Toby Perkins
Main Page: Toby Perkins (Labour - Chesterfield)Department Debates - View all Toby Perkins's debates with the Department for Education
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Toby Perkins Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Alex Burghart
I thank the hon. Lady for her question; it is nice to have two questions from Liverpool back to back. I must tell the House that we are undertaking an historic reform of technical education in this country. We want technical qualifications, at all levels, that are designed with employers, to give students the opportunities they need. At 16, that will mean that some students will get gold-standard level 3 qualifications that will lead to work, degree-level apprenticeships or higher education. For some, it will mean excellent level 2 qualifications, which will lead to apprenticeships or to work, or to our lifetime skills guarantee, announced by the Prime Minister in September 2020, allowing everybody to get a level 3 qualification.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Clearly, it would have been sensible for the Government to have finished their evidence and understood the outcome of the policy before starting to undermine BTECs by announcing that they would defund many of them. There is a widespread body of opinion that many of the 230,000 students studying level 3 BTEC qualifications might not be able to get on to that qualification in future. Will the new Minister—I should have welcomed him to his place; I do so late in my question—tell us in which year the Government are likely to meet their target of having 100,000 students studying T-levels? Will he guarantee that those changes will not lead to a reduction in the number of students studying level 3 qualifications in the future?
Alex Burghart
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his belated welcome.
We just had a historic spending review for skills in this country, with £2.8 billion of capital for skills, including money to deliver new T-levels across the spending-review period. Those T-levels will give more students the opportunity to progress into work at a higher level. Our level 2 review will enable more students to progress into work at the right level for them.