Is a Level 6 diploma a degree?

A credit is a unit of notional learning time. One credit stands for ten hours, so 120 credits represent 1,200 hours of study in total. The awarding body divides those hours into guided learning, the time you spend with a tutor or in structured teaching, and the remainder, which is your own reading, research and assignment writing. For the OTHM diplomas listed here that split is 480 guided hours and 720 independent hours.³

Most of the 120-credit diplomas are built from six units of 20 credits each. A unit is a coherent block of study, closer to a university module than to a school subject, with its own learning outcomes and its own assignment. Six of them, taken in sequence or in pairs, make up the whole award. There is no dissertation as such, though several programmes include a research project unit that plays the same role at a smaller scale.

What Level 6 asks of you, in every subject, is broadly the same: to read critically rather than descriptively; to apply theory to a real organisation, usually your own; to justify a recommendation with evidence; and to reflect on the limits of what you have found. If you have managed people, budgets or projects, much of this will feel like putting names to things you already do. The difference is that you will be asked to defend them.

A top-up is the final year of an honours degree offered to applicants who have already completed the earlier credit elsewhere. Universities admit such applicants with advanced standing: they recognise your prior, certificated learning in place of their own years one and two, or, in the case of a Level 6 diploma, in place of the credit that leads up to a final year.⁴ The route, as it runs in practice, is below. Read the caveats; they are the useful part.

There is a fuller account of the route, including what admissions tutors look at, on the top-up degrees page. Some readers decide, on reflection, that they do not need the bachelor's at all: their aim is to work and be assessed at the next level, and a Level 7 diploma offers that directly. That is a different route with its own trade-offs, set out on the companion site for Level 7 diplomas.

Every programme below is delivered by London School of Planning and Management and awarded by OTHM or Qualifi. Credit values are taken from the published specification of each award. The programme page for each gives the units, the entry requirements and a link to that specification.

Almost everyone we refer to LSPM for a Level 6 diploma is in work, and most have been for a long time. LSPM delivers the programmes part-time, with tutor support by scheduled sessions and by correspondence, so that study fits around a job rather than replacing one. Study modes offered: online, blended, evening classes. Session pattern and any in-person element to be confirmed by LSPM.

How many hours a week?

The awarding body's figure of 1,200 hours is the honest starting point for planning. Divided across the time you intend to take, it gives a weekly commitment that is demanding but not unusual for adult study:

Those figures are averages, and the work is uneven: light in the reading weeks of a unit, heavy in the fortnight before an assignment is due. Many learners take one unit at a time and let each assignment deadline set the rhythm.

How you are assessed

By written assignment, one per unit, set against the unit's learning outcomes. There are no examinations. Assignments are typically reports, analyses or reflective pieces grounded in a real organisation, and you are encouraged to use your own workplace where you can. Work is marked by LSPM's tutors and moderated under the awarding body's quality-assurance arrangements; if a piece falls short you receive written feedback and a resubmission opportunity, under the rules of the awarding body. The how LSPM teaches page describes a unit from first session to confirmed result.

We are cautious here, because the sector often is not. A Level 6 diploma does not by itself secure promotion or a new job, and we hold no data that would let us claim otherwise. What it can reliably do is three things.

First, it satisfies employers and application systems that ask for study at degree level, which is a broader group than those that ask for a degree. Second, it gives you a body of assessed work, in your own field and often about your own organisation, that you can point to in an interview or a promotion case. Third, it is the recognised stepping stone to a bachelor's top-up and, for many, then to a Level 7 award, which is where the qualification's longer-term value usually lies.

In subject terms, the programmes map to the roles you would expect: operations and general management, financial and accounting support, supply-chain and logistics coordination, health and social care service management, IT and systems roles, health and safety practice, teaching support and hospitality management. The careers pages take each field in turn, and say it plainly.