Gordon Brown calls on ministers not to scrap T-level qualification

Gordon Brown has called on the new government to retain the Conservatives’ technical qualifications, which Rishi Sunak had promised to ditch.

In a foreword to a report, Brown argues that T-levels are “one of the few genuinely successful new ideas and initiatives of the last decade” and that scrapping them would be “calamitous and costly”. Labour previously said it would review them after taking office.

T-levels were introduced in 2020 as the Conservatives’ gold-standard vocational qualification for post-16 students in England, but many in the sector have raised concerns about the mass defunding of other popular vocational qualifications, including BTecs.

There have been also been problems with low uptake and high drop-out rates, while last week an exam board was fined £300,000 over “major failings” with papers sat by health and science T-level students in 2022.

Before the election, Bridget Phillipson, now the education secretary, said Labour would pause and review the plan to scrap BTecs once in office. Rishi Sunak pledged to replace T-levels and A-levels with a new baccalaureate-style qualification known as the Advanced British Standard if the Conservatives were re-elected.

The new report featuring Brown’s T-level endorsement was compiled by the lobbying consultancy WPI Strategy and funded by Lord Sainsbury, one of the original architects of T-levels.

It calls for an end to the “wild west” provision of vocational qualifications and urges the new government to accelerate the rollout of T-levels by cutting public funding for “lower-quality and overlapping courses” including BTecs.

“T-levels have the potential to create a new skilled workforce for the next three-quarters of our century with the promise of good pay in the very sectors of the economy where we are experiencing key shortages and in the industries of the future,” Brown writes.

“Low-quality technical courses might be cheap to teach and easy to pass but they suppress talent rather than release it, and the reality is that employers don’t really value such courses when taking on new workers.

“A current fear is 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 argue that Labour should pause and review the technical education system yet again. These calls should be ignored.

“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.”

The former Labour education secretary David Blunkett, who has previously criticised the scrapping of BTecs, said: “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.”

Bill Watkin, the chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said: “T-levels are a welcome addition to the qualifications landscape but 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.”

David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the report underplayed some of the T-level implementation problems. “That’s why we are pressing for an urgent review of every single T-level to ensure that they deliver the outcomes that this report and its authors are aiming for,” he said.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We support T-levels as a high-class vocational qualification which gives young people a firm foundation for their future, and will confirm our next steps shortly.”