Creative Industries: Qualifications

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my education interests, in particular as a member of Pearson’s qualifications committee. It is always a joy to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing and introducing this debate. I add that I am delighted that the Minister is still in her place after the reshuffle.

My first job, at 13, was in the West End production of “Oliver!”. Seven years later, I co-founded a theatre company with Sam Mendes and went on to manage arts centres. My wife, after drama school, spent years delivering Creative Partnerships in schools. My daughter Ruth is now a successful opera director. All three of us have done well thanks to the vocational pull of the performing arts. But this is an industry that cannot be measured by productivity and earnings at 30; it is about vocation and about weaving the cultural fabric that binds us together—witness the connection between fans and players created by “Wonderwall” at the World Cup.

I want to focus today on why T-levels and V-levels, as designed, cannot deliver the talent that our nation needs to maintain our status as a creative superpower. I am a keen supporter of the post-16 reforms in general but not as currently applied to this sector. T-levels and the proposed V-levels are built on national occupational standards—competencies mapped to defined jobs. How will that work for creative artists?

My good friend Emily Burnett is a BAFTA-winning actor for film and TV and a theatre performer; she is also a writer, a director and a producer. Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winner for video installation, has been shown at the Tate and the Serpentine and won an Oscar for the film “12 Years a Slave”—one career, moving fluidly between fine art, documentary and narrative film. No single occupational standard could describe these trajectories, let alone train for them. While the creative arts require technical skills, they also need aptitude, fluidity and inspiration. They are more than the sum of their constituent skills.

This points to a category error at the heart of the reform. T-levels are, by design, technical qualifications, built to prepare a student for a specific occupation, with a narrow specialism at their core. The craft and design T-level’s occupational specialisms map to single, narrow trade standards: ceramicist, bespoke furniture-maker, garment-maker and jewellery-maker. Each is precise and each is far narrower than the breadth that a young person needs to build a creative career. Practitioners move fluidly across creative, technical and entrepreneurial work over a single career—what the sector calls a polymathic, portfolio-based working life.

That mismatch has already shown up in the numbers. Two creative T-levels have now been through full commissioning and delivery. Craft and design managed just 136 starts in its debut year; media, broadcast and production managed around 600. Combined, this is a rounding error against the roughly 84,000 learners currently on large, creative level 3 qualifications.

Creative education is vocational not technical; it builds a craft and a practice, not entry to one job title, and that distinction has a practical consequence in learning hours. A T-level runs to around 1,800 hours across two years, weighted heavily towards one narrow specialism and a placement. A single V-level, by contrast, is projected to be 360 guided learning hours, like an A-level. Neither fits creative training, which needs not the narrow technical depth of one occupation or the shallow breadth of 360 hours but sustained studio and rehearsal time across a broad practice. That is precisely what the UAL extended diploma’s 1,080 to 1,170 hours currently provide.

Two further technical problems would need to be resolved. The first is assessment. T-levels require substantial examined assessment, but A-level art and design, as an example, has long relied on non-examined, portfolio-based assessment, precisely because it captures the creative process and development that a timed exam cannot. The BRIT School told the Curriculum and Assessment Review that learners must be graded on vocational ability, not solely on written ability under pressured exam conditions. Push creative qualifications towards examination and we repeat a known mistake: students writing about practical outcomes instead of producing them.

Secondly, on industry engagement, T-levels currently require a discrete 45-day placement, which depends on employers being able to host it. The extended diploma embeds industry engagement continuously, with live briefs and employer-set projects running throughout the course.

I know the Minister is listening to these arguments and I hope the creative sector can engage with her to find the right way forward. To do that, the engagement needs to quickly resolve whether we can rebuild occupational standards for creative jobs. If not, the sector should then be given the certainty of retaining the extended diploma. This existing qualification already delivers the right hours, the right assessment and continuous industry engagement, with progression into higher education that nearly three-quarters of the creative workforce holds. Ministers can then confirm its funding on a permanent footing, rather than a repeated reprieve to 2030, and then let T-levels and V-levels find their places alongside it, not in place of it.