In January 2025, I recorded an episode of Inside Your Ed titled ‘Will the debate over vocational and technical qualifications ever end?’.

It is therefore rather fitting that my final podcast of 2025 will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this debate shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

In November this year, the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review proposed the creation of V levels - a new set of vocational qualifications for 16 to 19 year olds that are intended to sit between academic A levels and technical T levels.

The Government accepted this recommendation and has since launched a consultation on the design and implementation of V levels in order to get these new qualifications ready for September 2027.

So what problems are V levels supposed to solve? What opportunities and risks lie ahead for learners and providers with this new brand of qualifications? And will V levels be seen as a prestigious choice for young people or will they struggle to compete with A levels and T levels in terms of their visibility and profile?

My guests are Professor Dame Alison Wolf DBE, the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at Kings College London and author of a government review of vocational qualifications in 2011, and Shaun Hope, the principal of Bishop Auckland College, which delivers further education, vocational training and higher education to over 4,000 students across Durham.

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For the Higher Education, or HE sector, it may be starting to feel like one step forward is almost immediately followed by one step backward.

Last year, the announcement of a rise in tuition fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a large increase in taxes on employers, including HE providers, which probably wiped out some, if not all the extra fee income.

This year, the decision to again raise fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a brand new tax on HE providers in the form of an international student levy.

Needless to say, this new levy comes at a time when many universities and other providers are known to be struggling financially, and that’s before you even consider potential problems with the levy itself.

So what is this new international student levy? Are there likely to be winners and losers in different parts of the HE sector following the levy’s introduction? And are there ways that the levy could potentially be improved, or should the sector just keep fighting against it regardless?

My guests are Rose Stephenson, the Director of Policy and Strategy at the Higher Education Policy Institute, and Chris Havergal, the editor of Times Higher Education.

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“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.”

Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short.

A significant part of this new system was Education, Health and Care Plans, or EHCPs, which would identify any additional needs of children and young people aged up to 25 and set out the extra support that they are legally entitled to receive.

Just over a decade later in 2025, and the SEND system is widely regarded to be complex, fragmented and facing financial ruin. What’s more, the current government’s planned reforms to SEND, which were scheduled for this autumn, have been delayed until the New Year.

In October, IPPR, a progressive think tank, published a new report called ‘BREAKING THE CYCLE: A BLUEPRINT FOR SEND REFORM’, which set out their proposals for putting special needs provision on a better and more sustainable path.

So what did this new report identify as the main problems facing the SEND system? Does SEND provision need major investment, major reform or both? And when the financial pressures on local and national government are so acute, can EHCPs survive in their current form for much longer?

My guests are Geoff Barton CBE, chair of the IPPR Inclusion Taskforce that fed into this new report and also a former headteacher and union leader, and Eleanor Harris, co-author of this new report and also the Director of Policy, Impact, Research and Communications at The Difference, a charity focused on inclusion.

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