Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-10-12
Topic: Education
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, there are a number of other amendments in this group. I very much hope that we will pursue one or more of them to a Division if we do not get some very clear reassurances from my noble friend, because it is my conviction that BTECs should continue to be widely available for some good long time yet at least, and that the Government’s suggestion that we should quickly move to a system of A-levels and T-levels only is profoundly mistaken. I have a number of reasons for this First, BTECs are respected. When it comes to educational qualifications, respect is hard to gain. BTECs are respected by universities, employers and parents, and not just parents of disadvantaged children. My daughter took a BTEC, her friend took three, and my cousin took three. They are something, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, that I would happily advise a child to take. They are a well-respected qualification and to dispose of them in haste and short order is profoundly un-Conservative. I very much hope that my new colleagues in the department will share that view I am very grateful to the department for sharing its reasoning with us. Broadly, as I understand it—my noble friend will doubtless correct me if I am wrong—it is that, looking at the people who take BTECs and comparing them with similar people who take A-levels, the people who take BTECs have a higher drop-out rate at university, and those who stay at university go on to learn less than equivalent pupils who take A-levels. That analysis is deeply statistically unsound. I will explain why A definitive and careful choice is made by a pupil and the people advising them as to whether they should go down the A-level or BTEC route. It is not a question of random allocation. Unless you really analyse what is going on in that process of differentiation, you absolutely cannot legitimately statistically compare the subsequent path of the two groups. You can remark on and look at them, but to compare them and say that one is therefore better than the other is not something you can do because you do not have the data to understand what that process of differentiation was. They are two different groups. They are swallows and crows—both birds, but to compare them is just to describe. It is not something you can draw conclusions from Nor is that the only point at which these two streams have different processes applied to them. When it comes to applying to university, they receive advice as to which course they should take at which university. The quality of that advice might well differ markedly for people taking BTECs as opposed to people taking A-levels. It certainly differs markedly between institutions. When, a few years ago, I was working with HESA statistics it was quite remarkable how drop-outs focused on the products of particular institutions rather than particular types of students or courses they were going for. So there is a second point at which this stream is different, which destroys the ability to compare. Then there is what happens at universities. Universities are supposed, under their access policies, to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is quite clear that they have not been doing this properly. I am delighted that the OfS is picking them up on this, but universities have not been looking at how they make the best of a student and give them the best possible outcome. They have been providing them with a relatively standard product and seeing how they get on with it Students who take BTECs are likely to have a different set of requirements in terms of teaching and support from students who take A-levels, so the differentiation may be entirely down to the practices of universities in not supporting BTEC students properly. That means that you cannot tell what is going on. The department is using this data to evince the reasons for its proposals on BTECs, but the data applies to the old pattern BTECs only—those that existed before the 2016 reforms. The new BTECs were specifically designed to deal with the worries people had about how BTEC students were doing at university. All the changes made to BTECs in the first teaching in 2016 were directed at helping students do better at university, but there is as yet no data available on how those students do at university. There were big changes—it is a different qualification in many ways—but the Government are treating it as if they can apply the data from the old qualification There is then another set of data which the Government do not seem to have applied themselves to: the data that comes before the surge in popularity of BTECs. The data for disadvantaged students in 2013-15 shows that almost all of them took A-levels and there was a huge rate of dropout, because these were not suitable for them. Go on a few years and there was a much lower school dropout rate because BTECs were holding these students in school. That does not seem to have been taken into the Government’s calculations. The department talks of getting these students back to doing A-levels, but we used to do that, and it had terrible results. Why does it want to do that again I am somewhat in despair at the quality of the DfE’s analysis of why it wants to do away with BTECs quickly. However, its analysis does suggest a test; it suggests that we should look at how new qualifications do when they have run their course and students have got to the point of being in employment. We can then judge how well they are doing. If we look at 2019-21 as the sample cohort for the new BTECs, we should have a reasonable idea of that by 2027. We should have a reasonable idea of how well T-levels are doing by 2029 or 2030 That gives us a timescale for when we will have legitimate data to compare how T-levels and BTECs have done, if the Government are doing proper research—I do not know that they are—on how decisions are taken as to which qualification is provided, how pupils with the qualifications are supported at university and on careers advice given to different groups of students. All of that is necessary to take a justified decision about which set of qualifications should be provided I hope I am right in quoting the Government as saying that T-levels are the best option for 16 to 19 year-olds. How can they possibly know that? These qualifications have only just been created—they are newborn. The emperor’s second wife always wants to kill the older children. It is a natural thing, but we really should not allow that. We ought to insist on a proper period of comparison to find out how they work out. I think the answer will turn out to be that we need not two qualifications but three: A, B and T. We want parity of esteem. If the system has just A-levels and T-levels, we will lose parity of esteem I would never, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, advise a child to do a T-level unless they were so clearly committed—at age 16—to the narrow scope of that T-level that they could legitimately take such a decision. There are not many 16 year-olds who are so clear and focused that they can reasonably take that decision. It is really hard to commit yourself to a single, narrow line which leads you away from the generality of university and towards a specific career. There are children for whom this will work, but there are fewer of them than the Government think, and there are an awful lot who need to be kept more general.