Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

I am asking the Government to think again about this, because they have never justified why a student should be disallowed from taking two funded qualifications. It is very discriminatory and will affect the future life chances of many young children, so I would like to hear what other Members from different parts of the House think about my amendment.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 15A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is a tireless champion for education, including technical education. He has personal credentials in that field. It is also a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker. These Benches entirely agree with his amendment, too.

I had submitted an amendment, which covered the same ground as that from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, but I withdrew it to ensure we combined strength on this one to try to convince the Government of the extreme damage they are doing to young people’s prospects by their blinkered approach to T-levels. They have, after all, only just been invented. They have no track record and we have no way of knowing if they will really work. Okay, they have been developed by employers, but so has every work-based qualification in existence. BTECs were developed by employers, too; it is nothing new. Of course, employers are experts on employment, but qualifications need input from teachers at colleges and assessors at awarding bodies if they are to make sense.

Why do the Government not have a corporate memory? I was working for City & Guilds back when national vocational qualifications were introduced. Does anybody still remember NVQs? They were going to be the answer to the academic/vocational divide. They were going to break things down and ensure parity of esteem. Wow—they were great. There were six levels of attainment and employers were in the driving seat.

That was fine, but the retail sector decided that it did not need any outside help. All assessments were to be for real; there was to be no simulation. But two essential competences were dealing with fire and dealing with angry customers. The sector proudly printed umpteen boxes of the exciting new qualifications, until it was pointed out that, for anybody to pass them, many retail outlets would need to be burned down and many contented customers would need to have their feet stamped on to be angry enough to meet the requirements. Sadly, the boxes were pulped, as the sector acknowledged that teachers and assessors simulating assessments could be okay for some competences.

I was concerned to see this Government refusing to learn from the past and trying to develop T-levels without the expertise of teachers or assessors. Luckily, they have now been allowed in, but why is there only one awarding body per qualification? If choice and competition are good for GCSE and A-levels, why not for T-levels? It makes no sense to discontinue qualifications that are understood and respected by candidates, by parents—who are a particularly hard nut to crack—by employers and by further and higher education. They have been instrumental in ensuring that less academic, or in some cases more academic, students had choices in pursuing practical studies with enough academic content to satisfy universities’ entrance requirements, and which were capable of being studied alongside A-levels.

The Minister says that they will be withdrawn only if they overlap with T-levels but, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, they are very different animals. An engineering BTEC and an engineering T-level may suit quite different students. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, previously mentioned that, in the trial of his university technical colleges to which he has alluded today, only the brighter students took to T-levels, but there are many other students with different skill sets for whom the BTEC has been an ideal mix of knowledge and skills that has fitted them up for successful employment. Why on earth would the Government stop that?

In five years, we may know for sure whether T-levels are really the bee’s knees but, while they are still in their infancy, it would be folly in the extreme to put all the eggs in the T-level basket and possibly ruin young people’s chances of meaningful study or employment. I appeal to the Government to do nothing hasty and to keep BTECs funded as far into the future as possible. If not, they risk doing irreparable harm to young people’s prospects of meaningful employment and to addressing the country’s skills shortages.