Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to consult small and medium-sized businesses on the future of (a) technical and (b) vocational education.

The Government believes that employers should be at the heart of reforms to technical education. Employers and their representatives have been consulted in the development of plans for delivering technical education reforms and designing the outline content for new T level programmes. The Government is working in partnership with employers and industry experts, including small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), to design T levels in a way that meets the needs of business.

The Department is also talking to employers about how they can best be supported in delivering work placements as part of T levels. For example, a research project has been commissioned which will interview employers about their capacity and demand to offer T level work placements. Over 1000 employers, many of them SMEs, have been engaged through the work placement pilots, and are now offering work placements to students in the 2017/18 academic year. A public consultation on T level implementation has recently been completed, and the response will be published in the spring.