In 2023, we published Let’s Get Technical, our manifesto for professional and technical universities.
With a change of government taking place In summer 2024, we published an updated policy publication, titled: Let’s Get Technical: Priorities for the new government.
This publication expands our recommendations for the new government, with policy proposals for the short-term and the long-term.
It sets out a range of practical and cost-effective steps they can take to maximise and harness the power of professional and technical universities in service of their five missions.
Some of the headline proposals include:
- Launching a cross-government healthcare education taskforce, including representatives from across the higher education sector, to address the many challenges in training and growing the NHS workforce
- Including representatives from professional and technical universities on the industrial strategy council, to harness their significant expertise in using university-business partnerships to drive growth
- Allow more teacher training providers to gain accreditation by allowing those who were a ‘near miss’ in the last round of the Initial Teacher Training market review accreditation process an opportunity to become accredited. This will ensure more even geographic coverage of teacher training opportunities and support the government’s goal of recruiting 6,500 new teachers.
- Increasing student maintenance support to keep up with the cost of living, and reintroducing maintenance grants for those most in need, to ensure everyone who wants to can take up the opportunity of going to university.
- Implement a two year pause and review of the plan to scrap most BTECs. This week’s announcement by the Secretary of State falls well short of what is needed to alleviate the uncertainty facing young people, providers, and employers. To avoid a sharp increase in the number of young people disengaging from education, the government should urgently confirm that students can enrol on all 134 existing Applied General Qualifications up to and including the 2026/27 academic year.
