Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Maybe people outside this Chamber do not give a damn. Maybe they do not understand. Maybe they are not interested, except when occasionally they pay lip service to vocational qualification. But we do. I hope that we can manage to muster sufficient people to stay tonight to ensure that key amendments are passed, so that we give the Commons the real opportunity to say whether its Members, including those in the red wall seats, really want to go back to their constituencies and tell young people that they are removing a lifeline for their future. My eldest son took a BTEC national diploma and ended up with a master’s degree. Do not deny on a whim—because one feels one has to have a hard stop—the opportunity to get this right.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendment 33 in my name and in support of the other amendments, particularly Amendments 29 and 31. It has been a powerful debate and I shall speak briefly because the case has been made so effectively already.

I welcome the Minister to her post because I trust her to listen to the powerful points made by noble Lords from all sides of the House. I should declare my interests as the chancellor of the University of Leicester, as a visiting professor at King’s College London and as a member of the board of Thames Holdings.

I want to turn to the concern that lies behind all these amendments, which is the future of BTECs. What the debate has revealed is that the scheme of thinking—the Government’s model that lies behind their attempt to get rid of BTECs—is deeply flawed. The Government think that there should be some kind of clear divide between academic qualifications— A-levels—and vocational qualifications—T-levels—and nothing else in between. The reason why BTECs do not fit in is that they straddle that divide between vocational and academic—and that is a good thing, too. It is totally unrealistic to expect every teenager neatly to fit into one of just two specified routes.

It is good that T-levels have that breadth of appeal. The Government are clearly committed to T-levels and all of us on all sides of the House have said that we want them to succeed. However, they should succeed on their merits, not because viable alternatives are removed by government fiat. My noble friend Lord Baker spoke powerfully and, as a fellow Conservative, I believe in choice and trusting the judgment of the people. If people are choosing T-levels, that is fantastic. If they are obliged to do them because the alternatives have been removed, that is not a strong case for T-levels. They are, as we have heard, so far untried and untested, and that is why I have particular sympathy for Amendment 29, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, asking for a four-year delay so that the evidence on their performance, so powerfully referred to by my noble friend Lord Baker, could become available.

In private, Ministers and the Government think that BTECs are not much good. That is what they really believe. They do not think that BTECs are of a high-enough standard and worry that people who have done them do not perform so well afterwards. Ministers think that they are a soft option. That argument rarely speaks its name but that is part of the thinking. However, BTECs have been reformed. There is now an external examiner and that arrangement could be strengthened. BTECs are not unimprovable but they are not so bad that they should just be abolished. When one digs deeply into the evidence that they are apparently underperforming, one sees that the real evidence is on poorer academic performance. It is actually the old standard and always the academic measure. Indeed, as we have heard powerfully, T-levels are being designed as an academic vocational qualification. Often when Ministers say BTECs are a soft option, what they are really saying is that BTECs are not an academic route like A-levels. They appeal particularly to people who have other aptitudes, people for whom we have an obligation to design suitable qualifications, and I am not convinced that T-levels are right for them.

The other argument that one hears is that there are so many vocational qualifications that we need a cull of them. However, in that jungle of vocational qualifications, BTECs stand out. They are a recognised brand and are tried and tested. They were created by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s by the then Secretary of State for Education precisely to develop as a recognised vocational qualification, and they are now widely sat, as we have heard, by hundreds of thousands of young people and are known. Having a vocational qualification that is known, trusted and recognised is a precious thing. One does not throw away something that is well known and well recognised entirely in the belief in some experimental future alternative.

My amendment is designed to fit into the structure of the Bill, not to undermine its fundamental purpose. It says that as the Minister clearly has a power to decide funding, there should be a process of consultation before any significant decision to remove the funding of BTECs is taken. We hear all the time from Ministers about the importance of the employer voice and they are legislating to bring in new employer-representative bodies. It is therefore reasonable that these new bodies should at least be asked what they think about the abolition of BTECs.

I end on a personal note. Sometimes people associate my interests with higher education, and I am very aware of the charge that we must not design an education policy solely around the academic route. There is a real danger that T-levels as well as A-levels are being designed around that academic route. Imagine that the Government were proposing to remove the funding of an academic qualification—a set of A-levels sat by 100,000 or 200,000 young people. There would be absolute uproar and fury at a sudden decision that within two or three years the funding for that academic qualification was to be removed. The least we owe to young people who have a different set of aptitudes, who are taking a different route, who are being served often by FE colleges that are also entitled to a fair deal, is to treat a decision to remove the funding for the qualifications that they do as seriously as we would treat a decision to remove the funding for A-levels. That is why, as an absolute minimum, proper consultation is a prerequisite before any decision of such significance were to be taken.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I think that the House wants to move towards a decision and the arguments made have been utterly compelling. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, deserves to be parliamentarian of the year for his speech alone. I have rarely heard a government policy eviscerated so comprehensively by one of the Government’s own supporters.

However, the Minister has our deep sympathy in seeking to reply. Can she point us to the actual statement of policy on which we are supposed to think that this is a good idea? I have been in search of it in the run-up to the debate because I am always in the market for evidence-based policy; after all, this is supposed to be an education Bill and one might expect that it has evidence behind it. I have searched in vain. The only statement that I could find on the policy that the Government are pursuing is in the skills White Paper of January 2021, which has one paragraph on this policy—an Orwellian paragraph because it states as fact things that have not yet even happened. I will read it to the House because it adds compelling force to the arguments of my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Baker.

Paragraph 63 on page 33 of the White Paper reads as follows:

“In September 2020, students across England started on the first ever T Levels.”


That is one year ago. These are some of the students in those two colleges that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to. It goes on:

“The first three T Levels are in Construction, Digital, and Education & Childcare, and a further seven will be introduced in 2021.”


That is now; they are literally starting just now. We are being invited to legislate to abolish the qualifications which people sit in favour of qualifications that are only just at this moment being introduced. The Government say:

“We are proud of this programme”—


I am delighted that they are proud of the programme—

“which is based on employer-led standards and offers a prestigious technical alternative to A Levels.”

How can we know that they are a prestigious technical alternative when most of them have only just started, only a small minority have been going for a year, no candidates have yet got any of these qualifications and been able to give a view on them, and there has been no evaluation whatever? That is the sum total of the Government’s justification for this policy of unilaterally abolishing all the existing qualifications in favour of those that have not yet started.

The really compelling point was the last one made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. Not following the day-to-day developments in the education world, I had not realised that the Government were moving to abolish BTECs so quickly. We all support the development of T-levels, but to abolish the existing qualifications regime in this way is a truly astonishing act. He is completely right; I invite the House to imagine what would happen if the Government announced that in two years’ time, GCSEs and A-levels were going to be abolished in favour of a qualification which is only this year being piloted in schools for the first time.

When I was Minister of Education, we had to decide what to do with the Tomlinson report, which proposed to replace GCSEs and A-levels with a new 14 to 19 diploma. I strongly advised Tony Blair not to go ahead with this on the grounds that trying to run these two systems side by side—the development of a completely new diploma alongside maintaining GCSEs and A-levels—over a period of 10 to 20 years was simply unsustainable. In any case, we were being invited by Sir Mike Tomlinson, who is a friend of mine and I hold him in very high regard, on a series of assertions and nothing more, to think that a completely new qualification would outclass and—with the great English middle classes, who are very attached to the status quo—prove itself to be better than the entire existing system of education that was available then.

I can assure noble Lords that the arguments in the Tomlinson report did not get very far with Tony Blair; he certainly was not going to be the Prime Minister who announced that he was abolishing the entire existing system of GCSEs and A-levels in favour of an exam which had not even been introduced then. But that is precisely what is happening at the moment in respect of vocational qualifications. My noble friend Lord Blunkett brought up the social aspect, as did the noble Lord, Lord Baker—his closing remarks on the impact of this reform on students from black and ethnic minority communities and disabled students were literally breathtaking in their import.

We would not dream—least of all a Conservative Government, but I do not believe a Labour Government would either—of announcing in advance the abolition of the entire system of academic qualifications in favour of a new regime which had not even been properly designed, let alone tested. That is precisely what is happening in respect of vocational qualifications under the policy announced by the Government and taken forward by the Bill, and we need the biggest possible majority behind the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and these other amendments, so that the Government are invited to think again.

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Moved by

[Lord Willetts]

33: Clause 7, page 10, line 17, at end insert—


“(8) Where a technical education qualification has had its approval withdrawn under subsection (2), funding may not be withdrawn by the Secretary of State without public consultation and the consent of the relevant employer representative bodies, as defined in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2021.”

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

It is very important that we sense the mood of the House on this issue. I beg to move.