Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you’ve all had a great start to 2026.

Last year concluded with an action-packed autumn term of education policies, including the Curriculum and Assessment Review, a Post 16 White Paper and a new levy on international students along with several announcements on extra funding for schools and families.

But fear not, because this year is already poised to offer plenty more drama and debates. A Schools White Paper is expected in the coming weeks, including reforms to the support for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or SEND for short, and that all comes on top of simmering tensions over this year’s teacher pay awards and Ofsted’s controversial new inspection framework.

To share his views on what is coming up in 2026, I’m delighted to be joined by Pepe Di’Iasio, the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents over 25,000 leaders in primary, secondary and post-16 education.

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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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