The threat to BTec courses in England is the educational scandal no one's talking about | Susanna Rustin

Have you heard that an axe is dangling over courses being taken by 590,000 16-to 18-year-olds in England? Or that Labour’s commitment to “pause and review” Tory plans to scrap more than 100 popular qualifications, including BTecs, has been translated – now they are in power – into a secretive internal process run by civil servants?

Calls for a one-year extension and greater transparency, in a letter from 455 college heads , have been rebuffed with proforma responses, and the plans have been hived off from the wider and more public curriculum review being led by Prof Becky Francis, with a panel of experts.

Does it surprise you that the threatened courses are mostly taken by young people who did not score the highest grades at GCSE? Or that they are mostly neither taught in private schools, nor to students aiming for Russell Group universities? As one schools guide puts it: “Finding UK independent schools which provide a decent range of BTecs can be very frustrating.”

I expect you can guess why this is – and why there isn’t more fuss about the whole situation. As one frustrated campaigner told me, the bias towards academic high achievers in our system is such that there would be a louder outcry about the abolition of a single A-level (Latin or photography, say) than the threat to thousands of vocational courses.

Acronyms don’t help. The further education sector, which educates more than half of older teenagers as well as adults up to degree level, is plagued by confusing terminology. There are probably more people who know what OWL stands for (Ordinary Wizarding Level) than level-3 AGQ (applied general qualification – typically studied for in years 12 and 13). BTecs, which have existed since the 1980s, take their name from the defunct Business and Technical Education Council that once oversaw them. Nowadays they are a brand owned by Pearson and just one type of AGQ.

But beyond the muddle of initials, the blunt fact is that these courses aren’t posh or clever enough in the eyes of some to be treated with the respect they deserve. Sure, these days snobbery is more academic and less social, in the old-fashioned sense of who your relatives are and which houses they own. Some state sixth forms are as ruthless as the independent sector in their focus on elite university places. The Michaela school in Wembley , for example, advertises its staff’s “outstanding academic pedigrees” – with one-third of them holding degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. (I should say here that, despite my own preference for less regimented learning, I admire what Michaela and similar schools achieve with their ethnically and socioeconomically diverse intakes.)

But what about everyone else? Just a quarter of the roughly 37% of UK young people who are undergraduates attend research-intensive Russell Group universities. By pointing out the disproportionate attention gobbled up by this lucky few, I am not saying anything original. It is widely recognised that education in the UK (not just England) is weighted against children from less educated and affluent backgrounds, who are more likely to study in colleges after age 16 than stay on at school. This bias includes practical things such as pay. College teachers are not eligible for the recent 5.5% rise awarded to school teachers in England, and colleges, unlike state schools, pay VAT.

Sure Start, increased schools funding, the academies programme and more university places were the last Labour government’s response to educational unfairness. But no policymaker has ever claimed that higher education is for everyone. And when David Cameron’s government commissioned Lord Sainsbury to produce a report on technical alternatives, T-levels were the result. Among other problems, these vocational courses with built-in work placements were an attempt to address the UK’s low productivity – and close the gap with Germany and Japan. It is fair to say that the rollout of those has not gone to plan. About 30,000 young people have been enrolled on T-levels since 2020 (this year’s figures have not yet been released), compared with 590,000 on older courses. As well as low recruitment, T-levels have high dropout rates of up to 33%. Other issues include the difficulty of finding enough 45-day work placements and specific gaps – for example in the offer to would-be electricians. They are also tricky to combine with GCSE resits. Yet it is in order to push students towards T-levels that older, more popular courses are being defunded.

This is the sticky situation that the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and the skills minister, Jacqui Smith, have inherited – one made stickier by a recent report by Sainsbury promoting their consolidation, with support from Gordon Brown .

Related: ‘Unbelievably proud’: Luton pupils celebrate A-level and BTec results

It is understandable that schools absorb the lion’s share of ministerial attention. Progress on teachers’ pay and reforming Ofsted has been welcome. The secretary of state’s daunting to-do list includes the collapsing Send system and the poor state of universities. But skills training is essential to national wellbeing. Among a catalogue of failures, the Grenfell inquiry highlighted fatal deficiencies in the “ knowledge and experience of those engaged in the construction industry”.

Applied General Qualifications including BTecs are not perfect. Perhaps some resistance to change is simply that. But the mini-review that ministers have ordered should be open. The refusal of the Department for Education to share terms of reference with a specialist publication, FE Week, was a mistake. When also looking at the continuing unfairness on pay, college leaders, teachers and students are justified in feeling hard done by. A Labour government with a commitment to shrink the attainment gap between rich and poor children should treat colleges as partners in reform.

• Susanna Rustin is a Guardian journalist