Labour has always supported T-levels as alternatives to academic qualifications, but in pre-election press releases it also committed to a ‘pause and review’ of Tory plans to defund over 140 qualifications which were considered to overlap with the Ts. This including many established BTECs and other National level 3 options.
Cuts scheduled for the end of 2024 were suspended immediately Labour came into office and Bridget Phillipson has now ordered a stay of execution:
We will not proceed with defunding qualifications on published lists in agriculture, environmental and animal care; legal, finance and accounting; business and administration; and creative and design before 2027.
This applies to many of the most popular qualifications (only those with minimal take-up will be axed ). The respite will be welcome, with many sixth forms without the resources to offer Ts, able to continue BTEC programmes as alternatives to, or in combination with A-levels. The future of full time post-16 vocational qualifications is now likely to be dependent on the more general National Curriculum Review, rather than on the new Skills England
Meanwhile, T-levels will trundle on, with the government accepting that a shortage of employer openings means that parts of the mandatory work placement can be done ‘online’ – up to 50% for digital courses. Alarmingly, considering the current outcry about shortages of building labour, the T-level pathway in ‘On-site Construction’, started in 2020, will be scrapped, due to low numbers of students completing (barely a hundred) this past summer.
But with only a small proportion of apprenticeship starts in construction – some 25, 000 about 7% of the total and a 5% fall on the previous year, it could be concluded that young working-class young people (particularly ‘the boys’) don’t want to ‘work on the buildings’ like they used to? For example, employer representatives such as the House Builders federation (HBF) lining up to ridicule Labour’s plans for 1.5 million extra homes, claim there are plenty of vacancies, that the industry ‘doesn’t have enough talent’ coming in (a quarter of the workforce are said to be over 50) and that schools are not providing enough encouragement.
Though the reasons for this and the subsequent reliance on foreign labour are slightly more complicated, with the way the construction industry is organised at the moment, you can’t blame young people for not wanting to work in it. Yet the UK’s in no position to implement any form of Green New Deal, what ever Ed Miliband might think.
Education, Economy and Society 