Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Nash on 23 October (HL2026), why students without grade C maths and English whose school leaving age was raised in 2013 will have to wait until September 2015 for the new core maths level 3 and will be without a special "stepping stone" qualification in English.

The new core maths qualification is designed for students who have already achieved a GCSE grade C and wish to continue studying maths but not necessarily at AS/A level.

Qualifications are already available for students that have not achieved a GCSE C grade in either maths or English but are not yet ready to retake their GCSE.

A list of 263 stepping stone qualifications for teaching from September 2014 was published on 17 July and is updated regularly. 178 of those qualifications are specifically for English, 79 for maths and 6 combined.