Gordon Brown urges Labour to ‘ignore’ pause and review promise

Ex PM and Lord Sainsbury want new government to renege on a pledge made last year to rethink level 3 VTQ and BTEC cuts

Ex PM and Lord Sainsbury want new government to renege on a pledge made last year to rethink level 3 VTQ and BTEC cuts

Former prime minister Gordon Brown and T Levels architect Lord David Sainsbury have urged the new Labour government to “ignore” the party’s promise to pause and review the Conservatives’ controversial bonfire of BTECs.

In a new report by lobbying firm WPI Strategy, the influential pair endorse calls to end the “wild west” situation that “currently exists” where multiple and overlapping vocational courses of “varying quality” are offered to school leavers and “suppresses talent”.

It advises the government to continue with plans to defund qualifications that compete with T Levels, launched in 2020 as the technical equivalent to A-levels, from 2025. 

Brown claimed there is a “current fear” that those with a “vested interest in marketing and selling their own lower quality courses” will attempt to “pull the wool over parliamentarians’ eyes” and influence Labour to “pause and review the technical education system yet again”.

The report has attracted fierce criticism from former Labour education secretary Lord Blunkett who said the proposals will lead to the “collapse” of the pipeline of trainees in key sectors like health and social care, adding that Labour “must not walk into the trap of getting the blame for a scorched earth policy”. 

Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association that co-ordinates the Protect Student Choice campaign, said WPI’s report reads like it has been “drafted in a time warp, and its authors are not aware of all the incontestable facts of this issue”.

DfE will ‘confirm next steps shortly’

The SFCA successfully secured a promise from Labour to “pause and review” the level 3 reforms last year if it won the next general election.

Former shadow skills minister Seema Malhotra repeated this promise to the House of Commons multiple times over the past year.

There is however concern in the sector that Labour could U-turn on the promise as it did not feature in the Labour Party’s election manifesto.

New education secretary Bridget Phillipson has so far been silent on the matter since taking office this month.

Responding to today’s report, a Department for Education spokesperson said: “We support T Levels as a high-class vocational qualification which give young people a firm foundation for their future and will confirm our next steps shortly.”

WPI’s report repeats the last government’s claims that the post-16 education system is “incoherent and confusing”, with over 12,000 vocational qualifications from over 150 awarding bodies. 

It said the 2016 Sainsbury review, which paved the way for T Levels, called for a fundamental shift in technical education to solve the skills crisis, adding that the current reforms aim to “weed out low-quality qualifications and reduce overlap”.

The report’s authors, former civil servants Vincenzo Rampulla and Erika Williams, argue that Labour should be “empowering students, parents, and employers with a transparent system of post-16 qualifications – underpinned by data and easy to navigate”.

‘Vested interests attempt to pull the wool over parliamentarians’ eyes’

Gordon Brown’s foreword for the report highlights “outstanding” results for the first 1,000 students who completed their T Level in 2022, including stats that show 40 per cent of those have gone on to work in full-time jobs, 13 per cent have decided to pursue apprenticeships, and 44 per cent have decided to continue their studies at university.

But the report excludes facts that show a third of students who start a T Level drop out before completing. It also fails to mention the health and science T Level fiasco where over 1,200 students had their results remarked due to “major failings” in exam papers.

Several proposed T Levels have also either been delayed or cancelled altogether due to issues with quality and employer demand.

Education watchdog Ofsted released a damning review last summer that found “many” students have dropped out of T Levels after being “misled” onto the flagship qualifications, while experienced teachers struggle to teach the “complex” courses.

Employers were also allegedly being left “disappointed” and “poorly informed” about the mandatory 315-hour industry placements for T Levels, as the inspectorate warned that some placements are “not appropriate” for the subjects learners are studying.

Officials announced plans in April to undertake a “route-by-route” review of T Level content and assessment in a bid to boost their poor recruitment and retention and to ensure the courses are “manageable at scale”.

It would be calamitous and costly to slow the rollout of T Levels or pause the changeover of funding

Despite this, Brown (pictured left) claims that those with a “vested interest” in retaining competing level 3 qualifications that are of “lower quality” could soon force Labour to “pause and review the technical education system yet again”.

“These calls should be ignored,” he said, adding: “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. Delay would set the economy back at a time when we desperately need skilled labour now. It would hamper our growth prospects by bequeathing us an inadequately trained workforce for a decade to come.”

Lord Sainsbury (pictured right), one of Labour’s biggest election donors, added: “The most successful international skills systems have three things consistently in common: simplicity of choice, national standards, and stability. The UK’s system of thousands of qualifications, where in many instances public funding is going to for-profit private entities for qualifications that the government does not scrutinise the content of, is an international outlier. 

“Labour must seize the opportunity to break from the failures of the past and deliver reforms that provide value for money and high-quality education.”

‘The report recycles the tropes used by the last government’

Bill Watkin

SFCA’s Bill Watkin hit back. He said: “Lord Sainsbury’s objective in funding this report was no doubt to promote the value of T Levels. But in attempting to do so, the report recycles many of the tropes used by the last Conservative government to describe BTEC qualifications while overstating the performance and potential uptake of T Levels.

“In opposition, the Labour party made a firm commitment to pause and review the last government’s plan to scrap BTECs if elected this year. Today’s report urges Labour to renege on the commitment made in opposition, over a year ago, and press ahead with the plan to scrap BTECs, but it has nothing to say about the fate of the 155,000 students that our research identified last year would be left without a suitable qualification if this plan is implemented.”

Watkin added that T Levels are a “welcome addition” to the qualifications landscape, but claimed 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”.

Pearson, the awarding organisation that offers BTECs, said there is a “place for both T Levels and other applied general qualifications in the modern skills landscape – not a stark choice between the two as the WPI Strategy report today suggests”.

Pearson “strongly urge” the new Labour government to “continue its plans to implement a review of the vocational qualification reform programme”.

Lord Blunkett added: “There is a simple truth, which I know the incoming government will grasp immediately. Either we pull the plug on courses that are already working with the consequent collapse of the pipeline of trainees into social care, childcare and much else; or we use common sense. 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 an imperative.”

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5 Comments

  1. Rob green

    Sounds like a desperate attempt by Sainsbury to support his flawed t level brain child, now it’s Tory backers gave been sent packing. Let’s hope the ridiculous so called facts don’t change the most sensible decision which to stop the Btec defunding. I wonder how much his other play thing the Gatsby foundation received from the Tories.

  2. Frances Hill

    I completely disagree. The T Level reform does not take into account the key practical hand skills required to deliver the Government pledge on house building. Yes Bricklaying is covered in T Levels but Bench Joinery is not at the moment. The small independent providers that produce excellent craftspeople with clear progressions into employment are being penalised. There is no wool pulling.

  3. Sparky Dave

    As someone who likes and respects Gordon, I think he is completely and utterly wrong on this one. The T Level is an elite qualification, like the A Level, and will never give the opportunity for underprivileged or disadvantaged young people that the previous system did. I’m not saying everything is alright and reform is not needed (although continual reform is arduous, tedious, time-consuming and often pointless…), but I am saying DO pause the changes and reinstate the previous options so we can have a better think about how it will work. This is the logical approach, anything else at this point is ideological.

  4. A White

    The T Levels are generally aimed at higher level learners, what a surprise that those learners go on to University, work or Apprenticeships…That isn’t a success, thats justwhat happens with the majority of higher level learners.

    What good are T levels for those without the grades? Gordon Brown and Sainsbury are completely wrong and have no idea what they’re talking about.