Guidance on the review of post-16 qualifications reforms

Background

In July 2024, The Secretary of State for Education announced a review of post-16 qualifications reform, the outcomes of which were published on 12th December 2024. The review considered the level 3 qualifications due to have public funding removed on either 31 July 2024 or 31 July 2025 under the policy of the previous government. The Government has central missions to drive forward opportunity and growth, which rely on people having the skills needed to thrive in life and work.

The current post-16 skills system in England is too confusing. Learners and employers need a simpler range of high-quality qualifications, which provide them with the skills they need. The government undertook a review of qualifications reform, to see where alternative qualifications need to be retained for longer, such as applied general qualifications or BTECs.

This government is seeking to bring a more pragmatic approach to qualifications reform, that is based on the needs of learners and our economy. This includes moving away from blanket restrictions, such as removing funding from all technical qualifications that were assessed to overlap with T Levels and instead, taking a practical, evidence–led approach, looking at the qualifications route by route. This will ensure that there are high-level choices for learners.

Defunding was planned to take place across 9 routes: Health and Science; Construction and the Built Environment; Education and Early Years; Digital; Engineering and Manufacturing; Legal, Finance and Accounting; Creative and Design; Agriculture, Environmental and Animal Care and Business and Administration.

We began the review by identifying qualifications that had either no or below 100 enrolments per year over the last 3 years in the first 5 routes listed above. The other 4 routes were excluded from this process due to defunding only being announced for qualifications that had been assessed to overlap with the T Levels. Following the opportunity for awarding organisations to appeal, we will remove funding from 216 qualifications with low and no enrolments after 31 July 2025. We then conducted a route-by-route review of the remaining qualifications across all 9 routes in scope of the review, considering both the needs of learners and the economy when deciding whether qualifications should be retained for longer. The review concluded that 157 qualifications (circa 70 per cent of those that remained in scope) should have funding retained for longer. A full list of these qualifications is now available.

More details are set out in the guidance document attached to this page.

This guidance

This guidance sets out:

• the criteria against which you can notify us that a qualification should not have its funding approval removed from 1st August 2025 (as an outcome of the route-by-route review)
• the process, evidence requirements and timescales for you to notify us

You must notify us by 5:00pm on 24 January 2025, if you believe a qualification meets the criteria set out in the guidance. We will be accepting notifications through Galaxkey. To be able to set up your access on Galaxkey, we need you to confirm the email addresses of people in your organisation that will need access by 5:00pm on 10 January 2025.

Please download the guidance below for full information.