Schools are not just 'feeders' for local job market

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/27/burnham-to-tell-schools-in-england-to-adapt-teaching-to-local-business-needs

Andy Burnham says schools should be looking to feed the local job market when he I is in charge of the most Oxbridge weighted cabinet in years whose children presumably are aiming for university and certainly not looking to enter any local job force.

Which proportion of the school should be dissuaded from university entrance to make this plan work.? Is there any counter message for the bright kids at state schools (presumably this message isn't aimed at grammar or private) to aspire to university including Oxbridge to look ultimately at non regional roles?

Maybe we could bring back the grammar school system while sale so we have a university capable cohort with new secondary moderns catering for local business .....would that suit Mr. Burnham.

it's frustrating as my children are fairly academically capable but it seems state schools are being pushed to hear career advice to local non graduate jobs to fulfil government agenda which is leaving them confused.

I don’t think it’s a simple as stroll into anywhere and get a job, but its impossible if you don’t have any skills, training or work ethic. A broad general education is all well and good, but if you can’t access that in the very specific way it’s presented at school there needs to be another option.

Very often people find it much easier to access formal education in adulthood because there’s a recognition that there are many ways to learn the same information and they can find a way that suits their learning style. Maturity and motivation also play their part.

Writing off anyone based on their knowledge of fronted adverbials, age 14, is a real failure of the current system.

I agree with this but I think you'll find many who will argue that the newer universities are still a route to social mobility which they are demonstrably not. The people new universities help are the vice chancellors on multi 6 figure salaries who have convinced working class kids to go into massive debt for something that doesn't help. We should be actively supporting bright school kids to apply to high status universities and degrees and be unashamed about that.

I think there are high quality jobs in vocational subjects but also a lot of menial jobs (warehouses take a significant portion of our young people). This has to be acknowledged and we should be questioning if the likes of Amazon are setting up schemes with schools for a new generation of young people to shift packages in a highly constrained environment. This is why I question whether local business should have a disproportionate influence on educational policy.

@mids2019 but who isn't actively supporting bright children to apply for 'high status' degrees? You make it sound as thought that isn't happening.

What vice-chancellors are convincing working class children to take on debt? Name me one? The government has reduced funding to universities, so they are businesses and run as such. If anything vice-chancellors are trying to engage with overseas students, as that is where the money is, not homegrown students who are more often than not, loss making!

Ultimately, what we need is a thriving economy with jobs and wages that attract young people to a wide variety of sectors.

I absolutely agree that education should not only be focussed on getting a job. Education should be nurturing rounded capable people who can think for themselves and make sensible choices about their own lives. University isn’t for everyone and shouldn’t be thought of as such. Too often youngsters are persuaded to go to university because there are few other options. If we provide alternative pathways into a fulfilling future then fewer people will choose University by default. That will be better for all of us but more importantly it will be better for individuals who can achieve their full potential by making the right choices.

Most give chancellors have had massive pay increases recently like many CEOs. They get the big bucks by successfully brining in students with their 27K of fees.

The problem is that to get the poor undergraduates to fork out the cash poorer universities heavily market themselves and the VC is a focal.point for this drive. Where does a VC salary come from.

There is no wellbeing care when the graduate can only get an unskilled job far removed from media or fashion design or whatever they signed up to.

I went straight from school into a job at 16 (my parents expectation) and managed to qualify in a profession by my own efforts. Most of my friends became hairdressers or sales assistants. Two decades later that profession was being invaded by (often poor quality) graduates from the new universities. Those of us who had learned and qualified "on the job" were less regarded by short sighted employers. That was what led me to uni in the 1980s. However there were still local colleges where adults could learn practical computer and office skills and postgrads such as myself picked up teaching work while studying for our masters or doctorate. It kept me in touch with the local jobs market where there was (at that time) a huge range of admin, secretarial and call centre work available.

Of the million NEETs it would be good to have an easy to understand breakdown of their backgrounds/school experience/ parental input. If this turns out that these young people are all from middle class backgrounds that sheds a very different light on this group than if they are from more chaotic backgrounds with few role models to aspire then perhaps we need to look at that rather than just having sweeping changes. Chaotic families exist across all social classes that I appreciate.

Some young people cannot engage with the current education system. There are plenty of organisations which have popped up over the past decade or so offering alternative education. The funding these organisations receive per pupil is incredibly high.

I admire the stance AB has taken in addressing the endless ‘go to university’ pathway but for me there are other groups such as school leavers at 16 who genuinely want to work and are willing to do low paid jobs. If the NEETs we are looking at do not wish to work or have not achieved a level of education that employers require we need to address that.

I certainly agree with your last paragraph.

@BlueLegume you won't be surprised to hear that the economically disadvantaged feature highest in NEETS.

Here are some findings from Impetus (a charity looking at how to transform opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds):

• Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are 50% more likely to be NEET than their similarly qualified but better-off peers
• The variation between different local authorities within a region are much bigger than the variation between different regions
• Three quarters of NEET young people have been NEET for at least 12 months
• Young people who are from low socio-economic backgrounds, who have low qualifications and also have SEND are almost three times more likely to be not in education, training or employment (NEET) than the average.

You have inferred motives and attitudes that I did not even imply. I have not said anything about not caring about people needing employment or money. I simply stated the benefits of a university degree (numerous high level transferrable skills and better outcomes in many aspects of life such as earnings and health). I also acknowledged and agreed with your point about debt.

I’m Interested in your point of view but not in your false assumptions about my point of view.

And why the need the playground-style taunt at the end? I’m an adult and I assume everyone else on here is too.

I'm actually not going to fight, just going to congratulate you on the correct use of both infer and imply, which really made me happy! A rare experience online.

I agree with this. There are lots of reasons people “aren’t really right” for university study. I’d argue (I work in a university) that a lot of the students who are selectively mute/unable to leave the house/unable to be asked questions are as unlikely to thrive training to be electricians or bricklayers or hairdressers or call centre workers. But of course there are many others who would really benefit and thrive with better alternatives to university.

Having worked in state secondary education for over 35 years, I very much agree with the other posters who are calling for an overhaul of the curriculum and qualifications system. We really have to do something around incorporating more functional versions of English and more urgently, Maths, as well as the Govian versions on offer which are more appropriate for university-entry than life admin or working. We also need to make it easier to do academic qualifications at a later date - it’s almost impossible to do qualifications like A-Levels at night school etc these days if you work during the day.

I’m old enough to remember when the vast majority of 16 year olds left school on Friday and started at work on the following Monday but these were also the days when 40% of this cohort left without any qualifications at all. The jobs that existed in the 1980s for the 16 year olds don’t exist/ are under threat from AI/ have needed a degree for the last 20 plus years.

I also wanted to make the point that you don’t have to go to a private or grammar school to obtain the very highest grades, as several posters seem to think, although obviously, smaller classes/ being able to ‘manage out’ students with no consequences ( private) and the ethos of, say, a super-selective makes this easier! Very many comps have better outcomes and value-added scores than grammars in the big counties like Kent. Very few comps don’t have some form of setting by ability for subjects. However, historically, we have made these decisions about children far too early - 14/15 would be better than 11. We also need to ensure that entry to more academic routes isn’t predicated on highly tutored exams that don’t link to the Yr 5/6 curriculum, having parents who can pay for said tutoring/ the private schooling that focuses on these entrance exams, with a consequence that bright working-class young people are shut out from such opportunities in some parts of the country. A world -class education system considers the needs of all its young people, not just the academically-gifted but also not just the agendas of the local industries, where they still exist, in an age where we are more mobile and far more likely to have multiple careers in our working-lives. It’s going to need huge investment and cultural change about other routes (trades etc) because at the moment, the school and higher-education systems aren’t fit for purpose for far too many young people and it’s immoral that so many young people are racking up life-long debt for degrees that don’t lead to good opportunities.

My elder son was unable to pass GCSE maths or English. He attended a special school which was - bizarrely - extremely reluctant to offer him the Functional Skills alternatives. He passed FS English at the same time as taking and failing his English GCSE, but only because I insisted they put him in for FS as well. He passed FS maths the following year at his specialist sixth form college.

My younger son has a couple of friends in his mainstream school who have both just taken their maths GCSE for the fifth time. They are waiting for their results. They have never been offered FS as an alternative.

I don’t know how many schools offer Functional Skills maths and English to students who will struggle greatly to pass the GCSEs. However on previous MN discussions, very few people seemed to know about FS or that a level 2 pass is the equivalent to a GCSE grade 4 pass. (This included a poster who claimed to have taught both GCSE and FS….)

There must be so many young people out there who would benefit from the option of taking FS qualifications and also being offered a vocational route into work. My disabled son (with a lot of specialist support required) is one of them.

I think it’s useful to think past university as being the only valid path on leaving school. DS is very academic and had both conditional and unconditional offers to uni for this year. He also investigated school leaver apprenticeships and has decided to go that route instead. He will be getting paid and gaining work experience whilst gaining his professional qualifications over four years. It won’t be easy, but he will be debt free and have that all important work experience that seems so hard to get after graduating.

We need to have more of these types of apprenticeships and not see them as second best to going to uni.

Do you know how may kids sit GCSE's with no chance of getting any? Can you imagine how horrible that is? That you spend two years of your life preparing to fail? It's fantastic that finally someone if offering something else. There are loads of kids going to uni - but what do the others do? If you finish school at 16 with no GCSE's what happens to those kids?

This isn't about the high achievers, it's about the other kids and there are plenty of them. No one has previously been thinking of those kids and many of them will just end up on benefits.

Part of this is that the rules around this are very specific for state schools, especially the endless retakes post -16 ( especially for grade 3, rather than 2 Maths in Yr 11 - if you get a 3 you have to retake GCSE; if you get a 2 then you can do FS but very few Sixth Forms in schools will accept 3s and 2s for English, as if is colleges that have the non -A-Level offer post 16) and the funding arrangements. I taught FS and GCSE English to Yr 9-11 back in the day but with the post -Gove syllabuses and the fact that it’s pretty much compulsory to do Eng Lit as well as Eng Lang at GCSE due to the way Progress 8 is calculated, this stopped more than ten years ago, as the content is quite different and you can’t get through it all during KS4. It was easier when there was a modular model of assessment.

There are other reasons for not doing FS in state in Yr 11 too: the cost of exam entries (stratospheric) the cost of equipment ( every student for English needed to have access to a dictionary in the FS exam) and the logistics of having a large number of students taking another exam, now that we are in a world where dozens of students are entitled to access arrangements involving rest-breaks, own rooms and their own invigilator. To contextualise, a few years ago the Exams Officer in my school had to sequester 28 rooms on the days of the GCSE Eng Lang papers, including the headteacher’s office. I’d imagine that it’s a lot easier to be able to do FS in a specialist setting than any state Yr 11 secondary. , which is unfortunate.

I’d love to teach FS again, as I thought the content was far more relatable to everyday life and work but the only people I know who still do it work in FE or who work for providers like Toni and Guy where it’s part of the hairdressing apprenticeship route - and they often aren’t teachers. It’s imperative re Maths - it’s so soul - destroying for otherwise bright young people to endlessly retake it and then be blocked from careers down the line, despite having A-Levels and a degree, in some cases.

I work in a secondary school. It is so depressing to see a non academic kid work extremely hard to achieve a 4 in maths and English to access a trade course and then fail. A more clear and useful route would be better for the kid, parents, school and employers. It is the German model that has been lauded for decades and I welcome it.

All of this seems very sensible - but it isn't what Andy Burnham said? The announcement was:

'The government says that from Year 10, pupils will be able to combine core subjects - like English, Maths and Science - with technical courses linked to local jobs and industries.'

That doesn't sound like there is any plan to change the requirement to sit (or retake) maths and English. Maybe that will change as the ideas develop - and people should perhaps be lobbying for that - but it wasn't the announcement made yesterday that this would be an alternative to taking GCSEs at all.

Progress 8 and Ebacc need to disappear

Frankly, your kids aren’t that bright or academic if they’re confused by messaging and careers fairs. I went to Andy Burnham’s high school, I reckon maybe 20% of my year group when to university in the early 2000s. Not much more went to sixth form. The academics amongst us all managed to figure out that A Levels and degrees were the right routes for us, and there was a good mix of career unemployed/minimum wage/trades who are getting through life with no further qualifications.

I think its more confusing now though in that bright students get a steady stream of media about how degrees are a hige debt and there's no graduate jobs unless you pick some fairly specific vocational degrees and AI is coming for us all.

My son is about to go to university to do a traditional academic subject and every adult he speaks to is very negative about it and says its a huge waste of time and money.

The elephant in this room :
is that you are missing the point !
its about improving wider opportunities
not replacing the academic route -
your clever little cherubs will be fine -
let the others have the options of academia or vocational

I went to a technical.high school. You had a to pass the 11+ but there were commercial courses (RSA typing, shorthand, commerce) and woodwork, metal work , technical drawing that the local grammar schools didn't offer. About half the year group of 100 left at 16 for apprenticeships, courses at the local FE college or jobs in the financial sector with day release to college. Of those of us who stayed for A levels only about 12 of us went to University the rest went into jobs that needed training and led to professional qualifications but not degrees. I'm thinking accountancy, surveying, physiotherapy, nursing, engineering .I have a friend a few years older than me who thinks making nursing a graduate profession was a disaster that's another discussion. I don't remember any push to get us to apply to University, when I expressed an interest teachers were encouraging but it came from me. We need to get back to something like that. In the last couple of years of my teaching career I came across a girl who wanted to be a doctor. Unfortunately at 14 she had a reading age of about 8 , struggled with even basic maths but we were told not to discourage her ambitions. Utterly mad

This.

No idea why you’re getting a kicking OP.

Perhaps from those living in well off professional areas.

My partner and I are both professionals with masters level and accreditation. Sadly in a low paid field but highly qualified field. Think 7+ years training and average salaries.

So we live in a cheap working class area industrial area. Do I want my children’s education skewed towards vocational to meet ‘local needs’ aka. Minimum wage extortion by big business. Absolutely not.