Passport To A (genuine) Quick Degree

In 1996 the UK government came up with a scheme to allow people who had unrelated courses under their belt to use them to qualify for a degree or other form of higher education diploma (HND whatever). The system was called accredited prior learning and the idea was that each of your courses (and/or experience ) to be assigned a number of credits which would all count towards a degree (or GNVQ level 4 in eduspeak). The number of credits required for a degree was 360 (I think its now 300).

All it needed was someone with a TDLB D36 to 'award' the credits and then they could be used to knock time off the time it took to get a degree.

I have used the scheme as I got one of those early D36 awards (they are now called an A1 Assessor Award) which meant that I could say grant 120 credits for a year's successful classroom teaching (the guidelines specifically say "learning resulting from, for example, formal teaching" ) plus another 30 credits for TEFL - so that's half the degree course done. Then all you needed to do was to take these credits to a uk university (preferably one that produces modular degrees) and get them placed on your transcript. Hence with a couple of years of part time study (maybe less) you could graduate with a kosher degree that is acceptable anywhere.

You can read more about the accredited prior learning system here