Since the general election 15 months ago, the UK government’s approach to education has been opaque, to put it mildly. This has been intensely frustrating, especially given that the Labour Party told the country before coming to office that it had a “plan”.

Yesterday’s new amounts to the start of a slow reveal. It is the first part of a triptych that will be completed soon by the forthcoming schools White Paper and the results of the Curriculum and Assessment Review.

The oral statement to Parliament on the White Paper by the secretary of state for education, Bridget Phillipson, suggested ministers are especially proud of their new V levels. These vocational qualifications will sit between academic A levels and occupational T levels, though it will be possible to mix and match A levels and V levels.

If that sounds familiar, it is because BTECs and other qualifications already sit in this space. There will doubtless now be some tinkering to pretend the world is materially changing. But the new V levels could end up more like those vinyl wraps that spruce up your car while leaving the engine alone.

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In other words, we may end up with the same instructors teaching the same content to the same students. That is better than eradicating the third route, which – among other things – would have harmed the pipeline to higher education. Yet there is an opportunity cost to the sort of changes that have been announced. The time and money spent on tweaking and rebranding qualifications could have been used elsewhere.

At the recent Labour Party conference, we were told to expect “clarity and coherence”. It is only a slight exaggeration to say, when it comes to the provision of skills, that the White Paper is more likely to create confusion and complexity. Overall, there seems to be something of a return to the initiative-itis that plagued Labour governments before 2010.

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On higher education specifically, the White Paper’s biggest new announcement is that the undergraduate tuition fee cap will rise in line with (forecast) inflation for the next two years. Fears of breaching the £10,000 mark seem to have disappeared in a puff of smoke.

After that, fee increases are supposed to occur automatically, at least for places that meet “a higher quality threshold through the Office for Students”. Yet this will only occur in practice if the government finds time in the legislative calendar and Labour MPs play ball.

This news on fees has nonetheless been warmly welcomed by universities’ representative bodies, which have been calling for inflation protection. But the settlement does not go far enough in my view because while the fees will now go up in cash terms, they will not go up in real terms.

No other part of the education system would celebrate having the recent big real-terms cuts crystallised in this way. Moreover, the extra fee income is set to be taxed back via the new international student levy, just as this year’s fee rise has been taxed back in higher National Insurance contributions.

One surprise is that the White Paper says as much as it does on research, coming down decisively on the side of “specialisation”. When budgets are tight and research spending is fixed, tough decisions do have to be made. Worryingly, we are told this is likely to mean “funding a lower volume of research”.

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The White Paper similarly stokes the fears of those who believe this government does not understand the raison d’être of broad-based universities. Higher education providers, we are told, should consider switching “to focus on one or two [disciplines] where they are strongest”.

Oddly for a government committed to greater levels of participation in higher education, ministers want to see “fewer broad generalist providers”. Even more oddly, they seem to think this will happen because they say it should.

It is worth considering what this would mean in practice. The closest institution to where I live is Oxford Brookes University. Its two best-performing areas are management and hospitality & leisure. Do ministers expect Brookes to consider giving up motorsport engineering and its links to the local Formula One teams or to stop training the hundreds of new teachers it educates each year?

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Another surprise, which is snuck in through one short paragraph right at the back of the White Paper, is a commitment to deliver a new tool that resembles Progress 8 for higher education institutions. Progress 8 is a “value-added” accountability measure for secondary schools that considers how far pupils have progressed between primary school and their GCSEs.

We are told neither how this new initiative will work, given universities set their own curricula, nor how the Department for Education will ensure it is more effective than past “learning gain” initiatives in higher education. It seems unlikely to happen in practice, so it might have been wiser to revisit simpler teaching intensity measures than trying to retrofit Progress 8 on to higher education.

Despite the various new announcements, in the end I feel a little like Oliver Twist, wanting more. In recent Higher Education Policy Institute output, we have complained about the narrowness of the curriculum in the later years of schooling, considered the educational underperformance of young men and criticised the complex oversight of higher education. Yet, sadly, the White Paper has nothing specific to say on any of these issues. And when it comes to skills, it seems the multiplicity of funding streams, delivery partners and regulators will remain bewildering for employers and learners. Meanwhile, thanks to its pointed criticisms of higher education institutions, the White Paper passes new ammunition to the anti-university brigade.

Nonetheless, policy papers are like buses; they can arrive in threes. To understand this government’s approach to education overall, we must now wait for the schools White Paper and the results of the Curriculum and Assessment Review. Perhaps they will go further. We must hope they do.

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is director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.