Toby Perkins
Main Page: Toby Perkins (Labour - Chesterfield)Department Debates - View all Toby Perkins's debates with the Department for Education
(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) and I went to visit Lackham very recently and were delighted to see its investment in agritech facilities, which are groundbreaking and world class. It will mean that young people in that area will have the opportunity to study the very latest technology and techniques that will be required for our agriculture industry. In addition, there will also be a land management and agriculture T-level, which has been designed with the industry sector to make sure that many people across the country get the opportunity to study at that level with that investment.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Some 230,000 students have just studied BTEC level 3 qualifications. For the Minister to stand there, as she just has, and dismiss those qualifications as poor quality will disgust those students and many of the people who have supported them. The Minister suggests she has widespread support, but 86% of respondents to the Department for Education’s own consultation disagreed with the Government’s plan to scrap funding for qualifications that overlapped with T-levels. Even the former Conservative Education Secretary, Lord Baker described it as
“an act of educational vandalism.”
Why are the Government intent on removing the ladder of opportunity from so many students, particularly those from the most deprived communities, when there is such widespread opposition to this move?
Gillian Keegan
I assure the hon. Gentleman that I would definitely not dismiss the BTEC qualification or its quality, and the reason I would not is that I am one of the very few people in this place who has taken a BTEC as part of their apprenticeship. I very much appreciated my BTEC as part of my apprenticeship, as I did my other qualifications.
T-levels are unashamedly rigorous. They are high-quality qualifications, and there is no point giving access to qualifications that are out of date and have not kept up with the requirements of the workforce. The skills gap between what our employers need and what young people study should not be there. This is an employer-led system. I will tell the House what is a tragedy—a tragedy is having young people not able to get on in the workplace because they have spent two or three years studying something that does not offer the value that employers need in this high-tech economy.