Labour intends to review the vocation qualification introduced in 2020, while the Conservatives have announced that it will be terminated.
Although Rishi Sunak had pledged to ditch, Gordon Brown has urged the incoming government to retain the Conservatives’ technical qualifications.
Brown urges that T-levels are “one of the few genuinely successful new ideas and initiatives of the last decade,” and eliminating them would be “calamitous and costly,” he stated in the foreword to a report. Labour has previously declared that it will review them once in government.
T-levels were introduced in 2020 as the gold standard vocational qualifications of the Conservatives for post-16 students in England. However, many in the sector have raised concerns about the alarming defunding of other popular vocational qualifications, including BTecs.
Low uptake and high drop-out rates have also been an issue. This past week, an exam board was fined £300,000 for major failings in papers taken by T-level science and health students in 2022.
Before the election, the education secretary Bridget Philipson announced that Labour would take a break and reconsider its proposal to eliminate BTecs after assuming power. If the Conservatives were reelected, Rishi Sunak promised to replace T-levels and A-levels with a new baccalaureate-style qualification called the Advanced British Standard.
One of the original T-level architects, Lord Sainsbury, provided funding for the lobbying consultancy WPI Strategy to create tha latest report with Brown’s T-level endorsement.
In addition to urging the new government to speed up T-level deployment by cutting public funding for “low quality and overlapping courses,” including BTecs, it demands an end to the “wild west” provision of vocational qualifications.
Brown stated, “T-levels have the potential to create a new skilled workforce for the next three-quarters of our century with the promise of good pay in the very sectors of the economy where we are experiencing key shortages and in the industries of the future.”
Although low-quality technical courses might be cheaper to teach and easy to pass, they suppress talent rather than unleash it, and employers don’t really value such courses when hiring new employees.
There is a current concern that those vested in marketing and selling their low-quality courses would try to deceive parliamentarians into believing Labour should take a break and review the technical education system. These calls should be ignored.
“It would be calamitous and costly to slow the rollout of T-levels or pause the changeover of funding from lower quality to higher-quality qualifications.”
David Blunkett, former education secretary who previously criticized the elimination of BTecs, stated that “T-levels have a really important part to play, but they are in their infancy, and the statistics demonstrate that an urgent review of both timescale and what is working should be imperative.”
The chief executive of the Sixth Form College Association, Bill Watkin, stated, “T-levels are a welcome addition to the qualifications landscape but it would be reckless to scrap BTecs when there is no evidence to suggest that T-levels are close to being a genuine replacement or can be offered at scale.”
The Association Colleges’ chief executive, David Hughes, claimed that some of the T-level implementation problems were downplayed in a report. He stated, “That’s why we are pressing for an urgent review of every single T-level to ensure that they deliver the outcomes that this report and its authors are aiming for.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Education stated, “We support T-levels as a high-class vocational qualification that gives young people a firm foundation for their future, and we will confirm our next steps shortly.”
