My Lords, this is the first time that I have engaged on Report, and I gather that I have to speak to the various amendments I have supported. I certainly strongly support the one that has just been dealt with, and I will also speak to Amendments 30 and 31.
That amendment would delay the whole implementation of the Bill by four years. I will explain why that is necessary. The Bill is one of the most extraordinary Bills that has been laid before Parliament because it has no policy in it. It sets up two administrative procedures, one to deal with a statement that appeared in the White Paper on education and one to deal with a paper that appeared out of the blue on 1 January this year, on abolishing thousands of technical qualifications, which was totally unexpected. The Bill sets up a framework.
As regards the White Paper qualification, a framework of employer representative bodies was set up to prepare skill plans for each of the towns where the employers live, which is a very interesting idea. It is a bit experimental, but it means that local industry could get involved in setting the curriculum for Darlington, Newcastle, Plymouth or Exeter, and that is a good thing. It engages industry, which determines what technical subjects it needs. The various bodies that do the training, like the FE colleges, the apprenticeship providers, the private providers and the colleges that I support, such as the technical colleges, can then adjust their curricula accordingly.
The second policy that is not in the Bill appeared on 1 January this year, when the Government issued a paper on technical qualifications. This was totally unexpected: there has been nothing in a White Paper and no research on it—I am very interested to know what they will do—but they set out their policy.
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This is an unconstitutional enormity. All the other Bills that I have known in my 50 years in the two Houses of Parliament have always had policy in them so that it can be debated, amended, argued about, voted on, passed or rejected. It is very difficult to do that with this Bill because none of the details is on the face of the Bill. I will quote precisely what the Government’s policy is according to their statement on 1 January this year, when they opened consultation:
“It is our intention that technical qualifications which overlap with T Levels in these waves will have funding approval removed from the start of the 2023/24 academic year”
and it will continue into 2024-25. Well, there are several thousand technical qualifications. The first thing to appreciate is that the Department for Education in his history since the 1870s has never created one technical qualification. That has been left to the exam boards. The department has no real knowledge of the contents of technical qualifications and has never had to create them. It has a profound knowledge of academic qualifications, but none of technical qualifications.
The other extraordinary thing is that the body that the Government have appointed to be the executioner of all these qualifications is the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which has had no dealings whatever with technical qualifications. It does not do them; it does apprenticeships. That itself
is bizarre. We are dealing with very large numbers here; 200,000 students took these technical qualifications earlier this year. These are BTECs and diplomas. There were 100,000 diplomas and extended diplomas and 100,000 BTECs. The report was issued on 15 July, a very good day to publish the results of a six-month consultation, being the day when all the schools and colleges were closing for the summer. It is unbelievable that there has been no comment whatever in the general press, or even in the education press, about the policy, and so your Lordships are hearing about it for the first time.
The consultation had a lot of respondents, who were very frank. The report said that 86% of the respondents
“disagreed with the approach to removing funding approval for qualifications”.
All of them—businesses, colleges, schools and teachers—were ignored, so you cannot say that this is a listening Government. They are an assertive Government. The whole consultation process was complete rubbish. They just restated their starting point.
Why was this all being done? It was being done because the Government have introduced a new exam—the T-level. I say at once that this could be a very good exam, but it is in its early days. They want to ensure that T-levels will survive, so therefore they want to destroy every competing qualification within two years, in 2023 and 2024.
What do we know about T-levels? Two of the university technical colleges that I am responsible for decided experimentally to teach T-levels last September. The one in Dartford decided to teach skills; the one in Telford decided to teach construction. Curricula were provided for the T-levels. What did we learn? We learned that T-levels are not remotely suitable for people who get GCSE grades of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. They simply could not cope with T-levels. The students who can cope with T-levels are those at levels 9, 8 and 7—the top end, basically, the brightest children. Certainly, those with grades 9 and 8, and probably most with grade 7, could cope but at level 6 some coped and some could not. The Dartford UTC is doing skills. Eight students applied. The students must apply; if they do not apply, they will not be taught. After a fortnight, two dropped out, unable to cope.
This was a bit disappointing, but we will not know until August 2022 who passed or failed. I cannot tell you. I suspect some will have failed and some will have passed. Some might just have failed, and some might just have passed. We do not know about that at all. How many people took these T-levels as an experiment? I am told that it is fewer than 1,000—600 or 700—but every time I have asked anybody in the department, they have said that they do not have the figures. I am not asking the Minister to give the figures tonight.
By the way, I should have begun my remarks by congratulating the Minister on becoming a parliamentary under-secretary in the Department for Education. I have enjoyed the meetings that I have had with her so far. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree, but we do it very pleasantly. It is very nice to have a pleasant parliamentary under-secretary and I wish her well.
Coming back to where we are, we will not know until the autumn of next year how successful T-levels have been. This September, more T-levels were taught. I asked again how many have started them. We are half way through the term and no one will tell me. I do not know whether it is a few hundred or a few thousand. I have no idea. I would also like to know whether the ones who have started have secured promises of 45 days’ work experience over two years, because one of the qualifications needed to take a T-level is that you must have 45 days of work experience. That is a very demanding level. Medium-sized and small companies cannot possibly provide that level; perhaps only a handful of large companies can.
Given the millions of students that we have, this is a very modest start for a trial of an exam. For the ones who started in September of this year, we will not have the results until August 2023, the year in which the Government propose to cull a large number of alternative qualifications without even knowing the outcome of the second year’s trial. This is educationally totally and utterly unacceptable.
As I have said, this is a constitutional enormity. The report is very frank. It goes on to assess the impact of the proposals, which is very substantial. One of my purposes in speaking tonight is to put the words on record, because most people have not read anything about this, and I suspect that what I am saying is completely new to your Lordships.
As the Government are going to abolish most BTECs, they have to have something for all those 250,000 students who took them, so they have created a thing called a “small BTEC” of just one specialist subject. They say the students who used to take BTECs can do just this one. This means that a 16 year-old joining an FE college from his school, having done no technical training at all below 16, will, with a bit of luck, get a qualification at level 2—a sort of GCSE in a technical matter. That is good; that will get him a job somewhere. A smaller number might just get to level 3, which is A-level, but not all that many. That will not get them into a university at all.
So, in the future, youngsters who leave school and go into technical education will be able to take just one BTEC. But listen to this:
“It will be important to prevent students taking combinations of … qualifications designed to be taken alongside A levels that would effectively replicate”
the larger programmes of extended diplomas. That means they are not allowed to take a second BTEC; the Government have said that they are not allowed to. This is the first time in the history of education since 1870 that we have created a qualification and said to a student that they cannot take a second one. These are the words from the documents that came out. In effect, this is educational lockdown. They are committed to one and cannot take two. But I remind your Lordships that 80% of black students who go to university do it by taking two BTECs. In the future, they will not be accepted into university if they do not have two BTECs, and they will not be allowed to go.
This becomes even graver:
“Large academic qualifications”—
such as the diploma and extended diploma—
“larger than one A level … will not be funded if they overlap with T levels or A levels.”
The diplomas are very important. A diploma is taken post-16 and is called a level 4 higher national certificate, then there is the extended diploma at level 5. These are two steps to university, and university could be level 6. But these particular subjects will now be very difficult to follow. So you have a most extraordinary arrangement: a whole lot of students can take one BTEC and not get much to level 3. They will be denied taking two and going to university—many go into university that way—because T-levels are going to replace them.
One of the things we have learned in our experiment with T-levels is that the curriculum for them is very clear: it is only 25% practical and 75% academic. The Government say in the paper that these exams must be taught in the classroom. They are technical qualifications taught in a classroom, not in a workshop or a working environment. I will tell noble Lords what happened this year in one of the UTCs we sponsor in Tower Hamlets. It is sponsored by a very famous school called Mulberry. All Secretaries of State are taken to it because it is about 90% Bangladeshi girls. The head came to us and said, “I want to create a UTC for the less bright, but really I want to get them jobs”. Three years ago we started one and it has been highly successful. It has only two specialisms: health and the creative arts. For the creative arts it works with the National Theatre, and in health it does health and social care. To teach health and social care in this UTC, it creates a hospital ward instead of the some of the classrooms so that the students can go in and see what the nurses’ duties are, what records they have to keep, what equipment is available for them and how frequently they visit the patient. That is practical. T-levels will not do that; they all have to be taught in the classroom, not in a working environment.
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Turning to the results from this particular UTC, 5.96% of those born in Tower Hamlets go to university. In the July before last we had 79 leavers from that UTC and 80% of them went to university, mainly to do health. That is good technical and practical education. That is real social mobility: moving children from an area where 40% of the houses have English only as a second language. To go from 5.96% to 80% shows that this is very good technical education, and I really do not see how T-levels can replicate that as they are currently planned.
But it gets a bit worse, I am afraid.