Grab the popcorn, put your feet up and settle down for another episode of “The Turbulent Journey of T Levels”. Who’s excited?

This week, the drama centres around a drop in the predicted number of students who will take up T levels in 2020, and a corresponding fall in the collective value of the contracts awarded. Confused? Let’s rewind a bit.

The awarding organisation NCFE was given the contract to deliver the education and childcare T levels, and Pearson bagged design, surveying and planning, as well as digital production, design and development.

The value of these government contracts was initially advertised at a whopping £17.5 million.

Then came the twist. In the original invitation to tender issued in July, the number of students projected across all three pathways by the end of the fourth year of teaching was around 51,000. But by the time of the publication of the final tender document, this had fallen to 34,000 - a third less than the original prediction.

This revision had a snowball effect: the total value at the end of the fourth year of the programme fell to £8.5 million - less than half of the original figure.

Shadow FE minister Gordon Marsden bagged a few lines in the script of this drama, saying: “I think it is concerning for what is supposed to be the government’s flagship policy in this area that the value of these contracts has been revised down significantly. There needs to be a far greater degree of transparency about why this has happened.”

But when it came to the Department for Education’s chance to take centre stage, its performance was, well, rather stiff: “The implementation of T levels is the most radical reform of post-16 education since the introduction of A levels. Therefore, we have planned for a measured implementation period.

“The department has selected a relatively small number of high-performing providers for first delivery in September 2020 to ensure T levels are a high-quality study programme from the very start. Our revised estimates are informed by indicative student volumes from providers’ data.”