BTEC Qualifications

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Hopkins]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I will go on to talk about choices and how people can progress and make different choices about their careers and future, and what they want to do, but that is exactly it. Narrowing those options will make things much more difficult.

I would be interested to hear from the Minister what assessment has been made of how to support neurodivergent students who will be impacted by the proposals to defund BTECs. Altaf Hussain, principal of Luton Sixth Form College, based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), has made this point to me:

“By allowing that flexibility for A Levels and forcing the T Level route for students with lower prior attainment the government is creating a divided society that is penalising the most vulnerable in our society. The point is that many young people do not want to, or even should not have to, decide their future path at 16. Interests, aspirations and capabilities all change”.

To re-emphasise the point, it is not about favouring one route over others, but empowering young people to shape their own learning. T-levels could be a welcome development, but they should sit alongside BTECs, rather than replace them.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the need to keep options open for young people. Deciding our whole future at the age of 16 would have been unrealistic for most of us, and it flies in the face of what most educational systems around western Europe are doing. Does my hon. Friend also agree that employers want young people with a rounded range of skills and qualifications—vocational, academic and practical—and that the obsession with people going down an academic or a vocational route is completely at odds with what happens in most workplaces?

[Rachel Hopkins]

I thank my hon. Friend for her—as ever—very thoughtful contribution, and I thoroughly agree with her. As Ministers know, T-levels will not fill the gap, because this is not just about the qualification and the specific workplace at the end of the process, but about tailoring learning and types of assessment to suit people’s development.

I understand that the Government’s justification for defunding some BTEC qualifications is that they overlap with one of the new T-level qualifications, or that they have not been reapproved as they do not meet new quality and necessity criteria. The #ProtectStudentChoice campaign has raised concerns about the overlap process: it is not transparent, and some unusual decisions have been made regarding qualifications. For example, one awarding organisation’s diploma in health and social care featured on the list, but diplomas from other awarding organisations did not. Engineering BTECs were included, despite most engineering T-levels featuring in waves 3 and 4. Some clarity on that point would be very welcome.

Fundamentally, there is no student, provider or employer input into the overlap process. The reapproval process is expected to make its first announcement in September, so I urge the Minister to ensure the same failures are not replicated. As all BTEC qualifications must go through that process, it must be transparent, and decision making must not be the sole preserve of Whitehall and external consultants. As a bare minimum, the public—especially hard-working students—expect the Government to be open and clear about their plans. Not doing so severely damages trust in the Government to do the right thing and the credibility of the policy, so the Government must go further than simply delaying the defunding of BTECs by 12 months and making vague commitments to remove only a small proportion of them. They should rethink their plan and guarantee that funding will not be removed unless an impartial, evidence-based assessment has concluded that a qualification is not valued by students, universities or employers. Reckless policymaking that could be disastrous for social mobility and the economy must not take place without hard supporting evidence.

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[Vicky Foxcroft]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful and important point. These are people’s lives, future and opportunities to get on in life. Quite often, they are lifelines. I speak from experience. After failing my GCSEs, as a working-class 16-year-old with a difficult background, it was a BTEC in performing arts—I am doing a bit of performing now—that got me back into education and, ultimately, to university. It made me excited about education again. A BTEC was my second chance.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s ambition for a lifelong loan entitlement, so that adults can return to learning and achieve level 4 and beyond qualifications, will be compromised if it does not give people the widest possible range of opportunities to get the level 3 qualifications that will enable them to take advantage of that subsequent opportunity?

[Vicky Foxcroft]

My hon. Friend makes a good and important point about everybody having access to the education at the points and times in life that they need it. This Government’s decision to hastily remove BTEC funding quite simply makes a mockery of their claims to be levelling up in education. That is made worse on examining impact assessments of the decision, which highlight that 27% of BTEC students are deemed the most disadvantaged.

I am wholeheartedly opposed to the changes. Scrapping BTEC funding is simply the wrong call for several reasons, but one of the main reasons has to do with my life story of a young kid who many thought was never going to go on to achieve anything. I went to Accrington and Rossendale College and studied my BTEC in performing arts. That led me to believe that I could go on to university. That led me to believe that I could stand here one day as an MP. They offer life-changing opportunities for people.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Andrea Jenkyns)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) for opening this important debate, and every hon. Member who has taken part. A number of important questions have been raised, and I hope to cover many of them in my speech, so do bear with me—I have tons of notes here.

I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss my Department’s plans for the reform of level 3 qualifications, including how BTECs will fit into the future landscape alongside A-levels and T-levels. The introduction of T-levels is critical to driving up productivity and supporting social mobility. Based on the same standards as apprenticeships, T-levels have been co-designed with employers and draw on the very best examples of international practice. They will raise the quality and prestige of the technical offer in this country, ensuring that young people develop knowledge and skills that hold genuine labour market currency. It is this model that makes T-levels special, and it is the reason why we want them to be the qualifications of choice for 16 to 19-year-olds, alongside A-levels.

We have put significant investment into T-levels, as well as support for the sector, to help providers and employers prepare for them. We are confident that they will be a success and we will continue to carefully assess the progress of our reforms to ensure that no student or employer is left without access to the technical qualifications they need. There are now 10 T-levels available at over 100 providers across the country. By 2023, all T-levels will be available, and around 400 providers have signed up to deliver them.

We are introducing T-levels gradually to ensure quality from the start. Our confidence in their success is reinforced by the significant levels of investment and support that we have in place. We have made £400 million in capital funding available to support delivery since 2020, ensuring that young people can learn in world-class facilities and with industry-standard equipment. We have also put in place substantial support for schools, colleges and employers to help them deliver high-quality industry placements—I will cover this later, because I know that a few people were concerned about the placements—for all T-levels on a national scale.

We have supported providers in building capacity and networks with employers through the capacity and delivery fund, including through investing over £200 million since 2018-19. We want T-levels to deliver great outcomes for learners—I am sure that everybody in this room wants that—so we are committed to ensuring that teachers and leaders have the support they need to deliver them well.

In the two years to March 2020, we invested up to £20 million to help providers prepare for the delivery of T-levels, and to help teachers and leaders prepare for change. That included £8 million for the new T-level professional development offer, led by the Education and Training Foundation. We invested a further £15 million in 2020-21 and we have committed over £15 million in 2021-22 to continue this offer. Since its launch in 2019, almost 8,500 individuals and FE providers have benefited from T-level professional development programmes to help update their knowledge and skills, for first teaching T-levels in September 2020 and beyond. We will continue to publish regular updates and evidence as part of our annual T-level action plans, which can be found on the Government website.

On Thursday I met Leeds City College students and tutors—it was my first visit in this post. There was great enthusiasm for T-levels and for our apprenticeship programme. It was wonderful to see that the majority of the students I spoke to have already secured permanent employment in the sector that they studied in, which is an important move forward. We read about students securing permanent job roles at the companies that they did their T-level placements with, and other students securing apprenticeships. Employers congratulated existing students and looked forward to the next generation of T-level students starting their placements.

However, these essential reforms will have their full benefit only if we simultaneously address the complexities and variable quality of the broader qualifications system. Therefore, to support the introduction of T-levels, we are reviewing the qualification that sits alongside A-levels and T-levels to ensure that every funded qualification has a clear purpose, is high quality and will lead to good outcomes for students.

Successive reviews, including the Wolf and Sainsbury reviews, which have been touched on today, have found that the current qualifications system is overly complex and does not serve students or employers well. Through our reforms, we want every student to have confidence that every qualification on offer is high quality, to be able to easily understand what skills and knowledge that qualification will provide and, importantly, where that qualification will take them.

Our reforms are being made in three stages. First, we will remove the funding approval for qualifications with low or no enrolments. Secondly, we will remove the funding approval for qualifications that overlap with T-levels. Finally, we will reform the remaining qualifications—I will go into further detail on that in a moment. As part of securing early progress in the review, we confirmed that we would remove funding approval from qualifications that have had fewer than 100 publicly funded enrolments in a three-year period. Through this “low and no” process, we have confirmed that around 5,500 qualifications at level 3 have low or no enrolments, and will therefore have funding removed by August 2022.

The next phase of our reforms is to remove funding approval for qualifications that overlap with T-levels for 16 to 19-year-olds, which will reduce the complexities for learners and employers. By “overlap”, we mean that the qualification is technical, that the outcome achieved by the young person is similar to that set out in a standard covered by a T-level, and that it aims to take a student to employment in the same occupational area. Just as T-levels are being introduced in phases, we are also taking a phased approach to removing funding approval from technical qualifications that overlap with T-levels. This provision lists qualifications overlapping with wave 1 and wave 2 T-levels, and includes only 160 qualifications of over 2,000 qualifications available at the time. We will publish the final list of qualifications that will have public funding withdrawn in September 2022.

We have listened carefully to concerns about the reform timetable and have built in an extra year so that public funding approval is not withdrawn from overlapping qualifications until 2024, to help ensure that providers are ready. That means qualifications that overlap with T-levels will not have funding approval removed until the relevant T-level has been available to all providers for at least a year. It is important that there are no gaps in provision, and that we retain the qualifications needed to support progression into occupations that are not covered by T-levels.

Our final reform—our policy statement on level 3 qualifications—was published in July last year. It set out the Government’s decision on the types of academic and technical qualifications that will be necessary alongside A-levels and T-levels at level 3. On the academic side, we are absolutely clear that students will be able to take applied general style qualifications, including BTECs, alongside A-levels as part of a mixed programme where they meet our new quality and necessity criteria. That could include areas with a practical or occupational focus, such as health and social care—that has been mentioned—or STEM subjects, such as engineering, applied science and IT.

We will also fund large academic qualifications that would typically make up a student’s full programme of study areas where there are no A-levels and no equivalent T-level. It can also include areas that are less served by A-levels, such as performing arts, creative arts or sports science, where they give access to HE courses with high levels of practical content.

I want to ask the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) if we are the same person? We have a similar background: I too am a working-class girl who studied a BTEC national—although mine was in business and finance—and I also have a background in performing arts. It is evident that the Labour party is not the only broad church; the party of government is too. As a mature student I went on to study economics at the Open University, and international relations at the University of Lincoln while I was a parliamentary candidate—I know what it is like for someone to juggle things and try to pay their way at the same time.

[Kate Green]

I listened carefully to the Minister as she described the new landscape and how she sees it fitting together. She said a few moments ago that there was confusion about the range of qualifications that had been on offer. Listening to her just now, I have to say that I am still pretty confused about the landscape that we are moving into. What do the Government plan to do to communicate really clearly, to students, institutions and employers, how the new landscape will work?

[Andrea Jenkyns]

If the hon. Lady bears with me, I will come to that point; it was touched on earlier and I will answer it with regard to the pathways.

On a more technical route, we will fund two groups of technical qualifications alongside T-levels for 16 to 19-year-olds. The first will be qualifications in areas where there is not a T-level. The second will be specialist qualifications that develop more specialist skills and knowledge that could be acquired through a T-level alone, helping to protect the skills supply in more specialist industries and adding value to the T-level offer. Adults will be able to study a broader range of technical qualifications than 16 to 19-year-olds, which takes into account prior learning and experience. That includes technical qualifications that allow entry into occupations that are already served by T-levels.

I hope that has made it clear that we are not creating a binary system. Our aim is to ensure that students can choose from a variety of high-quality options, which I will go into. That is why it is important that we reform the system, to ensure that all qualifications approved for funding alongside A-levels and T-levels are high quality, have a clear purpose and deliver great outcomes, which is the most important thing.

As the post-16 qualification review continues, a new funding approval process will confirm that all qualifications that we continue to fund alongside A-levels and T-levels are both necessary and high quality. Both Ofqual and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education will have a role in approving those qualifications, and they are currently consulting on their approaches at level 3.

We are unashamed about raising the quality of technical education in this country. Students will benefit from the reforms because they will take qualifications that are high quality and meet the needs of employers, putting them in a strong position to progress to further study or skilled employment. Where students need more support to achieve a level 3 qualification in the future, we are working with providers to provide high-quality routes to further study. We have introduced a T-level transition programme to support learners in progressing to T-levels. We are also piloting an academic progression programme to test whether there is a gap in provision, which supports students to progress to and achieve high-quality level 3 academic qualifications in future.

We are determined to act so that all young people can learn about the exciting, high-quality opportunities that technical education and apprenticeships can offer. Through the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022, we have strengthened the law so that all pupils have the opportunity for six encounters with providers of technical education qualifications and apprenticeships as they progress through school in years 8 to 13. For the first time, we are introducing parameters around the duration and content of those encounters, so that we can ensure that they are of high quality. The new requirements will strengthen the original provider access legislation—the Baker clause.

We will continue to gather evidence to ensure that our reforms across both technical and academic qualifications are working as intended. In particular, the unit for future skills, as announced in the levelling-up White Paper, will ensure that across Government we are collecting and making available the best possible information to show whether courses are delivering the outcome that we want. That will help give students the best possible opportunity to get high-skilled jobs in local areas.

Employers will benefit from our reforms, which place them at the heart of the system and will ensure that technical qualifications are genuinely grounded in the needs of the workplace. The Construction Industry Training Board has said that the reforms to technical education are a great opportunity to put things right that industry should seize. We will also strengthen and clarify progression routes for academic qualifications, to ensure that every funded qualification has a clear purpose—that is vital—is of high quality and could lead to good outcomes.

I will now touch on some of the questions that were raised across the Chamber.