BTEC Qualifications

Debate between Kate Green and Andrea Jenkyns

Monday 18th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[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.