Curriculum and Assessment Review

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, last night I went to see my 17 year-old daughter perform in her final show at the BRIT School in Croydon. There were tears aplenty as a hugely talented bunch of students took their final curtain call. The good news for them is that the world of entertainment is a major employer: the Government estimate that over half a million work in those industries. It is undoubtedly very competitive too, but if you go to the right school and study the right qualification, you have a head start.

The Guardian newspaper put it better than I could just last month:

“As the Grammy winners took to the stage in Los Angeles on Sunday night, one common thread emerged: many had once walked the halls of a comprehensive school in Croydon, south London”—


the BRIT School. Just in case any noble Lords do not have Olivia Dean, Lola Young or Raye on their Spotify playlists, all of whom won Grammys last month from the platform of a BRIT education, then I also mention Adele, Amy Winehouse and Tom Holland. Why am I talking about where Spider-Man went to school, I hear noble Lords ask. It is simply because there seems a serious risk that the education he benefited from is under real threat. It is of course not just his, but the education of all these other stars too and so many other performers, less famous to be sure, but none the less all making an important contribution to the UK economy as well as giving pleasure to audiences home and abroad.

What is this risk? It is simply that the BRIT and all other post-16 education producers will be prevented from offering the extended diploma assured by the University of the Arts London in future—or indeed anything like it—for the extraordinary reason, it seems, that the extended diploma is too large. Apparently, the right thing for all 16 and 17 year-olds interested in the vocational path is to take three small qualifications, because that is what A-level students do, even though T-level students do not—I hope noble Lords are keeping up.

Where on earth has all this come from? It seems that someone, possibly in Whitehall, has taken a perfectly understandable recommendation from the Francis review and turned it, for some inexplicable reason, into a very unhelpful one. The Francis review drew attention to the variation in quality of some level 3 vocational qualifications and recommended investment in

“aspirational, coherent, recognised and respected vocational and applied qualifications, to sit alongside A Levels and T Levels”,

called V-levels. It went on to say that the majority should be the size of A-levels but, crucially, that there should be large ones, including for creative subjects, as for T-levels.

Thus far, the Government’s response—drafted, I suspect, by civil servants who did A-levels and do not have a single vocational qualification between them—stated that having large V-levels alongside T-levels would “create confusion”. This is plain silly. More than this, it is pointlessly destructive of world-beating creative vocational education, which is why it is not what Professor Francis and her expert team review recommended, and why it is not what fabulous schools such as the BRIT teach their students. Does my noble friend the Minister, who I am absolutely certain had nothing to do with this silliness, agree that it is not too late to think again, do the right thing and back the wonderful provision that already exists?