Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the trends in the number of students who take vocational GCSEs who go on to study at university.

The requested information has been supplied below:

Number of pupils entering higher education having achieved at least one vocational GCSE qualification

Source: National Pupil Database, HESA dataset

These changes are the result of reforms to performance tables which have removed the perverse incentives for schools to teach qualifications that were easy to achieve and/or had an inflated value in performance measures. This served only to devalue vocational education. Now, the qualifications which can count in performance tables are those that are of demonstrably high quality and promote progression.