Technical and Further Education Bill — House of Lords, 2017-03-27
Topic: Education
Alison Wolf (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I rarely disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, on technical education, where I highly respect her expertise and experience, but I confess to a certain unease about the idea that there should be only one list and that it should overtly include everything. One of the key things that we are trying to do here is to create a highly respected and distinctive technical education course which sits alongside the academic one, and therefore by definition it cannot include everything that has passed a basic set of requirements for being an acceptable qualification I remind noble Lords that I have an interest in this, having been on the Sainsbury panel, but also looking back to my experience when I was doing the 14 to 18 vocational education review. I completely agree that one could go round for ever on vocational to technical to professional. But there is a really important distinction here between a limited set of qualifications that have been identified as having a very clear purpose and the possibility—and, I would say, high desirability—of allowing a very large number of qualifications to arise and be offered and meet a minimum threshold in the vocational and technical area. It may be that the wording of the noble Baroness’s amendment will not get in the way of that, but these distinctions are important When I made the 14 to 18 recommendations, I said explicitly that there should be a distinction between there being strong requirements before something could be offered in mainstream 14 to 16 education and a very different set of requirements which said that they could be out there and schools could offer them if they wished but they could not count in the league tables as being equivalent to GCSEs or A-levels. The same thing applies here with the task set for the new institute to identify qualifications which really meet the requirements of that distinctive high-status route. That is not the same as being on the Ofqual register This is not about whether it is craft or creative or technical, where I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, but about creating this "lost" route that we used to have without at the same time throwing overboard a large number of qualifications—some of them tiny, some of them big—which may serve quite different purposes. It is really important to recognise that one of the purposes of the institute is to create that alternative route and that part of that is about having a set of qualifications—probably not thousands long—that meet these criteria. Getting there is going to be difficult but if you do not have this end in view, it is hard to see how we will ever get out of what is at the moment a hugely confused and confusing mass of qualifications Again, to talk from personal experience, when I did the 14 to 18 review, I did not recommend anything like as much restriction at 16 to 18. What was recommended and adopted was this idea of a programme of study for each individual student between 16 and 18, which has worked quite well. I thought at the time that as a result of that we would move to a situation where a smaller number of good qualifications became clearly apparent as market leaders, and strongly established. I was convinced by Nick Boles, the Minister at the time the Sainsbury panel was set up, that this was just not happening; we needed to be more active and the programme of study was not enough It seems to me that a fundamental part of what the institute is about is creating a set of qualifications which meet the requirements for that alternative, high-status route from 16 on into adult life. Without talking to lawyers or drafting clerks, I do not know whether the amendment would have any negative impact on that but it is important to understand that one of the purposes of the institute, for which I think there is cross-party consensus, is to recreate that route. In my view, that means that you cannot just say that everything that is not an A-level can be on the institute’s list, because we need a list that is clearly part of this route without wiping out all the other many qualifications which may serve other and different purposes. That is what I wanted to say and I hope the noble Baroness and I do not really disagree.