Snobbery around BTecs has to end – they’re exactly what British education needs right now

“That’s a bit BTec.” So goes an insult thrown by friends of Yvette Roberts’s son, used to denote something deemed sub-par. Even after achieving an A* and A in his BTec in graphic design, and going on to study film at Leeds University, the 21-year-old still “doesn’t mention the BTec aspect as he’s embarrassed,” she says. “There is still a snobbery around them.”

But that snobbery is starting to look woefully out of date. As an increasing number of experts argue, it is not more graduates in PPE or social sciences that the UK economy is crying out for, but young people with real-life skills: plumbers, builders, health workers, IT technicians and nursery staff.

No wonder Euan Blair, son of the former prime minister, announced last week that his £1.5 billion training provider, Multiverse, was starting to award special higher-education degrees to apprentices, having found a huge demand among employers for graduates who are prepared for the world of work and can hit the ground running.

It is time, he said, to end the “false trade-off” between academic and vocational education and value not just what a graduate knows but what he or she can do.

“All vocational training is undervalued and unappreciated,” says Jonathan Ledger, CEO of Global Skills Ledger and a vocational training specialist for the Department for International Trade. “Everyone thinks they want a [traditional] degree, because that’s what they’re encouraged to do [but] it isn’t necessarily a good thing for the student or for the country.

“You need employers to stop just taking on graduates because they’re certified as being clever when they’ve got no work experience.”

And, of course, apprenticeships, even the Multiverse ones that confer degrees, are paid for by employers, meaning no student debt.

Yvette Roberts’s four children embody the different types of intelligence that can exist among young people. Her elder two were academic, going on to become a lawyer and a journalist, whereas her younger two, while boasting a whole range of skills, struggled with exams.

“I’m sure [he] would have done really badly if forced to do A-levels,” she says of her 21-year-old, whose dyslexia went undiagnosed throughout his entire time at school. “[He] asked to leave his previous school after not getting the requisite six Bs at GCSE.” Her youngest has ADHD and, while “able and artistic”, struggles to focus, making traditional learning difficult.

“My younger children are the opposite of lazy – they work extra hard,” she says. But they only began to realise their potential when they moved away from book-based learning and embraced courses focused on practical tasks and ongoing assessment.

“[BTec courses] are much more like real life and real work,” she says. “Not everyone can manage exams – and all they show is that you can take exams.” Taking a broader attitude to what learning looks like has left both “loving it, and flying”.

BTecs (short for the Business and Technology Education Council) were introduced in 1974, designed to offer targeted, vocational options – from nursing to law, hairdressing, engineering and countryside management – in lieu of A-levels. Courses now cover topics such as product design and music technology and are typically offered by further education colleges or independent schools (including Bedales, in Hampshire, whose alumni include Daniel Day Lewis and Minnie Driver).

One in four university students comes via the BTec route (242,000 people sat BTecs this year, compared with around 750,000 A-level students), with entrants more likely to be from minority ethnic communities and deprived backgrounds.

Judith Fremont-Barnes, head of Milton Abbey, an independent school offering BTecs and A-levels in Blandford, Dorset, believes BTecs are a byword for “studying subjects in a non-traditional way – and for many of our learners, that’s exactly what they need in order to be able to shine”. The majority of Milton’s students are not “school-shaped”, she says, but, via BTecs, learn teamwork, initiative, flexibility, communication, self-knowledge and other skills that are essential for the workplace.

When the Government announced plans to scrap the majority of BTecs last year there was an immediate and vociferous backlash. Former education secretary Kenneth Baker described the proposal as “an act of vandalism”, while 12 organisations representing schools, colleges and universities published a letter saying the change would “do huge damage to social mobility”.

“It is impossible to square the Government’s stated ambition to ‘level up’ opportunity with the proposal to scrap most BTecs,” they wrote.

Fortunately, the Government then seemed to have a change of heart, announcing in November that the reform was being delayed, and that BTecs would, after all, continue to feature in the post-16 education landscape until at least 2024. 

Nevertheless, snobbery persists. The low esteem in which they are held seemed to be summed up on results day this summer when “systemic issues” at Pearson, the main provider of BTecs, meant students did not receive their grades on time. This, in turn, meant those undertaking Level 3 qualifications – equivalent to A-levels – were unable to confirm their university places, putting their futures in jeopardy. Pearson did not confirm how many people were affected, but the following week said that a further 7,000 pupils would miss receiving their Level 2 grades (equivalent to GCSEs) on time.

The board has been beset by delays multiple times in past years, which many feel is symptomatic of a qualification that is never given the priority it deserves.

“There’s often the feeling that BTecs are at the bottom of the pile,” explains Charlie Ball, head of higher education intelligence at Prospects Luminate, which collates data on the graduate labour market. It’s “very much a qualification taken by the sorts of people you don’t hear very much from in debates of this nature. They’re a little bit voiceless.”

But Fremont-Barnes believes opinions are shifting. “Things are changing so fast in the workscape, you really don’t know what kind of world we’re going into,” she says. “[And] I think people are quite concerned about the idea that they might have children who are sitting around with great A-level results, but who don’t have any initiative or ability to make things happen.”

The one limitation is to the cohort taking BTecs, Ball thinks – as “you are basically asking people to channel what they think their future career is going to be at quite a young age”. But Fremont-Barnes says there are transferable skills even within specialised courses, noting that one of her hospitality students went on to be offered a university place to read law.

The pandemic also prompted people “to question education” she says. One only has to “look at the skills gaps that we’re facing as a nation to see that there is a need for practical education,” she says – and that BTecs, which make students “irresistibly employable”, are a way to remedy that.