Latest news from FE Week

V Levels aren’t the answer, and Burnham knows it

One striking aspect of Andy Burnham’s very welcome announcement about reopening technical education routes for 14 year olds is that V Levels are not mentioned. When explaining this reform, he said it was not about “giving kids another qualification in a system that doesn’t work”, but about “transforming the system entirely”.

V Levels are not the answer to the challenge facing 16-19 learners not suited for the A Level route, for three main reasons.

First, they address the wrong problem. Qualifications are important milestones on a learning journey, but they are not the journey itself. The real issue is the lack of pathways and progression routes for vocational students, made worse by the collapse of level 2 16-19 apprenticeships.

Second, they will be a massive distraction for providers, already struggling with chronic underfunding and technical teacher shortages. Implementing the reforms will take time and energy away from the real task of building stronger progression pathways.

Third, by ripping up the existing 16-19 vocational curriculum they risk leaving learners having to navigate unfamiliar qualifications of untested value with only patchy careers advice and guidance to help them.

It’s hard to have much confidence in the DfE’s ability to make a success of this. Remember the 14-19 Diplomas, launched in 2008 and withdrawn in 2013? And T Levels, launched in 2020 and now undergoing emergency surgery to try and resuscitate them?

Qualification reform is complex, involving getting many components interacting effectively. It’s therefore only worth doing if there is a big prize to be won.

In this case, the reforms are not going to improve a post-16 phase recently described as “structured in a way to exacerbate inequality” by the Deaton Review of Inequality. They are unlikely to have any impact on NEET (not in education, employment or training) numbers. They are not going to solve the skills gaps holding back the economy. They are not going to help revive apprenticeships for young people – the implementation plan barely mentions apprenticeships.

As Alan Milburn’s hard-hitting “Young People and Work” report observes: “The education and skills system…is designed to produce qualifications rather than working adults. Until that changes..the tail of failure will persist.”

Thankfully, with the arrival of a new government the focus has at last shifted to tackling the systemic issues that have previously been side-stepped in favour of the DfE’s tired old playbook of qualification reform. It’s too early – and details are as yet too scarce – to evaluate how effective the new approach to technical education reform will be. But they are tackling the right problem – the failure of our education system to properly embrace technical and vocational pathways.

They open up the prospect of new mechanisms being found to properly coordinate school and college offers in each local authority area and ensure that a full range of well-resourced and attractive technical and academic courses are readily available in all parts of the country.

Where does this leave the V Level reforms already underway? Given their potential to divert energy and resources away from much more important issues, it might be better to kick them into the long grass, put them on pause and prioritise the new, more radical technical education agenda. Time will tell if they are viewed as having a place in the revolution the new PM is leading. But in the meantime we need to concentrate on opening new doors of opportunity, not redecorating the old ones.

Reform poses looming threat to ESOL we can’t ignore

In May 2025, newly elected Reform Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns used her victory speech to suggest that migrants should be housed in tents rather than hotels, by saying that “tents are good enough for France, they should be good enough for here in Britain”.

Around a year later, Keir Starmer found time in his short resignation speech to include the closure of “asylum hotels” as one of his key achievements.

Here in Starmer’s constituency of Somers Town and St Pancras, where WM College is located, we see more and more rough sleepers in tents every day, and cases of homelessness among our ESOL learners increase exponentially. So, it seems the Reform Mayor may have got her wish.

ESOL on an app?

And where Reform has real power over the education budgets, Mayor Jenkyns has gone further than mere rhetoric. Greater Lincolnshire will be defunding ESOL from 2027. Justifying her decision, Jenkyns suggested that migrants could learn English using a free app on their phone and that the money would be better spent on the “native” population.

The implicit assumptions here are that ESOL has no benefit beyond what Duolingo can do and that anyone who is benefiting from funded ESOL provision does not deserve our support because they are not “British”. The first point shows a truly shocking level of ignorance as to the nature of ESOL and of language learning in general. The second point is empirically false from a purely definitional standpoint; 35 per cent of people who reported not being able to speak English in the last census were in fact British nationals.

As Nusrat Hathiari argues, we see ever increasingly harsh rhetoric in debates around immigration, integration and language learning and few solutions offered. The current proposals in the government’s immigration paper focus mostly on increasing language requirements for visa applications, to make it harder to settle without already having high English proficiency. There is a brief mention of making access to classes easier for those already here, but still no sign of action on this.

Soaring demand

In the meantime, here at WM College, we watch our ESOL waiting list go up and up with no additional funding to meet the demand.

While the evidence from the latest census overwhelmingly shows that most adult migrants do in fact speak English well or very well (almost 80 per cent), over a decade of funding cuts has severely restricted access to provision of free ESOL classes. This has likely contributed to the significant and growing minority reporting that they do not speak English well or at all.

The numbers in the last census show that this number is much higher than average in a ward like St Pancras and Somers Town where there is a high ESOL need; 42 per cent of the population is foreign-born and 18 per cent live in a household where nobody has English as their main language. Within the Camden borough overall, 21 per cent of the population reported a language other than English as their main language. While almost 100 different languages were recorded, the most common were French, Bengali, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese and Somali which combined to make up around half of the total languages recorded.

Multilingualism as an asset

Those Camden residents who reported Bengali, Somali or Arabic as their main language in the Census, were especially likely to report not speaking English well or at all. This is reflected in our internal ESOL data where learners who speak these languages are highly represented in our learner population. But this data also contains a rich resource, largely ignored: those respondents with a different main language who also speak English well.

A core questions for a new ESOL strategy has to be: how can we better make use of the multilinguistic skills of those in our community, seeing multilingualism as a positive not a deficit to be fixed?

It has long been argued that ESOL provision needs a strategy that better serves the needs of the learners. This is why innovative schemes such as those showcased in the recent Beacon Awards for Excellence in ESOL are so important. Finalists Oldham College showed that an Interpreting course can tap into the multilinguistic skills of ESOL learners and can reap great benefits for the confidence of learners and for employability outcomes. These types of initiatives can be a guiding light for a new ESOL strategy, which views multilingualism as an asset to the community.

While we wait for a new strategy to come, WM College is following in the footsteps of Oldham, with our first community interpreting course planned for 26-27 already recruiting well.

FE and skills sector needs to get serious about its own pedagogy

For a sector built on developing highly skilled people, we remain surprisingly tentative when it comes to describing how that actually happens in our classrooms, workshops and workplaces. We borrow heavily from schools, often importing ideas from cognitive science and talking a lot about knowledge acquisition. But we are less confident in articulating what is distinctive about technical and vocational teaching and the learning of skills. This needs to change, particularly as providers increasingly offer T Levels and begin planning their V Level propositions.

In our recent book that identifies Principles of Technical and Vocational Pedagogy (TVP), we argue that the FE and skills sector is not simply a context where general pedagogical principles can be applied. It is a domain with its own purpose, its own forms of knowledge, and crucially, its own approach to teaching.

Too often, teaching defaults to models built around what learners can recall, describe or explain. But in technical and vocational education, knowing that is only part of the story. What matters is whether learners know how to perform complex tasks reliably, efficiently and safely in real-world contexts. In other words, whether they achieve not just accuracy with their skilled performance, but fluency.

This shift from knowledge to fluent performance has significant implications for pedagogy.

Firstly, it demands that we take skills seriously as teachable objects. We argue that much of what we think of as ‘skilled performance’ is not mysterious or innate; it can be broken down, practised and refined. In TVP, we describe this through deliberate instructional moves: deconstructing complex tasks into component skills, modelling expert performance, guiding practice, and gradually rebuilding towards authentic, whole-task execution. This is not discovery learning, nor is it generic ‘active learning’. It is structured, intentional, and rooted in the realities of occupational practice.

Secondly, in technical and vocational settings, teachers are not simply facilitators of learning; they are expert practitioners that make their thinking visible. Much of what defines expertise is tacit, difficult to explain, and embedded in action and judgement. Learners need to see the craft, hear the decision-making and then attempt it themselves with support. Teaching, therefore, becomes an act of surfacing tacit knowledge through demonstration, expert verbalisation and carefully designed practice.

Thirdly, a TVP places much greater emphasis on practice, feedback and repetition. Not practice in the abstract, but practice that is tightly aligned to occupational standards. Not feedback that is vague or affirming, but feedback that closes the gap between current performance and occupational expectations.

Crucially, it also insists that we move beyond simple completion of tasks to develop fluency. In other words, enacting skills with speed, consistency, resourcefulness, and good judgements. A learner who ‘gets there in the end’ is not necessarily ready for the workplace; fluency is the real benchmark.

In too many FE and skills settings, theory and practice remain artificially separated. Classroom time is dominated by explanation, while workshops become loosely structured spaces for ‘having a go’. A technical and vocational pedagogy rejects this fragmentation. It positions every session as both a learning episode and a rehearsal for work. It integrates knowledge, skills and judgement. And it builds deliberately towards authentic performance.

We appreciate that none of this is entirely new. The craft traditions of vocational education have always understood the importance of modelling, repetition and feedback. Researchers have long argued the distinction between ‘academic and vocational pedagogy’ but perhaps what has been missing is a shared professional language to describe and defend these practices. This, we argue, is what Principles of Technical and Vocational Pedagogy offers.

If the FE and skills sector is to be taken seriously as a driver of productivity, a route to social mobility and an equal partner in the education system, then we must be able to articulate how learning in our sector actually works. Not by borrowing the language of others, but by confidently asserting our own.

The Francis review rightly placed greater emphasis on technical pathways and skills, but said comparatively little about the pedagogy needed to teach those skills. As T Levels expand and V Levels emerge, the FE sector has an opportunity to articulate a genuinely distinctive technical and vocational pedagogy.

We do not need a diluted and morphed version of school pedagogy; we need a pedagogy fit for work.

Technical education must become lifelong route to work

Andy Burnham’s announcement this week on post-14 vocational pathways marks another reset in education policy. Successive governments have promised to elevate technical education. This time, however, the ambition appears to have more conviction. The prime minister has linked technical learning directly to economic growth, productivity and tackling the growing number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). That changes the conversation.

The question is not simply whether England has the right curriculum and qualifications. It is whether we have built an education system that supports more people into work, enabling them to progress throughout their careers and respond to the fast-changing needs of the labour market.

England has spent decades introducing new qualifications. Since 2020, T-levels and HTQs have been introduced. V Levels are expected to follow from September next year. Each policy announcement has been made in isolation, with little sense of an overarching strategy. Yet a framework is beginning to emerge that helps to build a pathway from levels 3 to 5 and above, from school and college to higher learning and employment.

While reforms have sought to strengthen technical education, employers continue to report skills shortages, productivity remains weak and too many young people struggle to establish themselves in employment. The lesson is clear. Qualifications alone cannot solve structural problems in the labour market. What matters is job creation and clear progression routes that connect school, work and lifelong learning.

This is where higher technical qualifications become important. In our recent report, “The Missing Middle: Unlocking the growth potential of higher technical qualifications” , we argued that stand-alone level 4 and 5 qualifications can play a crucial role in England’s skills mix.

HTQs should not be seen as an alternative to degrees or as a separate policy initiative. Their real value lies in creating a practical route for people already in work to develop higher-level skills and progress throughout their careers. But they are equally important for new entrants who begin in employment through apprenticeships, T Levels or future vocational pathways and later need to advance into supervisory, technical or professional roles.

The new announcements at school level include the chance to gain work experience. It is not clear how this is to be achieved but it needs to be a guaranteed, meaningful component, properly integrated with course work. Plans at the University of Manchester to compel all their students to take part in some form of work placement is an interesting extension of this principle.

But the debate about technical education should move beyond access and participation towards building coherent pathways for progression and advancement. Unless learners can see what comes next, these reforms risk becoming isolated stages rather than part of a coherent system. England needs connected incremental pathways. Technical education should not end at 18 or 21; it should continue throughout working life.

In reducing the NEET numbers, the priority should not simply be encouraging more participation in education. It should be helping more young people establish lasting attachment to the labour market. Employment itself is often the best platform for continued learning.

Rather than asking young people to spend longer accumulating qualifications before entering work, policy should increasingly support ‘earn-and-learn pathways’ that combine employment with modular technical education. This creates earlier labour market attachment while allowing people to build higher-level qualifications as their careers develop. That is where HTQs have perhaps their greatest contribution to make.

The same logic applies to adults. The largest future market for higher technical education is unlikely to be eighteen-year-olds choosing between university and college. It is the millions of adults already in employment who need to reskill as technology changes, artificial intelligence reshapes occupations and employers demand new capabilities.

Flexible learning, such as HTQs, delivered through smaller modules and supported by the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, can become one of the principal vehicles for through-life upskilling.

If the Prime Minister’s ambition is for technical education to be valued as highly as academic education, success should not be judged by how many people enrol on one particular course or qualification.

It should be judged by whether more young people move successfully into work, whether more adults continue learning throughout their careers and whether technical education becomes a coherent lifelong pathway rather than a series of disconnected programmes and initiatives.

In such a system, T Levels, apprenticeships, V Levels and HTQs are not competitors. They are successive stages of a single journey, one that connects education with work, supports progression and helps build the skilled workforce on which economic growth depends.

ESOL is evolving, policy and funding must evolve with it

When I started teaching in FE and adult education in the late 1980s, ESOL was often a quiet and improvised part of the system. Classes took place in community centres, church halls and borrowed rooms, supported by skilled teachers working with too little recognition and too few resources. Yet what happened in those rooms was unmistakable: people gained not just grammar, but confidence, independence and a stronger place in the world.

That truth has not changed. What has changed is almost everything around it. ESOL now sits much closer to national debates about immigration, employment, integration and public services. The stakes are higher, the learners’ needs are broader, and the pressure on providers is more acute. The question is no longer whether ESOL matters. It is whether the system has kept pace with what ESOL has become.

Around one million people in England and Wales cannot speak English well or at all, according to the 2021 Census. Yet in 2023-24, only around 170,000 people enrolled on an ESOL course and only a proportion of them were regulated award based qualifications. This is not a small technical gap. It is the distance between what policy increasingly expects of people and what publicly funded provision is able to help them achieve.

That gap has been building for years. ESOL investment has fallen from £247 million in 2010-11 to £186 million in 2023-24 in real terms, a 25 per cent cut at a time of sustained demand. Providers are managing waiting lists, recruitment pressures and funding rules that can push learners towards functional skills English qualifications that were never designed for people learning English as an additional language. Meanwhile, the national curriculum which dates back to 2001, was built for a different era. Its survival-focused model gave the sector important structure, but it no longer fully reflects the lives many learners are living now.

Recent immigration policy has also moved towards higher English language expectations which include demands on work, family life and settlement. The aim is understandable. Most people in the sector would agree that English helps people integrate, work and contribute. But raising expectations without strengthening provision is not a strategy – it’s a contradiction. If English proficiency is treated as a condition of participation then language learning must be treated as essential infrastructure, not an optional add-on.

This is where ESOL is evolving most clearly. For too long, it has been described as if it were mainly about survival English: making an appointment, asking for directions or filling in a form. Those things still matter, but modern ESOL has to reach further because learners’ lives reach further. People need English for work, health, housing, digital services, parenting, further study and community participation. They need to navigate systems that are increasingly online. Above all, they need the confidence to belong, not just the vocabulary to cope.

A contemporary ESOL curriculum should therefore connect English to the real situations learners face in their homes, workplaces and communities. That means building language through meaningful contexts: problem solving, collaboration, digital confidence, employability and civic participation. Practitioners such as Sam Pepper, an external quality assurer at Ascentis and a NATECLA trainer, have argued that approaches such as Fusion Skills, human centric skills all people need to thrive and connect with others in a diverse society, which can help ESOL move beyond a narrow survival model. This would give learners the language, confidence and adaptability they need for life beyond the classroom. It also means recognising learners as adults with experience, skills and ambitions, not simply as people with a language deficit.

Teachers and providers are already moving in this direction. They are designing learning that reflects changing communities, changing workplaces and changing technology. The sector cannot modernise on goodwill alone. Technology can help where it gives learners safe opportunities to practise, especially outside the classroom, but it remains a complement to skilled teaching rather than a replacement for it. What learners need most is high-quality provision, accessible routes through the levels, and enough funded places to meet demand.

The learners in ESOL classrooms are not a policy problem. Many are already working, raising families and caring for others. Many more could contribute further with the right support. If we want stronger communities and a stronger workforce, we need to fund the language learning that makes participation possible.

ESOL is evolving alongside our society. Policy and funding must evolve with it.

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.

Mayors to design technical education routes for 14-year-olds

Mayors and local leaders will be handed a role in shaping education for 14- to 16-year-olds under plans for new technical pathways from September 2028.

Prime minister Andy Burnham will announce tomorrow that pupils will be able to combine core academic subjects with technical education, employer projects and workplace experience from year 10.

Number 10 said the pathways would be shaped by strategic authorities, councils, schools, colleges and employers around the industries and jobs available in their areas.

But the announcement included no new funding and leaves unanswered questions about which qualifications pupils will take, whether colleges will teach them directly and how school accountability measures will change.

The Department for Education will instead examine how its existing budgets can be “prioritised” to support the reforms.

Every figure mentioned in the announcement had been announced previously. Downing Street cited £570 million for additional college places, the £4.7 billion schools uplift by 2028-29 agreed at the 2025 spending review and £3.7 billion for SEND places in mainstream settings.

Ministers said the pathways would build on local initiatives including the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc, introduced while Burnham was mayor of the region.

Pupils would continue to study English, maths and science while accessing technical training, practical projects set by businesses, visits to employers and work experience.

Local pathways could focus on sectors including advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, clean energy, life sciences, construction, health and care or the creative industries.

Burnham said the reforms would put technical and academic education on an equal footing.

“For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected,” he said.

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

Downing Street said the changes formed part of a wider devolution programme and would give local leaders “greater influence” over education for 14- to 16-year-olds.

Strategic authorities will be expected to bring together schools, colleges and employers, identify local priorities and coordinate workplace opportunities.

Undefined powers

However, the announcement does not explain what formal powers mayors will receive, how the system will operate in areas without a strategic authority or whether every part of England will introduce the pathways at the same time.

Work with local leaders and education providers will begin ahead of an “ambition” to start rolling out the routes in September 2028.

No detail has yet been published about which existing or new qualifications will form part of the pathways.

Nor has it been confirmed whether pupils will remain enrolled exclusively at schools or whether colleges will be able to enrol or teach greater numbers of 14- to 16-year-olds.

School performance measures and Ofsted inspections will be changed to recognise technical education and how well schools prepare pupils for employment.

That would amount to a second change to inspection inside a year. Ofsted’s report card framework only took effect in November 2025. The announcement referred only to school inspection and said nothing about the further education and skills framework.

Ministers have also not revealed whether the progress 8 or attainment 8 measures will be changed as part of the reforms.

Schools will be given stronger incentives to offer technical pathways rather than treat vocational education as an “optional add-on”, according to the release.

What gets the chop?

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), backed the ambition but warned that the reforms would require investment, achievable timescales and a national framework.

“Right now there is little detail about what this will look like in practice,” he said.

Di’Iasio said parity between academic, technical and vocational routes must be reflected in performance measures and repeated ASCL’s call for progress 8 and Ofsted’s new inspection framework to be reconsidered.

He also criticised the timing of the announcement during the summer holidays and questioned what schools and colleges would be expected to do less of if they were required to prioritise the new pathways.

Education secretary Lucy Powell said the plans marked the start of a “shared effort” to connect young people with jobs and careers in their local areas.

“By offering high-quality technical and vocational education alongside academic achievement, we’ll give more young people the chance to leave education with the skills, confidence and opportunities they need to thrive,” she said.

Strategic authorities, schools, colleges and employers will be expected to make the new routes accessible to young people with SEND. No funding was attached to that expectation beyond the £3.7 billion already committed to creating around 60,000 specialist places in mainstream schools.

The reforms follow an interim report by Alan Milburn, which warned that more than one million 16- to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training.

Milburn welcomed the announcement but said a “whole system reset” was also needed across health, welfare and labour-market policy.

His report was critical of schools and colleges being held to account on enrolments and attainment, rather than sustained outcomes.

Employers would be expected to offer mentoring, workplace visits, practical projects and work experience, but no minimum requirements or entitlement for every pupil were set out.

Number 10 did not respond before publication to questions from FE Week about funding, qualifications, college involvement, accountability measures and the rollout timetable.

There’s a wall keeping jobless teenagers and employers apart

The Times has put a number on what lots of us have long sensed. A 16-year-old on the under-18 minimum wage, working the legal term-time maximum of 12 hours a week, takes home about £94. A teenager signed off can receive £100 a week more.

You can argue about the causes, but not the incentive. Alan Milburn’s interim report spells it out: for a young person with a health condition, inactivity can mean more money, less hassle and less risk than work. It persists because the welfare system treats the individual and the employer as two separate worlds.

Those worlds barely touch: by design, an employer rarely knows whether a young recruit is on universal credit, and a jobcentre only becomes involved once a claim is made. The young person weighs tapers, conditionality and the fear of losing a health payment for a few hours’ work; the employer sees none of it. So the system nudges a teenager towards a claim while firms that might have offered a first job sit on the other side of a wall.

A wall the government keeps building

The youth guarantee, ministers’ flagship response, risks making that wall higher: it promises 18 to 21-year-olds a paid placement only after 18 months on universal credit – eighteen months before an employer even appears.

It has taxed hiring directly too: employer national insurance rose to 15 per cent and the threshold fell from £9,100 to £5,000, hitting low-paid jobs hardest. The Bank of England found 44 per cent of firms cut jobs over that rise, against 29 per cent citing the minimum wage. The cost of taking a chance on an inexperienced young person keeps climbing, and the Employment Rights Act has added to the chill.

It’s no surprise the welfare bill keeps growing. The government’s 2025 attempt at modest reform, sold as saving billions a year, was watered down by a Labour backbench rebellion. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says what became law delivers essentially no savings over the next four years, and costs money in its first two. Andy Burnham, who became prime minister a week ago, inherits not just a welfare bill out of control, but the backbenchers who forced that retreat.

Tinkering won’t turn the dial

Against this, the policy response has felt like tinkering: the levy rebranded as “growth and skills”, a few shorter apprenticeships (so-called “units”), Skills England stood up but weaker than its predecessor, new V Levels mooted without detail. None of it is turning the dial on a NEET count nearing one million and, on Milburn’s diagnosis, heading for 1.25 million within five years – a shocking one in six young people. His most damning finding: in 2024-25, for every £1 spent on employment support for young people, around £25 went on welfare.

Ministers do not lack advice. Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review said it last November: on health and work, employers should be “on the pitch”. Milburn’s final report, due this autumn, must say the same about the young, and be heard.

We need to think bigger, not another quango. We already have the Careers and Enterprise Company, the National Careers Service, UCAS and Jobcentre Plus – hundreds of millions of public money a year, with ample room to join up, simplify and expect more.

Instead, government should reverse the jobs tax with an employer national insurance cut targeted at entry-level jobs, and give employers a reason to invest beyond the levy – currently a ceiling, not a floor – with a training tax credit modelled on R&D relief.

At the same time, stop taxing the institutions doing most for NEETs: colleges, unlike schools and academies, cannot reclaim VAT, a quirk that costs them more than £200 million a year, despite teaching more disadvantaged 16 to 18-year-olds than anyone else.

None of it works unless the two worlds connect earlier. Colleges and training providers, trusted by both sides, are the obvious connector: fund them to stay alongside a young person and their employer through the first year of work, when dropout risk peaks.

Government needs employers onside and spending more on training. So far, everything it has done pushes the other way – but Andy Burnham has rightly made tackling the NEETs crisis his priority. Let’s hope his speech tomorrow resets the government’s approach to employers.

Mystery as DfE misses summer accounts deadline

Problems unearthed by an audit have delayed publication of the Department for Education’s annual report and accounts until October.

Major government departments are expected to lay their financial reports before the House of Commons adjourns for summer recess each year. But the DfE missed the July 16 deadline.

It means the DfE is one of four government departments whose annual report and accounts (ARA) will be certified by the National Audit Office after Parliament returns on September 1.

“The NAO is continuing to work with the Department for Education to address matters identified during the course of our audit,” a NAO spokesperson said.

“The work required means that the department was unable to publish its annual report and accounts before Parliament’s summer recess. We currently expect to complete our audit in October.”

The NAO did not give details of the matters identified.

Government departments are not legally bound to publish their ARA before the summer break.

Under the government resources and accounts act 2000, departments are legally-bound to send their annual report and accounts to the NAO’s comptroller and auditor general Gareth Davies no later than November 30 after the relevant financial year.

The NAO examines and certifies the accounts, issues a report and passes both on to the Treasury by January 15.

The Treasury then lays accounts before the House of Commons no later than January 31 the following year.

However, both the Treasury and the NAO had set an earlier target for all 17 major government departments to publish their 2025-26 accounts before the summer break.

The three other departments that missed the July 16 deadline are the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Justice.

According to an NAO report from January, nearly two thirds of annual reports were published before the Parliamentary recess in 2024-25, down from a high of 76 per cent in 2018-19.

The NAO said delays in recent years were caused by machinery of government changes, cyber-attacks, local audit backlogs and issues identified by audits that “could not be resolved quickly”.

The DfE has met the July recess deadline for the last three years but missed the target during the Covid-19 years.

The NAO found that the pandemic years had a “detrimental impact” on the timing of audited accounts provided to Parliament. Only 55 per cent of accounts were published on time in 2020-21.

The DfE also previously missed the statutory deadline in 2014-15, when it applied a statutory instrument to extend the deadline for laying its accounts by three months.

It came after the NAO issued an adverse opinion on DfE’s group financial statements, which considered the level of error and uncertainty in the statements to be “material and pervasive”.

The DfE requires further education colleges to publish their own audited accounts by January 31 each year “to maximise transparency and support accountability.”