Gareth Snell

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Linsey Farnsworth) on securing this debate. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a governor of Stoke-on-Trent sixth-form college and chair of the APPG on sixth-form education. I pay tribute to the leadership of the colleges in Stoke-on-Trent—Lesley Morrey at Stoke-on-Trent sixth-form college and Hassan Rizvi at Stoke-on-Trent college. They are doing amazing work to reduce what has traditionally been a stubbornly high rate of NEETs in Stoke-on-Trent. In fact, at one point I think we ranked No. 1 in the country for the number of NEETs, but that is coming down because the colleges are working to make sure that every young person in Stoke-on-Trent knows that there is a route for them somewhere, whether it be academic, vocational or technical, into a job in the city. However, we also recognise that part of that work must start further downstream, with young people in our secondary schools who have an idea of what they want to do and an aspiration to achieve it, but are not necessarily sure how to go about doing it. Under the leadership of Heather McLachlan and Simon French, the CEO Futures Forum is bringing together multi-academy trusts to consider how the curriculum review announced a couple of weeks ago can be used locally to create those academic, vocational and technical gateways into the right subject areas, where we know the jobs will be in the city, so that young people have something to look towards, strive and aspire to. Those are the good things that I wanted to mention today. We also know that for young people in north Staffordshire who want to go to university, widening participation is incredibly important. The Higher Horizons programme, run by Keele University in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), demonstrates how young people from across north Staffordshire can go to university if they are given the right opportunities and understandings. Briefly, the key point that I want to make to the Minister today is about V-levels. With the introduction of V-levels, there is a real possibility that a small group of young people will lose out in the next two years by not having access to BTECs, which are being defunded before V-levels come online. That could lead to a large spike in the number of NEETs in the next couple of years. What will his Department do to ensure that those young people are not lost in the transition to what could be an exciting new qualification?