My Lords, I shall speak extremely briefly, otherwise I think we will lose the amendments that we want to support. I declare an interest, because I have assisted Pearson’s with its consultation, including attending workshops chaired by the former Conservative Skills and Apprenticeships Minister, Anne Milton.
I have never met anyone outside the DfE who thinks it a good idea to do away with BTECs. I have not met anyone who thinks it impossible to promote the quality and worth of T-levels without having to demonstrate that they must do away with, defund or have a hard stop on BTECs and associated general qualifications. It is perfectly feasible to square this circle, and that is why I have put my name to all the amendments before us. I thank my assistant, Joanna Firth, who has been liaising with noble Lords and those outside who are campaigning on this critical issue.
It would be a great shame if—perhaps I may just refer to myself here—ageing Peers did not actually protect the interests of the young people we so often talk about, the vocational qualifications and drive for good-quality vocational opportunity that we so often talk about on the back of the Augar report and beyond: if we did not tonight help the Government to help themselves. The new ministerial team will need time to absorb what is being put in front of them and what they have inherited from their predecessors. The civil servants have worked extremely hard on this aspect, including in the Bill, but—I say with some temerity —they need to avoid the syndrome I found all those years ago, which is that once people have got on a trajectory, they cannot find a way of getting themselves off it. Tonight, we have the opportunity of helping both officials and Ministers to get themselves off what could be an absolute disaster. It is not often that I offer to help the Conservative Party out of a hole, but on this occasion, it matters. If a quarter of a million-plus young people are denied a route to a good qualification simply on an ideological whim, it would be a great shame not just for them but for our economy and our nation.
At this moment, we have never needed training in vocational qualifications more; we have never needed more opportunity to succeed outside A-levels. We know that; we know the gaps; we can feel them; we have seen them in the past month, not just at petrol pumps but on the shelves, in abattoirs and other key areas, including in the steel industry in my city and beyond. We need to support T-levels as a really good opportunity to develop quality, but not position them against good quality, high-level vocational BTEC qualifications. If T-levels are good, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and my noble friend on the Front Bench said, they will stand on their own merits.
An interesting document was circulated for this evening’s debate. I shall quote only two bits of it. It is very interesting, as was the document to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred, published on 14 July and placed in the public sphere on 15 July. Here is a question for the Government.
“Why are you defunding qualifications when we don’t yet know if T Levels will be a success?”
This is the answer:
“The government is committed to ensuring that T Levels are accessible to all”—
I stress, all—“young people”. But of course, they are not, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, spelled out. If you have to get a particular GCSE at level 6 or above to be able to take part in them, those who currently get levels 4 and 5 and go forward to BTEC are disqualified. We are talking here about tens of thousands of young people.
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Another question that has been referred to in passing this evening in relation to this document asks, “Are you intending to defund qualifications?” The answer is that defunding qualifications that overlap A-levels and T-levels for 16 to 19 year-olds will not be affected by the Bill, because funding powers rest with the Secretary of State for Education. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, rightly referred to the fact that the Bill is policy-free. What we are trying to do tonight is ensure that there is a policy that makes the Secretary of State and, for that matter, the institute accountable to someone somewhere for their actions, so that someone somewhere actually can assess whether the measures taken are in the interests of young people and our economy. If a quarter of a million young people are likely to lose in one form or another—the most disadvantaged, as has already been spelt out—it will be a disaster for our nation.
Maybe people outside this Chamber do not give a damn. Maybe they do not understand. Maybe they are not interested, except when occasionally they pay lip service to vocational qualification. But we do. I hope that we can manage to muster sufficient people to stay tonight to ensure that key amendments are passed, so that we give the Commons the real opportunity to say whether its Members, including those in the red wall seats, really want to go back to their constituencies and tell young people that they are removing a lifeline for their future. My eldest son took a BTEC national diploma and ended up with a master’s degree. Do not deny on a whim—because one feels one has to have a hard stop—the opportunity to get this right.