Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher, in an incredibly important debate about the future of our young people. I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on his tenacity on the issue. I remember his time as Secretary of State for Education in the Government of Mrs May, and he had a genuine passion for the issue. To see him still banging the drum many years later is testament to his character.
I agree with a lot of what the right hon. Gentleman has said over the many years that he has been talking about the importance of technical education—that is, about the need to understand that technical education is not the younger sister of A-levels and academic qualifications. It is not the less important member of the family of opportunities presented to young people.
I declare an interest. I am the governor of a sixth-form college in my constituency, which provides T-levels—one of the outstanding providers in the west midlands. I also have a daughter who will soon be thinking about GCSE options for next year, so where she goes and what she does is very much on my mind.
As the hon. Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford) said, it is incumbent on us all to say to young people who are looking at their options that whatever they choose to do, the routes available will help them to be the best they can be—whether through A-levels, T-levels or the remaining applied general qualifications, once the pause and review process is finished. We sometimes find ourselves in a false dichotomy of talking about academic studies on one side and vocational and technical studies on the other. Actually, we present a breadth of opportunity to our young people, in a simplified and accessible way, which will be the determination of whether they are successful or not.
I have two colleges in my constituency—City of Stoke-on-Trent sixth-form college and Stoke-on-Trent college. Under the leadership of Mark Kent and now Lesley Morrey, City of Stoke-on-Trent sixth-form college provides region-leading qualifications, including T-levels, BTECs and A-levels. Under the former leadership of Lisa Kapper, and now interim principal Antoinette Lythgoe, Stoke-on-Trent college demonstrates what can be done at all levels of potential learning.
A city like Stoke-on-Trent—not that dissimilar to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash)—is a city that has challenges. The opportunity provided to young people at FE can be the greatest social mobility driver there is—it can unlock their potential—but there is a challenge in making sure that they are on the right path.
T-levels have been excellent for my city—again, I commend the right hon. Member for East Hampshire on the programme that he brought in when he was Education Secretary. That is about not only the uplift in funding for each young person, which better reflects the necessity of the work from the excellent staff, but the capital funding available for those institutions in the first wave to take T-levels up, which has allowed us to expand our college to create new and incredible facilities that mean that the learning experience for those young people is brilliant.
I believe that the Government are right to continue looking at this breadth, but I would say to the Minister—I have written to her noble Friend in the other place, Baroness Smith of Malvern, about this—that, while the pause and review is doing a job of work in looking at what BTECs are available, the colleges in my constituency are now trying to plan what they can offer in September 2025, much as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn). They do not currently know what they can offer. They have been asked to submit their projected T-level enrolment numbers now, but they do not know whether they will be offering an equivalent BTEC for the same course. Therefore, they are having to either overinflate their numbers and worry about in-year clawback, or worry about lack of lagged funding for the AGQ. I would urge the Minister to take that back to the Department.
In the remaining time that I have left, I will say that, while this debate has been excellent for talking about young people, there is a conversation that we have to have as a nation about adult education and ensuring that people in places such as Hartlepool and Stoke-on-Trent having to change careers because of changes in the way that industries work have the same opportunities as others to retrain, get new skills, get those well-paid, secure and hopefully unionised jobs that come with that, and make a meaningful contribution to where they live and to our country.