Confirmed: DfE will chop all courses that compete with wave 3 T Levels

Ministers have confirmed plans to axe scores of level 3 courses taken by over 17,000 students that compete with the latest batch of “gold-standard” T Levels.

In May, the government published a provisional list of 92 courses, including popular BTECs, that would be defunded from 2025 where they “overlap” with wave three of T Levels, which includes business and administration, legal, finance and accounting and engineering and manufacturing qualifications.

Awarding bodies were given the opportunity to appeal the decisions, but the Department for Education revealed today that none were successful.

The final list, published today, names 85 qualifications that will now be defunded (see list below). This is lower than the provisional list because officials had mistakenly included seven courses that already had their public funding removed due to low or no enrolments.

Another 134 qualifications taken by almost 40,000 students are set to be defunded from 2024 where they overlap with courses in wave one and two of the T Levels rollout, as confirmed in March 2023.

Ministers are pushing forward with their defunding plans despite prime minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement earlier this month that he wants to replace both T Levels and A-levels with one qualification: the Advanced British Standard.

James Kewin, deputy chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said the DfE’s level 3 reforms have “no credibility left”.

“Despite being forced by Downing Street to reverse the plan for a twin track system of A-levels and T Levels, ministers are continuing to scrap successful qualifications like the BTEC diplomas in engineering.”

The final list shows 46 engineering courses will be scrapped, the majority of which are BTECs delivered by Pearson.

Its level 3 national foundation diploma in engineering is the most popular course on the scrap list, with 3,790 enrolments in 2020/21.

Pearson didn’t appeal to save any of its qualifications facing the axe, however.

Kewin said engineering employers have been “very clear” that these qualifications are valuable and removing them will create a “serious gap in the talent pipeline”.

Defending the defunding plans, skills minister Robert Halfon said: “As recently outlined by our prime minister, our goal is to future-proof education, and T Levels support just that. They are a robust qualification, which give young people the skills and real work experience which employers need, and they will be the backbone of the new Advanced British Standard alongside A-levels.

“On the final list of 85 qualifications, 30 of the qualifications had no enrolments and a further 23 had fewer than 100 enrolments in the 2020/21 academic year. Removing funding from the list of qualifications published today streamlines further education and ensures that anyone taking a technical course can be confident that they are getting a qualification respected by employers.”

Labour and the Liberal Democrats have backed the Protect Student Choice campaign’s call to pause and review the defunding of BTECs.

Kewin said: “The government should now do the same, particularly given the uncertainty created by its plans to replace A-levels and T Levels with the Advanced British Standard.”

Final list of qualifications overlapping with wave 3 T Levels