of them stuck in my mind for a long time. It was a really interesting experience, we did all sorts of things with them. I used to really enjoy taking those kids caving and I did that as a local authority volunteer instructor for a long period of time because what caving did to these kids, not to be too blunt about it, but physical contact between those kids then and now between the peers usually came down to one of two things - either because they were fighting or because they were trying to shag each other. Let's not mince our words. So actually to go into an environment where they physically assisted each other was quite extraordinary and they had to overcome all those, 'Oh, I can't go in there, I'm claustrophobic, I'm scared, it's small, it's dark.’ And for many kids it was almost a transformative experience being in an environment where they could physically be assisted by or physically assist other people without any of those implications of violence or sex. And it was great as a trust-building activity and these kids were an extraordinary experience. I don't really know why most of them were there but by the end of the year, by the end of that first year, there were only, my memory has it, that there were only two of that group of fourteen kids remaining. One of them was called John and the other one was called Phil Bird. And John, his ambition always was to join the army but right at the end of that experience he had, as I recall, a row with his mother. He came from a single-parent family. He had a blazing row with his mother and he stormed out of that house and he was picked up for a number of 'taking and driving away' incidents. And that was the end of his potential army career and I never set eyes on him again.
[00:06:00]
Phil Bird, on the other hand, he was a very bright kid and he was interesting, a very interesting boy. His father hadn't worked for 20 years. His younger brother was called Savage, came from a family in Hartcliffe , big, tall, strong lad. I lost contact with Phil although some of my colleagues at YES, Roger White and Dave Brockington kept contact with him for a while but he turned up again in my life many years later when I was running the County Council's Unemployment and Training Scheme . One of my colleagues had said to me that he had to go out and he was expecting a contractor to come, to quote for equipping an Open Learning Centre and would I see the contractor? So I said, “Yes, of course I will.” So I was sat at my desk and the receptionist called me up and said, ‘Oh, Jonathan's contractor's here, would you come and talk to him?’ And I said, “Yes,” and I turned round and it was Phil Bird and he'd gone from a rough kid in Hartcliffe who didn't attend school, his family had never worked, to running his own company, an office fitting company. And I can't help but think that probably I played some small part in changing him and it was great to see him again. The only thing I didn't like about it was that he was an ardent Thatcherite. [laughter] As somebody running schemes for kids who were victims of the Thatcherite revolution, I couldn't do with that. But it was amazing, and he was employing other kids from Hartcliffe and his brother and various other people. And I've lost track of him again now and I suspect Dave Brockington will be in contact with him.
[00:07:34] So that was my early experience of YES. The other kids, I don't really know what happened to them. Some of them went back to school, some of them were withdrawn by their parents because this was not real education, not that they participated in real education anyway. Some of them went into care, some of them probably went inside. You know that great mix of tragic outcomes for many of the kids. Some of them may be perfectly respectable, now elderly citizens, like me. But for me, working with that group of kids changed my life. I can't put it in any other way at all because it politicised me, it made me realise that in my middle class upbringing, there were whole swathes of people to whom I'd never been exposed, who had pressures on them that were beyond my imagination.
[00:08:18]
And I can remember once going back to my old school and talking to my biology teacher, who was a fantastic man and a friend of my family, and he asked me what I was doing and I described the type of kids I was working with and he said, ‘If they weren't interested in learning, I wouldn't be in them.’ And I said, “Look Joe, the outcome of that is that they'll be the ones putting the bricks through your car window.” But he was an amazing man and many of my teachers were inspiring people but they also had no experience of these types of kids. They condemned them. I can remember saying, “How can these kids do their homework?” You know, some of these kids lived in a family of six or seven with one room. They just don't have the facilities to do it. And that was it, a gulf had opened up. My father was the Deputy Head of that school and all his siblings worked in private education and a sort of educational gulf grew up between us.
[00:09:10]
And so, for me working with what was then the ROSLA projects that subsequently became YES and caving changed me totally. And it then led into … laid the foundations for my subsequent … I can't really call it career because I just kept going from job to job to enable me to go on my next expedition. But when I went in to teaching I got a job in a huge comprehensive school in Derby. And the reason that I got the job was because of my work with the ROSLA project. They wanted somebody that had worked with kids in that sort of much less formally structured setting, and often working with kids out of school. And I had the same experience there. I worked with a group of a dozen or so what were then fifth years who were that mix. There was one kid who was the most dyslexic child that Keele University had ever encountered when we finally had him tested for dyslexia at the age of 15. There was a kid with hypothyroidism. There was a kid with the most amazing gift for winding up other children. You'd put him in a group, the others would be ripping each others' throats out within minutes. And just that mix of kids who, if you got them out of school, were fine. You know you could work with them, talk to them as adults. But in the school they just didn't function. And I think that applied to so many of the children I was working with when I worked with ROSLA. And I then went on from there, Dave Brockington head-hunted me, it's a grand title, he head hunted me back to Bristol to run one of the pilot programmes for what became the Youth Opportunities Programme in the early days of youth unemployment under the Thatcherite revolution.
[00:11:00]
And so I found myself building on this foundation, that working with ROSLA, to be working with kids all over the county. Kids of all sorts really and providing them with opportunities to do stuff that they wouldn't otherwise have done. And I think one of the greatest lessons that they taught me was actually to work outside the boundaries of the system. And what we did on those Youth Opportunities Projects in those days, you couldn't do it now - because everything's target driven and too tied down and too accountable and everything else - was that we bent every rule that we possibly could in order to give those kids a positive experience. And my colleagues, many of whom had done similar work with the ROSLA Project and similar initiatives, really we did bend over backwards to try and offer as much flexibility as we possibly could to give those kids the opportunity to open their eyes and experience things they wouldn't otherwise have done and potentially to get back into education.
[00:12:05]
And from that I moved into working with unemployment schemes for adults, not unemployment schemes so much as training programmes for adults. And in Avon we spent 70% of the national budget for one programme providing short vocationally relevant courses for unemployed adults, and again we bent just about every rule we possibly could in order to do that. The only two things that we never did were driving lessons and outdoor management because the Minister didn't like getting letters from his constituents saying that they'd just paid £2,000 to get their wife through their driving test. Why did these dole merchants get it for nothing? Or why are we subsidising people to have a good time walking across gardens?
[00:12:49]
And I did all that for ten years until I started seeing the same people coming round for the third time on the schemes at which point I got out, I couldn't justify being part of it really. But all of that was built on that experience of what went on in and out of this building, 14 Frederick Place , and the people I met through it which was extraordinary really. And I've always sort of kept in contact with it because Roger and Dave are neighbours and friends of mine. VH: Other trustees? [00:13:19]
DW: Other trustees, yeah, they're two other trustees and then a couple of years ago they asked me if I'd become a trustee for YES. which I was delighted to do although I think what they really wanted was somebody younger to come in with a bundle of energy and try and invigorate some of their thinking, in which case they failed dismally because I'm much the same age, and they're not quite as worn-out as I am really. But it was a privilege to come back into working with this organisation and to see what's changed here, and quite a lot of things. We're now in the basement of 14 Frederick Place whereas back in the days when I was working with ROSLA we occupied this floor which then had a bowling alley, a skittle alley which was one of the activities that we did with the kids and the floor above which had the sort of administration role, and then over the years the organisation as it became the Youth Education Service expanded hugely so.
[00:14:10]
YES, itself, ran training schemes for unemployed people and it expanded and contracted as the funding had been available and not been available really. And the fact that Chris Cox is still here and joined as a volunteer at a similar time to me. Both the longevity of YES and also the value of holding that body of experience because although the social context may change, the political context, the funding context may change, I don't think there's much change in the issues that face the sort of kids and young adults with whom YES works. That complex mixture of their own family contexts, their relationships, maybe if they've got learning disabilities, other challenges: dyslexia and so forth. All of those things come together: lack of confidence, maybe a criminal history in some cases, background of care that requires them, if they want to make progress, to have personal input, one-to-one or very small group input. And the importance of programmes that really are not the bog-standard GCSE stuff that take account of the individual’s needs and the need to recognise that mixture and respond accordingly.
[00:15:33]
And I think one of the great tragedies is that because funding these days is so tight particularly for young adults then the opportunity to provide those sorts of inputs to people lessens. We are wasting people in society and I find that a huge tragedy. So ROSLA project I started 40 years ago and it's morphed slowly into where we are now. It's grown in size, it's shrunk in size, it's embraced a whole load of people and I am really looking forward to the 30th birthday party . I was having a text exchange the other day with a young man who was one of our first Youth Opportunities Programme students I suppose who was himself a ROSLA project literacy group student and stayed with ROSLA for a very long time. And I subsequently, when I was running the training schemes, I subsequently employed him as a caretaker and he then trained some years later, he did an Access course to HE and trained as a youth worker and he's still employed as a youth worker which is a bit of challenge today with the cuts. Another real success for ROSLA/YES I think, changing someone's life and giving them opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.
[00:16:55]
VH: Thank you Dick. DW: My pleasure.
Notes: University: Bristol University PGCE: Post Graduate Certificate in Education ROSLA Project: ROSLA - Raising of the School Leaving Age - alternative provision set up at 14 Frederick Place for pupils in their last year of compulsory schooling. Pupils attended for a half-day session once a week. the university: Bristol Polytechnic now the University of the West of England Hartcliffe: a housing estate in the south of Bristol County Council’s Unemployment and Training Scheme: Avon County Council (see x) YES: Youth Education Service Fifth years: school pupils aged 15-16 years old Youth Opportunities Programme: a programme for unemployed, young people Avon: the County of Avon – a county from 1974 to 1996. It included Bristol and parts Gloucestershire and Somerset. 14 Frederick Place: YES, 14 Frederick Place, Bristol 30th birthday party: YES 30th anniversary, 2014 Access course to HE: a preparatory course for adults who do not have the necessary qualifications and wish to apply for degree level courses.
[00:00:05]
VH: This is Vanessa Harrison interviewing Dick Willis on May 19th, 2014 at 10 o'clock at 14 Frederick Place as part of the YES Oral History Project.
VH: Good morning Dick, thank you for coming along this morning. I'm looking forward to hearing the story of your involvement with YES. DW: Well, my involvement goes back a long way before YES really. So I was a student at the university here starting in ‘72 to ‘74 doing Zoology and at the end of that, having never had any idea of what I wanted to be with my life, I wanted to stay in Bristol another year and a convenient way of doing that was to train as a teacher. So I joined the PGCE course at the university here. And one of the things that they did in those days, they probably don't do it now, is to ask all of the PGCE students to do some sort of extra-curricular activity. And I can remember that we were all in this great hall somewhere in the depths of the Education Department and a parade of people came through asking for volunteers to work on their projects. And most of them were, you know, good, predictable projects like literacy projects or working with, I don't know, children, extra in schools providing additional support or something. And these two guys came in and they talked about working with kids, who were not attending local schools and what they really wanted were climbers and cavers and my arm went up automatically because I was a caver. I'd been completely taken over by caving when I was a student and that was the end of that.
A decent academic career and I subsequently spent 40 years doing big expeditions overseas. But anyway, my hand went up and the hand of my flatmate next to me, his hand went up as well, so we signed up for what was then called the ROSLA Project , the Raising of School Leaving Age. So this was back in the days when the school leaving age had gone up from 15 to 16 and ROSLA, as I understood it, then was a sort of social education project where you're working with kids from six of the big comprehensives who were non-attenders at school. And the model that they adopted was to accept that these kids weren't going to school and to bring them together as groups which were led by housewives effectively, mothers and housewives, women whose experience of dealing with teenagers was exactly that. They had kids of their own and they'd worked with teenagers. They knew the foibles of working with teenagers and they were supported by students from the Education Department and the Social Work Department at the university , what was then called Bristol Polytechnic. So I arrived at Frederick Place, this very building, although it was very different in those days. As a student I hadn't the faintest idea of what I was going to be doing other than the fact that they wanted my caving skills which sounded alright to me. VH: And what was the date of that? [00:03:28]
DW: Oh, that was in 1974. So a long time ago, 40 years ago and I was introduced to the other people working with this particular group. And then we were taken out to be introduced to the students with whom we would work. And we went to a church hall somewhere out in South Bristol, I can't remember where it was, anyway Churchill, and I met this bunch of kids and as I recall there were 14 of them, but as you get old your memory gets worse. Fourteen kids who were the sort of kids to whom I'd never experienced really. I was public school educated, it was what is now called an assisted place, direct grant in those days.
So these were kids that I'd never encountered before and most of them I've forgotten, but two of them stuck in my mind for a long time. It was a really interesting experience, we did all sorts of things with them. I used to really enjoy taking those kids caving and I did that as a local authority volunteer instructor for a long period of time because what caving did to these kids, not to be too blunt about it, but physical contact between those kids then and now between the peers usually came down to one of two things - either because they were fighting or because they were trying to shag each other. Let's not mince our words. So actually to go into an environment where they physically assisted each other was quite extraordinary and they had to overcome all those, 'Oh, I can't go in there, I'm claustrophobic, I'm scared, it's small, it's dark.’ And for many kids it was almost a transformative experience being in an environment where they could physically be assisted by or physically assist other people without any of those implications of violence or sex. And it was great as a trust-building activity and these kids were an extraordinary experience. I don't really know why most of them were there but by the end of the year, by the end of that first year, there were only, my memory has it, that there were only two of that group of fourteen kids remaining. One of them was called John and the other one was called Phil Bird. And John, his ambition always was to join the army but right at the end of that experience he had, as I recall, a row with his mother. He came from a single-parent family. He had a blazing row with his mother and he stormed out of that house and he was picked up for a number of 'taking and driving away' incidents. And that was the end of his potential army career and I never set eyes on him again.
[00:06:00]
Phil Bird, on the other hand, he was a very bright kid and he was interesting, a very interesting boy. His father hadn't worked for 20 years. His younger brother was called Savage, came from a family in Hartcliffe , big, tall, strong lad. I lost contact with Phil although some of my colleagues at YES, Roger White and Dave Brockington kept contact with him for a while but he turned up again in my life many years later when I was running the County Council's Unemployment and Training Scheme . One of my colleagues had said to me that he had to go out and he was expecting a contractor to come, to quote for equipping an Open Learning Centre and would I see the contractor? So I said, “Yes, of course I will.” So I was sat at my desk and the receptionist called me up and said, ‘Oh, Jonathan's contractor's here, would you come and talk to him?’ And I said, “Yes,” and I turned round and it was Phil Bird and he'd gone from a rough kid in Hartcliffe who didn't attend school, his family had never worked, to running his own company, an office fitting company. And I can't help but think that probably I played some small part in changing him and it was great to see him again. The only thing I didn't like about it was that he was an ardent Thatcherite. [laughter] As somebody running schemes for kids who were victims of the Thatcherite revolution, I couldn't do with that. But it was amazing, and he was employing other kids from Hartcliffe and his brother and various other people. And I've lost track of him again now and I suspect Dave Brockington will be in contact with him.
[00:07:34] So that was my early experience of YES. The other kids, I don't really know what happened to them. Some of them went back to school, some of them were withdrawn by their parents because this was not real education, not that they participated in real education anyway. Some of them went into care, some of them probably went inside. You know that great mix of tragic outcomes for many of the kids. Some of them may be perfectly respectable, now elderly citizens, like me. But for me, working with that group of kids changed my life. I can't put it in any other way at all because it politicised me, it made me realise that in my middle class upbringing, there were whole swathes of people to whom I'd never been exposed, who had pressures on them that were beyond my imagination.
[00:08:18]
And I can remember once going back to my old school and talking to my biology teacher, who was a fantastic man and a friend of my family, and he asked me what I was doing and I described the type of kids I was working with and he said, ‘If they weren't interested in learning, I wouldn't be in them.’ And I said, “Look Joe, the outcome of that is that they'll be the ones putting the bricks through your car window.” But he was an amazing man and many of my teachers were inspiring people but they also had no experience of these types of kids. They condemned them. I can remember saying, “How can these kids do their homework?” You know, some of these kids lived in a family of six or seven with one room. They just don't have the facilities to do it. And that was it, a gulf had opened up. My father was the Deputy Head of that school and all his siblings worked in private education and a sort of educational gulf grew up between us.
[00:09:10]
And so, for me working with what was then the ROSLA projects that subsequently became YES and caving changed me totally. And it then led into … laid the foundations for my subsequent … I can't really call it career because I just kept going from job to job to enable me to go on my next expedition. But when I went in to teaching I got a job in a huge comprehensive school in Derby. And the reason that I got the job was because of my work with the ROSLA project. They wanted somebody that had worked with kids in that sort of much less formally structured setting, and often working with kids out of school. And I had the same experience there. I worked with a group of a dozen or so what were then fifth years who were that mix. There was one kid who was the most dyslexic child that Keele University had ever encountered when we finally had him tested for dyslexia at the age of 15. There was a kid with hypothyroidism. There was a kid with the most amazing gift for winding up other children. You'd put him in a group, the others would be ripping each others' throats out within minutes. And just that mix of kids who, if you got them out of school, were fine. You know you could work with them, talk to them as adults. But in the school they just didn't function. And I think that applied to so many of the children I was working with when I worked with ROSLA. And I then went on from there, Dave Brockington head-hunted me, it's a grand title, he head hunted me back to Bristol to run one of the pilot programmes for what became the Youth Opportunities Programme in the early days of youth unemployment under the Thatcherite revolution.
[00:11:00]
And so I found myself building on this foundation, that working with ROSLA, to be working with kids all over the county. Kids of all sorts really and providing them with opportunities to do stuff that they wouldn't otherwise have done. And I think one of the greatest lessons that they taught me was actually to work outside the boundaries of the system. And what we did on those Youth Opportunities Projects in those days, you couldn't do it now - because everything's target driven and too tied down and too accountable and everything else - was that we bent every rule that we possibly could in order to give those kids a positive experience. And my colleagues, many of whom had done similar work with the ROSLA Project and similar initiatives, really we did bend over backwards to try and offer as much flexibility as we possibly could to give those kids the opportunity to open their eyes and experience things they wouldn't otherwise have done and potentially to get back into education.
[00:12:05]
And from that I moved into working with unemployment schemes for adults, not unemployment schemes so much as training programmes for adults. And in Avon we spent 70% of the national budget for one programme providing short vocationally relevant courses for unemployed adults, and again we bent just about every rule we possibly could in order to do that. The only two things that we never did were driving lessons and outdoor management because the Minister didn't like getting letters from his constituents saying that they'd just paid £2,000 to get their wife through their driving test. Why did these dole merchants get it for nothing? Or why are we subsidising people to have a good time walking across gardens?
[00:12:49]
And I did all that for ten years until I started seeing the same people coming round for the third time on the schemes at which point I got out, I couldn't justify being part of it really. But all of that was built on that experience of what went on in and out of this building, 14 Frederick Place , and the people I met through it which was extraordinary really. And I've always sort of kept in contact with it because Roger and Dave are neighbours and friends of mine. VH: Other trustees? [00:13:19]
DW: Other trustees, yeah, they're two other trustees and then a couple of years ago they asked me if I'd become a trustee for YES. which I was delighted to do although I think what they really wanted was somebody younger to come in with a bundle of energy and try and invigorate some of their thinking, in which case they failed dismally because I'm much the same age, and they're not quite as worn-out as I am really. But it was a privilege to come back into working with this organisation and to see what's changed here, and quite a lot of things. We're now in the basement of 14 Frederick Place whereas back in the days when I was working with ROSLA we occupied this floor which then had a bowling alley, a skittle alley which was one of the activities that we did with the kids and the floor above which had the sort of administration role, and then over the years the organisation as it became the Youth Education Service expanded hugely so.
[00:14:10]
YES, itself, ran training schemes for unemployed people and it expanded and contracted as the funding had been available and not been available really. And the fact that Chris Cox is still here and joined as a volunteer at a similar time to me. Both the longevity of YES and also the value of holding that body of experience because although the social context may change, the political context, the funding context may change, I don't think there's much change in the issues that face the sort of kids and young adults with whom YES works. That complex mixture of their own family contexts, their relationships, maybe if they've got learning disabilities, other challenges: dyslexia and so forth. All of those things come together: lack of confidence, maybe a criminal history in some cases, background of care that requires them, if they want to make progress, to have personal input, one-to-one or very small group input. And the importance of programmes that really are not the bog-standard GCSE stuff that take account of the individual’s needs and the need to recognise that mixture and respond accordingly.
[00:15:33]
And I think one of the great tragedies is that because funding these days is so tight particularly for young adults then the opportunity to provide those sorts of inputs to people lessens. We are wasting people in society and I find that a huge tragedy. So ROSLA project I started 40 years ago and it's morphed slowly into where we are now. It's grown in size, it's shrunk in size, it's embraced a whole load of people and I am really looking forward to the 30th birthday party . I was having a text exchange the other day with a young man who was one of our first Youth Opportunities Programme students I suppose who was himself a ROSLA project literacy group student and stayed with ROSLA for a very long time. And I subsequently, when I was running the training schemes, I subsequently employed him as a caretaker and he then trained some years later, he did an Access course to HE and trained as a youth worker and he's still employed as a youth worker which is a bit of challenge today with the cuts. Another real success for ROSLA/YES I think, changing someone's life and giving them opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.
[00:16:55]
VH: Thank you Dick. DW: My pleasure.
Notes: University: Bristol University PGCE: Post Graduate Certificate in Education ROSLA Project: ROSLA - Raising of the School Leaving Age - alternative provision set up at 14 Frederick Place for pupils in their last year of compulsory schooling. Pupils attended for a half-day session once a week. the university: Bristol Polytechnic now the University of the West of England Hartcliffe: a housing estate in the south of Bristol County Council’s Unemployment and Training Scheme: Avon County Council (see x) YES: Youth Education Service Fifth years: school pupils aged 15-16 years old Youth Opportunities Programme: a programme for unemployed, young people Avon: the County of Avon – a county from 1974 to 1996. It included Bristol and parts Gloucestershire and Somerset. 14 Frederick Place: YES, 14 Frederick Place, Bristol 30th birthday party: YES 30th anniversary, 2014 Access course to HE: a preparatory course for adults who do not have the necessary qualifications and wish to apply for degree level courses.
