Burnham – parity of esteem starts with pay, not pathways

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.”

This is what Andy Burnham said this week while unveiling new technical pathways from Year 10, pairing core academic subjects with skills training linked to local jobs.

I’m behind the announcement in principle but I wonder whether the value placed on technical education is about the education itself, rather than the career waiting at the end of it. Change the pay, the security and the way people talk about a job once someone qualifies, and doesn’t the status of the qualification that got them there move with it?

When we look beyond the headlines, the comparison is not simply between technical and academic education. Even the pledge itself reaches for the hard hat as its defining image – a symbol of one particular type of technical manual work. It is not, for example, the architect who designed the building, despite their work being every bit as technical. Our instinctive image of “technical” remains the person on the frontline.

Britain already knows how to reward technical skill highly. Accountants, software developers and structural engineers carry a badge of prestige, no-one questions their credentials as skilled professionals. A 2024 UK study by Newlands and Lutz, which surveyed prestige and social value across 576 occupations, found that electricians and plumbers are rated as more socially valuable than accountants, yet both still land lower on prestige. The work itself isn’t rated as less useful; in fact, the study consistently rates it as more useful. It’s rated as less prestigious, with a gap opening up once the work moves from a desk to a toolbox.

If we go back to 2020 and 2021: care workers were one of the occupations treated as holding the country together, clapped on doorsteps for a broader base of frontline job holders than the first pan-banging for NHS workers. None of it survived contact with a normal year, with median hourly pay for independent sector care workers still sitting barely above the National Living Wage, with pay progression so thin that five years’ experience is worth only a few pence an hour. The status flickered on for a moment because the country needed the labour and could see it clearly. It flickered off again once the visibility passed. The skills required to do that job have not changed in between.

If the ambition is to close a parity gap, isn’t the more interesting version of the argument asking why a structural engineer and an experienced care worker, both doing technical, skilled, often physically demanding work, end up in such different places on pay, security and public regard? That’s not a question about the education system in isolation but one of debating which kinds of hands-on work Britain has decided, over a long time are worth paying for.

With strategic authorities being asked to turn a national pledge into local pathways and employer partnerships, this challenge lands with them. When they decide which technical routes to champion and which employers to bring to the table, are they choosing the sectors where status is already recoverable, such as construction and engineering, where shortages give workers leverage, or the sectors where the logic actually needs to be tested in care, early years, hospitality, where the shortage is just as real but the leverage never seems to follow?

Nobody should expect a devolved skills strategy to undo a class-coded hierarchy that’s taken decades to settle. It will fail if we once again place the solutions to broader societal challenges on the shoulders of teachers.

My home in the Northeast of England is a good a test case. It’s a region built on technical work that used to carry real weight because it was scarce, dangerous and visible: coal, shipbuilding, steel.

The fair question is whether sectors like social care in the region will be backed with the same scale of investment and the same public visibility as money given to Nissan, as the shortage there is at least as pressing. If a region shaped by the memory of skilled manual work that was properly valued finds it easier to back the sectors that already carry status than the ones that don’t, that would say a great deal about how hard this pattern is to shift.

None of this is a reason to hold back from the policy itself. It’s one worth getting behind. The slow burn of the Manchester Baccalaureate may not be a mark against the national version. However, it’s a useful reminder of the timeframe this runs on, and a reason to be patient with today’s announcement.

But patience only helps if education is where the problem sits, and it isn’t entirely. No curriculum, industry placement or work experience, however well-designed closes a gap that was never about training in the first place.