Balfour Beatty and Wates, two of nine construction firms sponsoring five new University Technical Colleges (UTCs) to open by 2014, have criticised the government’s move to downgrade the value of hundreds of vocational qualifications in school league tables. This included several engineering and construction qualifications.
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The diploma was a flagship Labour policy, with construction being one of four subject areas that the first wave of students embarked on in 2008. Labour planned three other diploma lines, and enough coverage in schools and colleges to offer every pupil in England and Wales the chance to take any of them.
But in summer 2010, the coalition government backed away from this policy of “entitlement”, with the result that schools and colleges have chosen to move away from the qualification.
Nick Gooderson, head of qualification and standards at ConstructionSkills, said the industry had been “short changed” by the government’s actions. He described the coalition government’s decision to withdraw funding from the course as “incredibly wasteful of public money”.
Gooderson said: “Unfortunately it’s typical of this country where educational policy is linked to politics.”
The UTCs now under threat are for 14 to 19-year-olds and are sponsored and run by the private sector in areas such as construction and manufacturing. In January, as part of a wider government move to downgrade vocational qualifications, engineering diplomas were downgraded from being worth five GCSEs to just one.
The commercial sponsors of UTCs, which also include the Shard, Mace, Lend Lease, Taylor Wimpey and Enterprise, are currently securing funding for construction of the colleges and drawing up the curriculums.
But training heads at Balfour Beatty and Wates told Building the government needed to better promote vocational education or risk undermining UTCs. Chris Simpson, Wates education liaison officer, said: “[The downgrading] does send the wrong signal. The government doesn’t understand what’s going on in the real world.”
Gooderson added: “The downgrading of vocational qualifications is going to make it very difficult to set up and promote these schools.”
UTCs sponsored by construction firms due to open by 2014:
Southwark, London Shard, Balfour Beatty, Mace, Lend Lease, Shangri-La Hotel Group; Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, Taylor Wimpey Houghton Regis; Central Bedfordshire, Wates; Burnley, Lancashire, Enterprise, Barnfield Construction; Daventry, Northamptonshire, SDC Construction.
