The new prime minister is linking the need for better vocational education in school with his belief in localism
Good morning. In his last speech to Labour’s annual conference as party leader, Keir Starmer called for a fundamental shift in the way education in England operates. While saying he would never “denigrate the aspiration to go to university”, he said that aiming to get 50% of pupils into university was wrong and that it was finally time to show equivalent respect to apprenticeships and technical education. “So, today I can announce we will scrap that [50%] target and replace it with a new ambition, that two-thirds of our children should go either to university or take a gold standard apprenticeship,” Starmer said, to loud applause.
So heaven knows what Starmer is thinking this morning as he hears his successor, Andy Burnham, announce his own plan for “a fundamental change to the education system” that sounds – well, very similar.
For too long, we’ve built an education system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk. That opened doors for millions of people, and rightly so. But somewhere along the way, we sent another message too: that if your ambition was to do something that required more technical skills, somehow you were aiming lower.
I think that was one of the biggest mistakes this country has made. In the age of AI, practical and technical skills haven’t become less valuable — they’ve become more valuable than ever. Britain will need brilliant engineers, electricians and cybersecurity experts more than ever before.
These new [technical education] routes won’t be designed by Westminster. They’ll be shaped by the people and places they serve. Working with mayors, local leaders, employers and schools, we’ll identify the industries driving growth in local areas and make sure that local kids have a clear route into them.
We all want to see better opportunities for young people and a boost to technical education, but this announcement is all over the place. Labour have literally just legislated to strip schools of their freedom to choose what’s best for the pupils they’re teaching, yet now they imply it should be locally tailored. It’s not clear whether or not Labour intends to replace GCSEs, which would be a disaster. The focus should be on the knowledge rich curriculum that has helped the most deprived children.
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