Qualifications Reform Review

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement.



For many years, people have worried about the huge number of different qualifications in further education. For many years, people have wanted us to be more like Germany and called for new, higher-quality, higher-funded, simpler qualifications. T-levels, introduced under the previous Government, are an attempt to do exactly that, with a higher unit of funding and much more work experience. Finally, we have a clear, prestigious qualification mirroring A-levels on the academic side. As the Minister will know from talking to Lord Sainsbury, part of the vision was to use T-levels to simplify the landscape, which everyone agrees is too complex. I think the sector will heave a sigh of relief that today’s announcement is finally out—we were getting to the point where literally any decision would have been better than continued indecision—but it leaves some huge unanswered questions. The Minister says that things will be clear up until 2027. In other words, we will be back here again in two years. We had a pause and a review. We will now have a longer pause and another review. At some point, the Government will have to decide. The sector wants certainty, but we know from the statement that it will not get that yet.

The Government must spell out some kind of vision for how they plan to simplify the landscape of qualifications, which for my whole lifetime everyone has agreed is far too complicated and fragmented. The Minister said in her statement that the qualifications landscape is too confusing, even as she announced that the Government have decided to keep more qualifications, particularly overlapping qualifications. I do not want to be too mean to her—these issues are not easy. In Government, we had the Wolf review. More recently, we removed a further 5,500 qualifications that had sustained low take-up, but what is this Government’s vision to simplify the landscape? Never mind the detail, what is the rough vision, and when will they set it out? If it is not T-levels and what the previous Government were planning to do, what is it?

There is also a lot more work to be done to improve T-levels. As the Minister said, the Government will allow part of the work experience to be delivered working from home, but we need much more than that. What is the plan to reduce drop-out rates, and make T-levels more appealing and easier to deliver? One of the great things about T-levels is the need to produce so much work experience—about 50% more than previous qualifications. That makes them much harder to deliver. What are the Government doing to help colleges to deliver them? On a point of process, the Government—extraordinarily, I thought—refused to publish the terms of reference for the review that has just concluded, even in response to freedom of information requests from FE Week. Will the Minister agree to publish the terms of reference now that the review has concluded? There is no reason for them not to be in the public domain.

No qualification structure will work unless the review gets the funding landscape for technical education right, so will the Minister set out the funding implications of her announcement? The Government promised that they would protect public services from the national insurance increase, but first universities and, this week, nurseries and early years providers have discovered that that was a false promise. The university fee increase has been entirely eaten up by the increase in national insurance. Now, early years providers say that the failure to compensate them for the national insurance increase is “catastrophic” and will mean that

“countless nurseries, pre-schools and childminders will be left with no option but to raise costs, reduce places or simply close their doors completely.”

So far, the Government have refused to come clean about the cost to the further education sector of the national insurance increase—a piece of information that this House deserves to know. The Government have it, but they will not release it. When staff in non-academised colleges complain about their different treatment on pay compared with academised colleges, the Government say that there will be £300 million for post-16 education, but they will not say how much of that will be eaten up by the increase in national insurance. I hope that today the Minister will finally give this House the information that it deserves to know. The Government have the information, and this House and people in the sector deserve to know it.

It is early days, but what we are looking at is ongoing uncertainty over these qualifications, no clear vision to bring about the simplification that the Government say they want, and no proper plan yet to support T-level students and providers. The House is not allowed to see the terms of reference of the review that has just concluded, or know how much the national insurance increase will cost the sector. For students and teachers alike, we have to do better than this.