UK culture is overflowing with the fruits of creative labours, practical talent and technical knowhow. The West End. The Royal Academy. The Great British Bake Off. Glastonbury Festival. The Proms. Doctor Who. The British Grand Prix at Silverstone. But we don’t often ask ourselves what lies behind the technical perfection we have come to expect.
The pursuit of technical expertise through practical learning is as integral to many professions as the pursuit of conceptual expertise through academic scholarship. And as so many sectors, from music, film and games design to construction, pharma and finance, rely increasingly on advanced technology, the training of their practitioners has also become more complex, centring around higher-level skills.
Still, technical institutes equal in fame and fortune to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge remain conspicuous by their absence. And I contend that that is because they lack a comparable freedom to innovate.
Universities became successful not by following a pre-existing template but by pursuing the passions of individual scholars, protected by financial and institutional independence. They didn’t have to get every new programme vetted by a regulator. No Institute for Academics confirmed the currency of their curriculum via a committee of learned folk.
Degree Awarding Powers (DAPs) are the central pillar of this institutional autonomy. But despite decades of attempting every possible alternative, we have failed to apply this simple lesson to technical education.
In our new Manifesto for Higher Education, Independent Higher Education – the umbrella group for independent providers of higher education, professional training and pathways – is calling for this error to be corrected with the introduction of Technical Education Awarding Powers (TEAPs).
While no one can doubt the current government’s commitment to boosting technical education, its reforms – T levels, higher technical qualifications (HTQs), apprenticeships – have been marred by a top-down approach of centralised control. Even the Institutes of Technology introduced by Theresa May are attempting excellence by committee.
Education at its best, however, is a virtuous cycle of knowledge creation, into which students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and industry all feed. This positive feedback loop is explicitly encouraged in higher education institutions with their own DAPs, but is critically disrupted in technical education, where teaching providers and awarding bodies are kept separate. The vast majority of technical provision involves providers teaching to a rigid specification controlled by commercial awarding organisations, which, in England, are then separately regulated by Ofqual. This is a recipe for homogeneity and mediocrity.
Regrettably, when HTQs were introduced in 2022, the government accepted and entrenched this flawed model as the starting point for most providers, while opening a separate route to (supposedly) the same destination for HE providers with DAPs. In reality, most would-be HTQ providers have struggled to make headway on either path. Ofqual-regulated awarding bodies are unconvinced of the market and unwilling to commit resources to co-design courses with teaching providers, while validating universities have been uncomfortable straying too far outside their academic and subject-specific comfort zones.
A further bureaucratic process has been overlayed, overseen by the dutifully rebranded Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. Cobbled together from the fraying edges of the apprenticeships system, with its rigid, backward-looking occupational maps, what was envisioned as a big bang of exciting new industry-driven qualifications has ended as more of an administrative whimper.
Whitehall has leaned into its nervous inclination for control and uniformity, attempting to retrofit the missing link of employer engagement into existing programmes and pass them off as new ones. This just creates even more delay and distance between the design of these courses and their students.
IHE’s manifesto proposal would restore the golden thread between teaching, learning, assessment and the cutting edge of professional practice. Building on the proven model of DAPs but embedding a deeper level of industry engagement, a specialist technical education provider could be authorised in specific industry fields to award its own higher technical qualifications at skills levels 4-6, as well as qualifications below this level.
But DAPs are not flexible enough for technical education and are hamstrung by a pernicious rule so archaic that its provenance has long been lost to the mists of time. This is the “50 per cent rule”, which makes DAPs conditional on more than half of an institution’s students being enrolled on programmes at Level 6 (bachelor’s degree) or higher. Indeed, even providers offering Level 6 don’t qualify for DAPs if they structure their provision flexibly so that students take one level (or module) at a time, because a majority will always be enrolled at lower levels. No rule could be more more tailor-made to frustrate the flexibility intrinsic to the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, which will be vital to an economy increasingly dependent on retraining and upskilling.
We could simply scrap the 50 per cent rule, but the innovation-stifling HTQ approval process would remain. Specialist technical education providers empowered with TEAPs, by contrast, would need no Whitehall committee to vouch for the value employers place on their provision because engaging employers in course design would be written into their DNA.
At the same time, they would still be regulated robustly by the Office for Students, making them eligible for public investment in technical research and innovation, as well as for capital grants for state-of-the-art facilities.
TEAPs would give the UK gold-standard industry-led qualifications and a new generation of higher education institutions to be proud of.
Alex Proudfoot is chief executive of Independent Higher Education.