Burnham’s speech: Groundhog Day rhetoric, Manchesterism in practice

When a new prime minister or education secretary arrives, the further education world takes a deep breath and waits for them to say the thing. He didn’t disappoint. Burnham pledged an education system built on parity “between academic and technical”.

Like a nervous tic, we have heard this from every senior politician for more than a decade. Vince Cable “abolished” Blair’s 50 per cent university target in 2010. Gavin Williamson, as education secretary did so again in 2020. For good measure, Keir Starmer abolished it again just last year. The “how” always gets missed off the speech.  

Perhaps we are expecting too much, given how fast Burnham has become prime-minister-in-waiting. But setting aside the sense of Groundhog Day, the ballooning NEET figures of the last two years, almost a million young people out of education, work, or training, should be a source of national shame. Burnham is right to anchor on this as the core challenge of our times. 

What does this mean in reality? 

Let’s start with what is unlikely to change. This is a Labour-to-Labour handover, so most of the reform programme is already bolted down.

The growth and skills levy has run since April. The youth-first tilt, including the end of funding for level 7 apprenticeships for over-22 starters, is settled and sits comfortably with how he thinks. If your strategy rests on another levy reset or a level 7 reprieve, set it aside and read the Milburn review instead. 

One qualifier. His enthusiasm runs to degree and higher apprenticeships, so he may prove warmer to higher-level routes than the Starmer period allowed. 

The real shift is where almost no engagement strategy is pointed: the architecture itself.

Burnham has questioned whether bodies such as Skills England need to exist, calling central oversight of a local matter an inefficient “halfway house”. I have argued, forlornly, before that its success was in all our interests, and that without teeth it would drift. The question now is whether it survives, and how much will be devolved. 

What Burnham prized most as mayor was control of post-16 funding and employment support, and the mechanism already exists to make this happen.

Greater Manchester and the West Midlands Combined Authority already hold integrated settlements, single pots a mayor can flex. Follow that line, and you reach a more regionally commissioned, potentially more fragmented system. 

Colleges have the most at stake, yet are oddly absent from the commentary.

Mayoral commissioning redraws who a college answers to, away from the department and towards the combined authority. For those aligned to their city region’s sectors, it is a chance to become the anchor institutions Burnham talks about. For those with no combined authority, it is ambiguous and worrying. Remember, most of England has no mayor, nor the prospect of one soon. 

Unnamed but unmistakable, the Manchester baccalaureate, with its guaranteed work placement, is the model he will default to, tied to the Milburn review and bringing down the growing benefits bill. A national work placement guarantee would take Manchesterism to scale. 

The intellectual centre of gravity has moved to No 10 North 

In the ascendancy is an influential Manchester circle that includes Andy Haldane, rather than established FE thinkers.

Having met him recently, I’d say no one should underestimate his scepticism about Whitehall, or his passion for skills. Burnham has called the DfE his single biggest frustration as mayor. A skills agenda built in opposition to the department is not a detail. It is an organising principle. 

So the moves are not hard to name. Build the regional and mayoral dimension in first, frame propositions in his terms, not the department’s, treat the national architecture as up for debate, and read the Milburn review again (have I said that already?). 

A Burnham government will set its direction fast, and the window to shape it before it hardens will be measured in weeks, not months.