Burnham all down and start again?: KS4 Technical Education

New prime minster Andy Burnham has announced a shake-up of secondary education, with proposals for technical provision to sit in equal importance to academic offers within secondary school. It’s something that we’ve heard a hundred times before, however it has caused significant ructions, and the timing of the announcement, is much criticised.

There is a lot of talk about cost to schools, both in preparing for these qualifications, the facilities to provide them, and then the knock-on effect on wider curriculum offer and staffing, especially given the squeezed budgets of education establishments, this is a valid concern. How the potential implementation may affect other aspects of schooling are valid, but at times there seems to be a blanket feeling of this lowering standards entirely by principal, which I’m not so-sure that I agree with.

I will talk about the Prime Minister’s announcement in four sections, discussing the small amount that we know from the announcement and the fallout from it.

Firstly, the announcement was fairly vague – it needs fleshed out before we can tell what the overall effect is going to be. However, the first thing I want to discuss is the current state of vocational education in schools, and how dramatic of a change is this actually going to be?

Secondly, a main component of the announcement was around devolved strategic authorities having influence over curriculum offers of schools, but what the actual legal mechanisms they will have to leverage this apparent authority, and how it will work in practice, was not explained. Mayoral Strategic Authorities (etc) will be able to influence curriculum to match the labour force needs of the region. I’ve seen this receive pushback, some of this is from the viewpoint of autonomy, but mostly around a lowering of standards, and how this risks opportunity for students in deprived areas.

Geographical deprivation is potentially a concern, particularly around implementation of qualifications and employer activities (which has been seen with the L3 vocational reforms, which I will discuss later), however, from the viewpoint of social mobility this is at best a misunderstanding of the scope and size of devolved authorities (we are often talking multiple counties in size), and what the outcomes are for most learners under the tutorage of schools, currently. This second section will investigate this, and will also talk about proposed accountability measures in conjunction with this policy, and how current Further Education accountability already assesses this.

Thirdly, I will look at concerns around lowering standards with flashbacks to early 2010 BTEC First gaming of league tables, worries about forcing young people into early specialism, and what this might mean for social mobility – and also some concerns around the optics of the announcement.

Finally, I will look at post-16, further education and skills, what concerns stem from there, and why this proposal might have been put forward.

1. Is it ‘actually’ going to be a dramatic change to curriculum?

Headlines like the one from the BBC article on this will stoke the flame that this is a wholesale change. That is also the optics that the government are wishing to push with this as well. A brave new world! But how much is a curriculum offer really going to change?

At this time, no new or adapted qualification has been announced. In theme what was announced bears some similarities to the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate pilot (but the lack of specifics around work experience hours etc, that are part of the MBacc, was very telling). However, there is also a potential tie-in with the reforms that are happening at post-16, where the current Level 2 BTEC/NVQ qualifications are going to be defunded and replaced by qualifications based on occupational/vocational area, with rationale and explanation very similar to this announcement (This L2 post-16 reform was part of the V Level announcement a few months back, but naturally, didn’t catch the headlines in the same way).

Ultimately however, as things stand, the technical subjects to be offered by schools because of this announcement are the exact same technical subjects already offered by schools before this announcement.

In 2025 approximately 360,000 achievements were given in L2 Tech Award qualifications (such as BTEC). This made up approximately 6.5% of the qualifications awarded at the end of Key Stage 4. This is dramatically down from the 26% high of BTECs (etc) in 2013, the time which was arguably the worst league table manipulation. However, even now, for every 19 GCSE entries, there was at least one Tech Award entry. When you factor the average number of GCSE entries per student, you begin to see that despite a lot of the discourse, vocational education has not fully disappeared. Whilst data doesn’t strip out how many individuals receive Tech Awards, the number of 16-year olds who achieved GCSE’s in 2025 was under 700,000. How Tech Levels sit in the Progress 8 accountability measure, the influence is for a learner to only be entered into one vocational/technical course. If that holds true, then 50% of students in the country are already doing a technical course at key stage 4. This is the most generous interpretation of the statistics, and I don’t personally think it will cross the 50% threshold, however it will still be a substantial cohort.

Of course, vocational education is not as universal as it once was (when it was likely overinflated due the rewards from the system), and whilst it fluctuates year on year, approximately 4 out of every 5 mainstream secondary schools will offer some form of BTEC/Tech Award subject offer in their provision. A large proportion of these will already align to regional needs in several situations; Health and Social Care, Early Years, Construction and Engineering, Data Information and Technology, Enterprise, Tourism and Sport etc – a number also make-up elements of the MBacc curriculum offer from the pilot.

These Tech Awards are generally weighted 40%/60% on written exam/industry style portfolio work, whilst some areas will require specialist equipment (construction and engineering – generally similar to a Design and Technology department), a large portion (such as the most -popular, Health and Social Care) are currently designed to be classroom-based qualifications. However, there is a difference between timetabling, rooming and staffing a single option, as opposed to multiple options that this announcement suggests would need to happen.

As stated before, there is nothing around subject reform at this stage, however it wouldn’t surprise me to see the current KS4 level 2 vocational/technical provision receive some tweaking to be closer aligned with what is going to happen at KS5, especially the potential to embed employer engagement elements into the qualifications themselves.

It should be noted that this could also see re-emphasis on GCSE provision of subjects, such as Design & Technology, Computer Science, Drama, Art & Design etc. Obviously, this all comes with logistical nightmares, uncertainty as to the size of technical provision a school will be expected to provide has rightfully got people anxious – for some schools this would be a ginormous overhaul depending on the complexity and expectation, for others though, based on statistics at least, it would not be too extreme of a pivot.

Whilst the mechanisms of implementation and effect on curriculum mostly shrouded in uncertainty, focus then swings towards accountability. There were suggestions that Ofsted and league tables will look to value vocational provision in a way as important as academic provision, to give an incentive for leaders to not treat vocational education as an ‘added on’ element of curriculum. TES have asked about what this means for the Progress 8 measure, which as I am writing, the Government have not yet responded to. However, there was an underlying emphasis about school curriculum responding to the local labour market needs, and being assessed on whether they do. This begets the next question.

2. Does a school need to focus on Regional Needs?

Within the Ofsted framework, there actually already exists a measure for “Contribution to meeting skills needs” that certain post-16 institutions are graded against. Originally introduced as a phrased judgement under the previous EIF, it is now stylistically the same as all other main judgements (besides safeguarding). This has been a bone of contention for Sixth Form Colleges since its introduction, as unlike other accountability measures that are based on the type of provision that you deliver, whether an institution is rated on the “…skills needs” metric is entirely down to the legal make-up of the institution and not the curriculum offer. For example; General FE and Sixth Form Colleges are measured against this, however academies that are standalone 16-19 schools, are not. Many of these are called “College” or “Sixth Form” and run literally identical provisions to institutions beholden to the judgement.

The Sixth Form Colleges Association have been vocal about how unfair they perceive this on Sixth Form Colleges, stating that it is an additional administrative burden in comparison to their school-based counterparts. They argue that a focus on regional skills needs is misguided for Sixth Forms, as they tend to have a ‘broader’ focus than General FE establishments. It’s interesting that following the announcement from the prime minister, the same argument began to permeate from schools and teachers, that focussing on regional needs will stifle, the lofty goals of academic curriculum are ‘broader’, with at times (not always, but at times) a heavy implication of ‘better’ for young people.

The feelings I’ve seen online following the announcement and the complaints that the Sixth Form Colleges Association have around the Ofsted measure are not actually rooted in reality of the workforce. I admit, at one point I believed the same myself, that academic provision sits beyond regional skills, but I was wrong. When you’re seeing students travel across the country for university to study a massively diverse set of programmes, from one class, it’s hard not to think like that, but it’s not quite how things play out. Data from the Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index (2025) indicates the majority of young people will be in the region of their schooling at the age of 28, including those who travel for university study.

Now this is data for all students, so let’s drill down on the North East of England as one particular region, and specifically graduates – the ultimate recipients of the ‘broader’ aspiration that academic pathways begin students towards. 3 out of 4 graduates who were originally domiciled in the North East will eventually find employment in the North East after graduating, this is inclusive of those who moved out of the area for the studying itself (Athey, 2023). Contrasting this, 85% of the young people who move to the North East to study from outside of the region will then leave in order to gain employment. Whilst proportions are different across regions, the general trend holds true across England, with data suggesting that 69.9% of graduates in employment have returned to their original region of domicile following completion of their studies (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2026).

Interestingly, most of the above is from a different post I had not finished writing around Ofsted inspections of post-16 environments. In my research I came round to the idea that all establishments with a curriculum offer of Key Stage 5 should be graded against “Contribution to meeting skills needs”. Now obviously what this looks like in different institutions will have to be driven by context, but when you view what the general outcomes are, you cannot separate academic tracks from regional skills needs. Institutions may want to think that they are ‘above’ this or are offering things ‘broader’ than what a region needs, but that can only be borne from an ignorance to what regional opportunities there actually are, and what the current actual outcomes for most learners attending institutions tends to be.

It seems from the announcement and the accountability element, this judgement, or at least a comparative one, could likely find its way across secondary institutions. I know this type of thing gets peoples backs up, we automatically go to those frustrating “Where will I ever use this in real life” questions, and assume your curriculum is to now be scrutinised through that lens.

The irony is, those involved in the academic provision who have a blanket negative approach on this, are doing the exact same thing. “You need to think about the regional labour market?” – “Oh, no, no, no! You’re never going to use this in real life!”. It also has a very warped view of what the regional labour market is. There is talk of social mobility and opportunity that comes from academic study. Eventually those students join the labour market. They do not exist outside of it.

A Simple Example

Before even worrying about vocational provision, employer partners, work placements that may need to come in all of this. Let’s just do a quick example of how a school could justify their curriculum through the lens of regional needs.

Let’s focus on the North East again. We have statistics about graduates in the region as discussed in the last section. A quick search around the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority data records pull up a couple of interesting charts. Nice and simple. 5-minutes of ‘research’, I’m not even pulling the raw data. First is qualification level/economic activity status for the population in the region.

As we can see, the higher the level of highest qualification a person has the more resilient they are against unemployment and economic inactivity, in a region with one of the highest rates of inactivity. Those with L4+ (HNC up to PHD) have the greatest level of protection in the labour market. A lot of concerns are based around NEET status in young people, particularly on the back of the interim report in the Milburn Review (2026). This data shows in the North-East at least, higher levels of qualification safeguard against some of these risks.

Next are supporting documents of projected regional employment requirements by 2035. The first chart gives a general breakdown of projected employment opportunities by ONS sector area, the dark bar indicates ‘additional opportunities’ beyond what was available in 2020. The second strips these down into smaller occupational areas.

The growth areas are in degree level industries under professional occupations. Huge changes in science, research, engineering and tech. Health and Social associate professionals sees a large growth as well, these are roles that do not always require a higher education qualification (but increasingly have begun to, e.g. early years practitioners, paramedics, pharmaceutical/dental/medical technicians, counsellors-community workers etc).

I’d argue most people involved in education could take that information above, and justify the general curriculum offer of the average secondary school provider, explain how it actively contributes to the demands of the future regional economy, before identifying appropriate vocational offers in high demand areas that would complement academic pathways that provide additional and worthwhile options for young people, under the criteria of supporting regional demands.

There can occasionally be pace of change issues with this, needing to react to what is required within the region. Generally, the worst thing is sometimes waiting for qualifications to catch up with the demands of industry. Green Skills areas have been notorious for this in Further Education and Skills.

Ultimately, as far as accountability goes, we can see that focussing on regional needs does not have to dilute curriculum, or lower standards. Nor is having this focus in mind in of itself an anathema to social mobility.

3. But is it lowering standards?

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. At this point we haven’t even been provided the ingredients yet, let alone baked the thing. Could everything I say here turn out to be incorrect. Yes. Realistically we don’t really know what this is going to be like, the people planning the thing probably don’t even.

So, is there the risk that this could cause a lowering of standards? Of course there is. Do I find some of the framing and language around the announcement unhelpful? Yes. But, will this automatically lead to a lowering of standards at Key Stage 4? I’m not so-sure. So where are the main concerns to be addressed?

There have been accusations of the policy reducing the importance of core subjects, like Maths and English – which is a misrepresentation of the announcement, or engaging with it third hand, as even from the basics of the release, a core curriculum of GCSE’s (English, Maths, Science) seems to be the absolute baseline before any technical aspect is applied. I’ve seen arguments that the focus should be on improving Maths and English and this is detrimental to that. Maths and English are vital, but the counterargument here is that is not the status quo. Additional focus on Maths and English would also require a change from the current provision. At this time, all the announcement is suggesting is that there’d be more scope for learners to choose Drama and Health & Social Care instead of Geography and RE as their options at KS4.

There are then concerns around narrow curriculum, and how this will push students into certain pathways. Pursuing this line of thought, nationally, on average a 16-year old achieves 7.8 GCSE’s. English, Maths and Science can account for between 4 and 6 of these, depending on combinations around English Literature, single sciences or combined science, with the vast majority of students across the country having 5 or 6 GCSE’s in their study programme from this core selection. In the announcement, this core provision is going to remain. If this announcement narrows curriculum, then the counterargument is that the curriculum is effectively already that narrow for the average student. Ultimately, the overall number of subjects or disciplines the average learner will engage in will stay the same – why is Health & Social Care narrowing, if RE is not?

Worries whether the choice at 14 to pursue technical provision will force a student into that route long-term, effectively reducing the opportunities that a young person has to develop and train in the future, are also common. I think one of the key aspects here is that it’s not being branded as an ‘alternative provision’ in the way teachers generally think. The core GCSE provision is still expected, and looking at the MBacc pilot, all of the pathways are built around pre-existing technical qualifications. These are broad Tech Awards. Health & Social Care, Engineering, Enterprise, Digital Technology etc. It’s not employers offloading the training of a potential underage employee to a school, nor does this need a dramatic qualification overhaul. As for progression, achieving core GCSE’s will mean academic progression is still possible through many institutions, we also have the post-16 reforms (which will be discussed later) that are aimed at encouraging institutions to look at allowing learners to balance academic, technical and vocational provision as well.

Significant concerns are based on what we’ve seen before in these types of initiatives. Particularly around league tables and performance measures, and the incentives that are either purposefully, or indirectly created by tweaks and changes to curriculum. A number of experienced staff in schools are well aware of the BTEC First issues of the early 2010’s, where certain centres literally entered entire student bodies in BTEC Science over/as well as GCSE, in order to game performance tables. BTEC’s were often worth 4x more than GCSE programmes. It led to schools incentivising technical curriculum, not because it was beneficial for their students, but because it made their results better. BTEC’s in Art, Music, Business often replaced stable GCSE’s in those areas in curriculum offers, because of the benefits to the school, not the young people.

This announcement brings memories of those days, and the risk that the incentives may return that will encourage schools to cheapen and weaken offers that are available to students. However, in the announcement, there was a stress about technical education not being an ‘add-on’. Since the launch of Progress 8 in 2016, a single Tech Award can be included in the measure of the best 8 results for a student, as one of the three qualifications in the “Open” bucket. Realistically, the incentive is therefore for vocational education to literally be an ‘add on’ to curriculum. 80% of schools still offer this, up-to maybe 50% of 16 year olds in 2025 achieved a Tech Awards – if these aren’t focussed on regional needs, how is the curriculum offer being decided currently? Why do schools choose the Tech Awards that they do? What students are enrolled onto them? How are those students identified? Is it part of a potential career, or is it because BTEC Enterprise is ‘more achievable’ than GCSE Business Studies?

Given pockets of technical and vocational education have remained, this change likely means that schools are going to need to justify this type of provision more, as opposed to what is done currently. The hope would be that this provision would also become more robust, and higher quality, as it is now specifically being looked at, as opposed to simply being a qualification that can be slotted into the last bucket of “Progress 8”. Simultaneously however, the communication around this has included one of my least favourite tropes. The argument around equality of technical and academic pathways. The idea of drawing equivalence between the two pathways if fraught with difficulty. This was what led to issues in old performance tables, trying to artificially apply a value to technical qualifications in order to make direct comparisons between technical and academic routes and their results. It skewed things and led to perverse rewards. I do appreciate in the official press release, the expression “equal footing” is used – this gives me hope that technical provision will be recognised and measured separately, instead of trying to come up with some equivalence formula.

Finally, there are others who just ideologically think this is the wrong thing to do. They think that schooling and KS4 should be for academic fundamentals, and the deviation from that is by default reducing the standards that they wish to hold the provision to. There’s nothing that will likely convince these people otherwise, and they are absolutely entitled to their opinion.

However, we have to look at the practicalities of systems, and what the Key Stage 4 part of the system is designed for. For 40-years, the educational leaving age was 16, however in the 2010’s this changed, and young people are now legally obliged to remain in education or training until the age of 18. From the most recent DFE data, approximately 93% of young people remain in full-time education, apprenticeships, or specialist and part-time education and skills training, for these two years, with around 3% sitting in employment and 4% being NEET. The rate of learners in education and skills is around 10 percentage points higher than when I left secondary school (a good decade before these changes were introduced), with the amount remaining in full-time education increasing by effectively 20 percentage points.

So, 16 is now no longer officially ‘the end’. In fact, technically, it’s not even the last opportunity that young people have to achieve Maths and English GCSE. Whilst education stages and provisions are their own thing, with their own demands and nuances, there is an inbuilt expectation of certain benchmarks, or things being implemented in order to aid with progression to the next stage. Early Years has aspects that go to inform Infant schooling, and then Primary, which then has certain expectations placed on it by the future needs of Secondary provision. They are all their own things, but elements are there to aid with progression – it’s joined up. However, Key Stage 4 has remained untouched by the changes at post-16. Historically secondary was the ‘official’ end of the chain, and whilst a large portion of students went to sixth form or college, it was legislated for as the expected outcome, as things are now. Beyond this, the post-16 landscape has underwent some dramatic changes, and when you start to look into those, the reason behind this announcement begins to make more sense.

4. Post-16 Education

If you’ve read my thoughts over the years, or been unlucky enough to engage me in conversation, I’ve emphasised that for a lot of the last decade the educational reforms at KS4 and KS5 have not aligned (and there are even some issues with this announcement which need clarified as well, and how if may overlap the proposed L2 pathways at post-16). The gaps between the two became even more apparent from the rationale for T-Levels and then again after the pandemic, with colleges and sixth forms being told to go all-in on “skills” and the needs of national and regional labour markets, completely at odds with emphasis at KS4 and school-based provisions.

What was old is going to be new again in 16-19, as in a year or so we will essentially be back to the same provision as 10+ years ago, but with slightly different names.

A Levels -> A Levels
BTEC/Applied General Extended Certificates -> V Levels (1 A Level equivalent)
BTEC/Applied General Extended Diplomas -> T Levels (3 A Level equivalent)

Yes, there are some structural and ‘rigour’ differences (occupational components to T Levels that were not in all extended diplomas), and the removal of 720GLH (guided learning hour) Diplomas, but with the forthcoming extension of T Levels to include public services, sport, hospitality, drama and the arts, the core L3 extended diploma offer will now all be represented within T Levels.

This isn’t just the new Government undoing the previous colour governments reforms. Large portions of this were already on the table, for example V Levels were called AAQ’s, and even beyond that, Extended Diplomas had their funding extended in certain areas, including those where T Levels had already launched, due to concerns around the new provision (effectively running parallel qualifications). Even the concept behind V Levels, and the opportunity to build a mixed study programme of vocational, technical and academic provisions (which will likely provide gateways for learners to transition at 16+ between academic and technical progression routes) has elements that can be traced back to Rishi Sunak’s “Advanced British Standard”.

The T Level introduction has not been smooth. By the time it concludes, there will be a 10-year gap between the first qualifications being introduced and the last one starting. The 16-year-olds signing up for the first cohort of T Level Performing Arts would have been in Infants school when the first cohort of Childcare began. Like QCF’s to RQF’s to AAQ’s to V Levels and the Advanced British Standard proposals in-between (all of this since 2015!), some of this is due to the revolving door of Educational Secretaries and Prime Ministers over recent years, and then of course the political party of government changing as well. The general lack of continuity has led to differing perspectives on what should be funded, what should be called a “T Level”, putting curriculum offers and exam boards in a state of flux.

On top of this, universities and employers have not always accepted these new qualifications in the way that was originally anticipated. Despite being sold on their academic rigour over older technical provision, courses such as the Mechanical Engineering pathway of T Level Engineering and Manufacturing contains less advanced maths than some option pathways within the BTEC Mechanical Engineering. Anecdotally, this has led to some universities requesting A Level Maths for progression, alongside the full-time T Level programme (which doesn’t match qualification design or funding). Within the ongoing qualification changes, T Level students are now able to achieve on their programme whilst failing an externally assessed element, this was/is not possible on BTEC/Applied General provision – the courses T Levels were planned to replace.

Now you could take this and form a pretty strong argument around “dumbing down” – and use this to criticise technical education carte-blanche. What’s interesting is that these choices are not of one political party, or one education secretary. These are coming about from the need on the ground. Over 1 in 4 students are not retained to the end of their T Level (this is actually down from 1 in 3 during initial launch years). In contrast to earlier qualifications, they also leave without accumulated credit, failing to achieve a qualification. Research from the Education Policy Institute in 2024 reveals that of those who dropped out, only a third enrolled on another Level 3 qualification, under a third of enrolled onto lower level qualifications, and over a third ended up either NEET or in unsustainable employment. Given the current focus of young people ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’, this is incredibly significant, and when T Levels become the sole extended L3 technical programme available in 2028, it cannot continue, or the situation around young people is going to become worse.

At this point, I think it’s good to reflect on who the T Level cohorts are. Students primarily require ‘passing’ GCSE Maths and English to enrol unlike in other technical and vocational programmes, and a number of institutions request at least 5 strong passes. Students with high prior attainment (7+ average) skew dramatically towards A Level, leading to an the average GCSE score of a state educated A Level learner of around 6.1-to-6.5 over recent years. Data around T Levels is not as freely available as A Levels, but from the boundary range given, only a tiny percentage of cohorts have prior attainment 7+ on average, but a huge majority of the cohorts are recorded by the DFE to have a prior attainment average score of between grade 4 and 7 (this is also the largest group for A Levels, for reference). These are predominantly not the students who “didn’t succeed at GCSE”!

The default argument shared is that the best thing for young people is a set of strong GCSE results achieved through a strong academic curriculum, after which they can go on and succeed through technical education at post-16, if they choose. I want to stress. I don’t necessarily think that is wrong! A strong academic curriculum and knowledge rich curriculum is absolutely the right course of action. However, is that alone, enough?

The qualifications that are poised to become the absolute standard of technical education at post-16 have unprecedentedly high dropout rates. The expectations and demands of secondary schooling are not translating to the demands of post-16 technical provision. Statistically, from the EDI analysis, around 8% of a starting T Level cohort will end up dropping out of education and training altogether before completing the qualification. These are students who through our accepted metrics absolutely succeeded in the academic secondary school system. With the concerns around NET and NEET young people, this position isn’t sustainable, and there’s only a certain amount of rearranging post-16 provision you can do in isolation.

At the end of section 3 I discussed the idea that 16 and Key Stage 4 qualifications are no longer the ‘official end’ of an education and training journey for a young person. However, except for the GCSE/A Level reforms, all of the changes in Key Stage 4 and 5 since that policy introduction have been disconnected from each other. This is the first time that there actually appears to be joined up thinking between the stages. Even a small emphasis on technical expectations, and the occupational expectations at an earlier stage could be beneficial in supporting young people be better prepared for success at the next stage of their education.

Final Thoughts

Whilst the new provision emphasis is significant in the Prime Minister’s announcement, the concerns and issues and underly it are not new. There were already measures introduced to schools under previous governments that were done to try and address much of the same things that the new Prime Minster’s announcement has. They were smaller in scope, and ‘tagged on’, but the Gatsby Benchmarks for careers education, implemented since 2018 are coming from the same place. The purpose of those benchmarks was to try and ‘fix’ the same things that this announcement is trying to do (a disconnect between schooling, progression and careers), admittedly in a much softer way. Here are four of the eight benchmarks for schools.

Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information

Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

Benchmark 5: Encounters with employers and employees

Benchmark 6: Experiences of workplaces

These four benchmarks are also key pillars of the Prime Minister’s announcement from this week. Now obviously implementation is different, the recommendations around labour market in the Gatsby Benchmarks information was around guidance, and the Prime Minister’s announcement goes a stage further, of using it to help design a curriculum offer, but I do feel a lot of the backlash against this in-particular comes from people not being aware of the statistics around regional workforce I shared in section 2 (from Sutton Trust and the HESA), including how many graduates return to the area of childhood domicile for eventual employment.

Instead, when people read “local employers”, they imagine a cohort being rounded up and sent down the pits or to the crisp factory at the bottom the road. In the announcement it is explicitly stated that focus will be on local strengths or growth industries of the future. For example, the North East’s acute skills shortage areas are; Health and Social Care, Construction and Engineering (particularly around large infrastructure developments), Hospitality and Tourism, and Science, Technology and Research. It has mature industries in Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceuticals, as well as Energy, it has a large civil service presence across a range of departments – and then there are emerging industries in AI (a designated AI Growth Zone) and defence, military technology and satellites.

This is something that has become entrenched in Further Education, the language used in the release may feel shocking to colleagues in secondary schools, but it’s been at the heart of what FE has been doing for a while, filtering all the way down to classroom level. Return to the areas listed in the above paragraph, ethical quandaries that you may personally have about some of these sectors aside, we should at least be able to agree that these are not low aspiration, they are not anti-social mobility. This is not a backdoor to get schools to do ‘on the job’ training for a singular specific job role.

Along these lines, there are numerous cries of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and ideas that schools will dump certain students to one side, abandoning them under the pretence of learning a trade. Now, implementation remains to be seen, but this is unlikely to be heavily skewed towards what people think of as “trades”. These roles do not tend to have skills shortages, nor are they areas of high demand as the workforce needs are generally satisfied without intervention. In fact, the examples given in the prime minsters release are not traditional “trades”. If we are going to take a moral high ground on “soft bigotry”, then there’s clearly people involved in education who have preconceived ideas that are far from the reality of what constitutes a technical career in 2026 and beyond. The logical conclusion is that the knowledge the introduction of the Gatsby Benchmarks was to bring to the sector has clearly not permeated as hoped.

You may argue that concerns are just being voiced about the they perceive the worst case scenario being, but they are predominantly being voiced as what the default is, without actually engaging with the small pieces of information that have actually been shared from the policy so far.

This doesn’t mean it’s clean sailing. Whilst I have said that local needs focus does not need to be an anathema to social mobility, but how the implementation is managed could raise issues. I said earlier that I personally suspect some form of employer engagement might find its way into possible reforms that come to Tech Award qualifications (it just makes that element of what was proposed easier to enforce). The level of employer engagement required and the demands of work experience (and the specifics of it) will be where this becomes unstuck. I genuinely feel this is a much bigger problem than school concerns around delivery and resourcing of curriculum in these areas (whilst obviously an immediate concern, with the financial implications).

Returning to T Levels, they require a minimum of 45 days of placement or employer engagement. This is still proving a challenge, but these components used to be highly inflexible, which made it dramatically worse and effectively impossible to scale. Providers competed for the same willing employers in a region, and the numbers required to run a sustainable course often meant sourcing the required number of placements was impossible, so courses never even got off the ground. In previous writing (What’s the T?: T Levels and Post-16 Education Reform – The Mark Scheme), I looked into how this prevents scalability and feasibility of pathways of demand, based on factors beyond the classroom. Tweaks to the qualification structure have looked to address these, but still, in areas of rural spread, geographical inequalities come to the forefront. Depending on the level and complexity of the employer engagement and work experience required at Key Stage 4, the same could happen here.

It’s interesting that whilst “high quality work experience” was mentioned in the Prime Minister’s announcement, a specific quantifier was not. The MBacc pilot is 50-hours – I don’t see how that level would be scalable across the country with the employer buy-in it would require, or even how feasible it would be for 14-year-olds in areas of rural spread. We then reach not only providers competing with each other, but also many stages of qualifications doing the same. T Levels are going to have to scale as they become the sole extended vocational and technical Level 3, these occupational qualifications have large scale employer buy-in requirements. We then have the expectations of vocational focus in schools, but also L2 reforms at post-16 as well. Will industry actually be able to engage to the level required?

In the interim report from the Milburn review there was emphasis on the fantastic work that schools and colleges are doing to help support young people develop and achieve. This was juxtaposed by revelations that despite complaints about young people not being ‘work ready’, the labour market is doing less now for supporting young and developing employees themselves, there’s a reduction in on-the-job training, and entry level apprenticeships are in complete freefall, with many apprentices being pre-employed, such that the average age of an apprentice has jumped to almost 30 (which I wrote about here – To H.E or not to H.E…that is the question – The Mark Scheme). The recommendation towards policy makers was not to just burden more onto schools. On the surface, this announcement seems to be contrasting that.

It’s a hard line to tread. Schools are what governments have control over. They can’t realistically put the same demands in place for private business. This seems to be one of the reasons that justifies the devolution element of this announcement. It allows leverage to be applied to support employer engagement from regional policy makers and decision makers.

Whether it will be successful remains to be seen. But for many reasons, particularly concerns around the growing numbers of youth NEET, there is definitely justification that the status quo is not sustainable.