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A pair of shoes taught me more about NEETs than any policy paper

It is reassuring to see the growing urgency around the NEETs (not in education, employment or training) challenge in this country. More concerning, however, is the apparent lack of joined-up thinking about how it will be addressed.

I have a somewhat unique perspective, having led a national training provider that delivered one of the strongest traineeship programmes in the country. I am now CEO of a small charity that works face-to-face with young NEETs every day.

The traineeship programme, discontinued in May 2023, was designed for 16 to 24-year-olds who were motivated by the prospect of work but not yet work-ready. I delivered the programme for more than a decade, primarily in Yorkshire communities with relatively low educational attainment and high unemployment.

The programme was not perfect, but it allowed providers to deliver a flexible, work-focused offer. Employers could support young people into work with the backing of a pastoral tutor who provided maths and English support, employability training, CV writing, interview preparation and guidance on workplace expectations.

Crucially, tutors could also provide practical support: helping learners understand public transport, plan journeys, manage basic budgeting and navigate the challenges that arise during the first few weeks of employment. They often helped young people overcome homelessness, domestic abuse and safeguarding concerns alongside more practical barriers.

The pair of shoes

One case has always stayed with me. A young man was excelling in a traineeship placement with a national retailer. Then, without warning, he stopped attending. Eventually, we discovered that his only pair of shoes had fallen apart. Unable to afford a replacement, he stopped going out altogether and quickly found himself in a difficult place.

We bought him a new pair of shoes. No bureaucracy. No lengthy assessment. Within days, he was back at work and ultimately secured full-time employment.

That story captures what traineeships did well. They were flexible enough to provide tailored support for young people who were motivated to work but faced barriers that many policymakers never see.

I remember attending discussions with the Education and Skills Funding Agency shortly after the decision was made to end traineeships. It was suggested that traineeships were primarily a route to entry-level qualifications that could be achieved elsewhere and were unlikely to lead directly to employment.

My argument then is the same as it is today: for most NEET young people, qualifications are not the main issue.

The real challenge is support, guidance and pastoral care.

Most of the young people we supported then, and most of those I work with now, do not have someone who can help them complete a job application, review a CV or explain how to write a professional email. Many struggle to navigate public transport networks or understand workplace expectations.

Big initiatives for NEETs

Over the past year, three major initiatives have emerged to tackle the growing NEET crisis.

The first is foundation apprenticeships. They have merit, but they feel too long, are not always pitched at the right level and remain heavily focused on vocational delivery. Many providers also appear to view them as carrying a level of risk that makes engagement difficult.

The second is the youth job grant, a £3,000 incentive for employers to recruit a young person who has claimed Universal Credit for six months or more. The principle is sound, but important questions remain. How will employers find suitable candidates? How will they support them when challenges arise? What happens if a young person leaves after only a few months? With 20,000 grants available, this represents a £60 million investment that must deliver meaningful outcomes.

The third initiative is the job guarantee, offering six-month paid work placements and training for 18 to 24-year-olds who have claimed Universal Credit for 18 months or longer. Again, there is much to like, but questions remain. What happens after six months if the employer cannot retain the individual? What about those with enormous potential who have been unemployed for 12 months and are equally in need of support?

Each initiative has been designed with good intentions. Viewed together, however, they reveal a system that remains too rigid, fragmented and ultimately not inclusive enough to meet the needs of the young people it is trying to support.

What’s missing

NEET young people do not fit neatly into funding bands, eligibility criteria or arbitrary timeframes. Some need intensive pastoral support before they can contemplate employment. Others are ready for work but need help overcoming practical barriers. Some would thrive in a work placement, while others need confidence-building and employability support first.

The question should not be which programme a young person qualifies for.

What is missing is a single, flexible programme that combines the best elements of all three approaches: employer engagement, work experience, targeted training, financial incentives and, crucially, pastoral support. A programme tailored around the individual rather than forcing the individual to adapt to the programme.

We have been here before. The success of traineeships was never simply about qualifications; it was about flexibility. It was about trusting providers and frontline practitioners to identify barriers, intervene quickly and provide the right support at the right time.

If we are serious about reducing NEET numbers, we need to stop creating multiple schemes that address different parts of the problem and start building a single, coherent pathway that supports the whole journey into sustainable employment.

Manufacturing SMEs are being squeezed out of apprenticeships

There is no denying that the skills challenges facing the government are stark. Today, the UK has close to one million young people aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training (NEET) and in two of the country’s biggest sectors – manufacturing and engineering – apprenticeship starts are well below the level they reached in the early and mid-2010s, with over 500,000 starts a decade ago compared with 340,000 starts in 2023-24.

Apprenticeships are essential for building our future workforce, improving productivity and creating accessible vocational routes into high-demand sectors. Yet, the route for young people to access these industries is lagging. Not only does this jeopardise the potential of these future workers, but it also undermines the UK’s global competitiveness.

This picture is particularly acute for SMEs (small and medium sized businesses). In our latest ‘SME snapshot’ survey, we found that labour and skills shortages are negatively impacting their businesses. Sixty per cent of businesses have engaged in recruitment over the last six months, and of those, 80 per cent said they experienced difficulties getting suitable staff, with 60 per cent citing lack of candidates with appropriate technical qualifications as the biggest driver of skills gaps.

If SMEs don’t succeed, the economy doesn’t succeed. Over 90 per cent of UK manufacturing organisations are SMEs: given the manufacturing sector accounts for 9 per cent of UK employment and is a key source of highly skilled and highly paid jobs, it is vital that SMEs can thrive.

For some time now, it has been clear that SMEs fall through the cracks of government policymaking, especially where there is a tendency to focus on policies that work for bigger business. On the apprenticeship system specifically, SMEs can often feel locked out, with its complexity and inflexibility being incredibly challenging to access. Many directors and managers of manufacturing SMEs are apprentice trained and they know firsthand the value of this route into the sector. If these SMEs feel locked out and priced out of apprenticeship recruitment then we do have a problem.

Employment costs as a barrier to recruitment is well talked about but there is another tax that increasing numbers of SMEs are facing; More SMEs than ever are falling over the apprenticeship levy threshold and becoming levy payers. Using the latest labour market and employer data, we’ve calculated that the average mean salary is now nearly £124 more in manufacturing than this time last year. Consequently, an SME becomes a levy payer with only 68 rather than 70 employees. Going back five years, the wage bill would tip an SME into being a levy payer in the manufacturing sector at 88 employees. This is a 20 person difference in only five years, a monumental and overlooked shift, only compounded by other cost pressures in recent years such as high energy bills and increases to National Insurance. The difference is more stark in manufacturing than in all other sectors combined.

This is a clear example of an unintended policy consequence. SMEs currently pay the levy at well under the 250-person threshold (the formal definition of an SME), resulting in enormous disincentives to engage with the apprenticeship system. This is bad for manufacturing and engineering, and it is bad for young people’s life chances. A simple tweak to public policy here could be all that’s needed to drive real change.

SMEs, with the right support and skills, can be the driving force of the country’s future economic growth.

To achieve this, we’re asking the government to collaborate closely with SMEs on skills reforms and labour market improvements. By co-designing policy, we can ensure that it will genuinely work for SMEs. Enginuity’s Policy Centre for Supply Chain and SMEs was designed to do just this – provide facilitated communication between manufacturing SMEs and government decision makers.
There is a golden opportunity for the government to harness the immense talents within SMEs to drive local and regional economies, creating sustainable and productive employment that can tackle the burgeoning NEETs crisis. Not only that, but we can also turbocharge the uptake of apprenticeships in crucial sectors, fulfilling the government’s ambition of a modern industrial strategy.

Reform funding bands, but don’t sacrifice transparency

When the Institute for Apprenticeships launched in 2017, its staff faced a complicated, opaque funding band system.

Funding managers moderated providers’ quotes using formulas, rate cards and the funding rules to reach a figure the Department for Education took as its best estimate of delivery costs. The effort was significant, but outside the organisation the reasoning was poorly understood.

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education then found a better way and, after two formal public consultations, produced the system in use today.

Now Skills England are remaking the model, and whilst I wouldn’t advocate another two consultations, government would do well to revisit what they uncovered, what the current system does well, and address a couple of things it did not.

Be very wary of losing transparency

A key expectation was that decisions be transparent and the “working out” shared. The opaque system meant most funding bands were formally challenged through independent re-review, which was adversarial and time-consuming to administer.

The current system, to my knowledge, has yet to face a single procedural review. IfATE went from the majority having appeals to none. They understood the decisions and could see why they had been reached, even if not everyone was happy.

Government must retain that openness and explain its decisions clearly. Stakeholders will appreciate it even when they disagree.

Anchoring in the costs of delivery is vital

Respondents were clear that apprenticeship funding should derive from the actual costs of delivery, which vary wildly across a diverse suite of apprenticeships, hence the sophisticated calculation that emerged.

There seems to be an intention for future bands to reflect broader economic and political priorities, rather than simply estimating delivery costs.

That isn’t unreasonable, but the best estimate of delivery costs must remain a vital data point. The final figure can move up or down, but anchoring to that cost-based position matters for stakeholder understanding and success.

Keep employers involved

Skills England also has ambitions for a more data-driven, automated calculation. That is reasonable; greater automation was always an aspiration for the current model, and it would ease its burden on employers.

But the consultations showed, and the current model demonstrates well, the value of keeping employers involved in judging viability.

Through trailblazer and route panel groups, employers could raise points a data-only model could never fully appreciate.

Only that real-life experience gives the full picture, so every new calculation must be scrutinised by employers.

The interim guidance frequently uses “may” when talking about engagement with employers and expert groups. That isn’t sufficient for me, and I think it should be a requirement.

Addressing inflation versus stability

Since the current model was designed, various events have shaken our economy and driven inflation, particularly raw material and energy costs. Many providers have felt this, engineering and manufacturing especially, where delivery costs rise year-on-year while funding bands stay stagnant.

There is no in-built mechanism to monitor and address inflation, which is a flaw in the current system, though it is one area where automated intervention could add the greatest value.

I don’t personally think annual reviews of all bands are viable or optimal – there is value in consistency – but automatically moving an apprenticeship up a band once inflation pushes it there would be a welcome improvement.

Properly supporting high-value apprenticeships for young people

Lastly, the review seems driven by two clear priorities: delivering its industrial strategy, and opening more apprenticeships to younger people.

Engineering and manufacturing apprenticeships sit at the convergent point of these two priorities. Many align directly with the government’s economic aims, yet are overwhelmingly taken by young people as a first career step.

So whilst we at GTA England are eager to understand the next steps, one huge barrier remains before reform can have real impact in our sector – the £27,000 maximum funding band.

Level 3 engineering apprenticeships such as the engineering maintenance technician have their potential, for the economy and young people alike, restricted by the £27,000 limit when actual delivery costs are considerably higher.

Any business, SME or multinational, scrutinises the decision to take on an apprentice. When training costs up to £10,000 more than they can draw down, it is often a step too far. This is a particular problem for SMEs, and disproportionately hits young engineering and manufacturing apprentices.

Without revisiting the maximum funding band, which hasn’t changed in a decade, the impact of any changes will be undermined.

A great opportunity to refine and improve

Skills England and DWP have a great opportunity to improve apprenticeship funding band allocations. It is the right time to maximise automation and address what the last change did not.

What they can’t do, however, is forget the learning of the past. They must not lose the transparency, focus on costs of delivery and employer input that made the current model better than its predecessor.

The future is hands-on: the labour market is finally catching up with FE

For most of the last forty years the cultural wind blew against further education. University was the route ambitious parents pushed their kids towards, trades were positioned as the back-up, and a generation of young people picked their post-16 pathway based on a status hierarchy that had little to do with what the labour market was actually asking for.

A recent report pushed this to the front of the conversation. Microsoft’s research team analysed 200,000 real conversations with Copilot, mapped them against occupational data, and produced an applicability score for every job in the US economy. The roles with the highest AI applicability turned out to be interpreters, historians, writers, sales staff, customer service representatives, and almost everything in the computer, mathematical, office, and administrative categories.

The roles with the lowest were the ones that FE has spent decades training people for: nursing assistants, ship engineers, roofers, tyre repairers, plumbers and electricians. Microsoft’s own framing of the finding speaks directly to this sector: occupations that require a degree have higher AI applicability than occupations with lower formal education requirements.

This will not be news to anyone reading FE Week. The sector has been making this argument for years, often into a headwind. What is different now is that the broader labour market is starting to make it without prompting. Wages in the skilled trades are rising. Vacancy backlogs in care, construction, and engineering run years deep. The risk-adjusted return on a level 4 apprenticeship is starting to compete seriously with the risk-adjusted return on most undergraduate degrees, and Microsoft is far from the only research outfit publishing data that points the same way.

Look at the sector’s own numbers and the same shift shows up. Apprenticeship starts rose 11.9 per cent in the first half of 2025-26, with higher apprenticeships up 23.5 per cent on the same period last year. The achievement rate climbed from 51.4 per cent in 2022 to 65.4 per cent in 2024-25, the biggest sustained improvement since standards came in. ITPs led with a 5.7 percentage point jump in a single year.

Government has clocked the structural argument, which is what the youth guarantee and the £1.5 billion youth opportunity package are about, alongside Starmer’s repeated push for more young people in apprenticeships.

Set against this, supply is the harder problem, and the case has been made well in these pages already. Engineering apprenticeship starts have fallen 25 per cent since 2017, level 2 apprenticeships have halved, and employers are choosing higher-level apprentices partly because they are less risky to take on. Even with the moment now running in the sector’s favour, not enough of the people who would benefit from these routes have been completing them (65 per cent in 2024-25).

The DfE’s 2023 evaluation survey of non-completers shows that the single most common reason for leaving an apprenticeship was getting a better job offer, at 16 per cent. Personal or domestic factors accounted for 36 per cent. 65 per cent of all non-completers leave within the first 12 months of their programme, and the survey shows how many simply realised the work was not what they had imagined it would be.

That is a clarity-of-pathway question and is one of the cheapest, fastest levers the sector has to pull.

Vocational careers guidance in this country is thin. Most young people pick an apprenticeship the way they pick a degree, with a hazy sense of what the work involves and an even hazier sense of which kind would suit them. There is real work to do here, and I have been building Rumbo in part to help with the self-understanding piece, but the bigger point is sectoral.

The hands-on economy is going to keep rising. The sector’s job now is to make sure the people who arrive on its programmes are arriving with their eyes open.

The cost of getting that wrong shows up as a non completion statistic. But underneath the number is a young person who tried something the country needed them to try, found it was not what they thought, and added one more data point to a story the sector cannot afford to keep telling.

Teen jailed for nearly four years over Stafford College bomb threats

A teenager who threatened to blow up Stafford College with homemade explosives has been jailed.

Jagger Strang, 18, was sentenced today in Birmingham Crown Court after pleading guilty last month to seven offences including making threats to kill his classmates, possession of an explosive substance and possession of information likely to be used for terrorist purposes.

Justice Wall handed him a sentence of three years and 11 months in a young offender institution, reports said.

Authorities were alerted last September after Strang, who was 17 at the time, told fellow college students that he had access to weapons that could blow up the college.

Officers at Staffordshire Police arrested him on the same day and uncovered “black powder/gunpowder” and thermite, a pyrotechnic that burns at 2,200 degrees celsius and can melt steel.

They also found a blow pipe, which can be used to direct air or gas onto a flame to increase heat, and containers filled with powdered aluminium, activated charcoal, copper oxide, iron oxide and magnesium ribbon.

Police also found a manifesto, internet searches release to “notorious mass killers”, including the 2024 Southport killings, and YouTube tutorials on how to make gunpowder and improvised detonators.

“You wanted to be like the serial killers,” Justice Wall said in his sentencing remarks, the BBC reported.

“At the same time, you developed an unhealthy interest in explosives. You acquired the chemicals necessary to make gunpowder and thermite, and you made them.”

Strang has been in custody since his arrest. He had pleaded guilty seven charges as his trial was due to start in May.

Detective Inspector Dave Rowlands of Staffordshire Police said: “This was an extremely concerning case involving a teenager with a clear and troubling fixation on violence. The threats he made caused genuine fear among students and staff.

“Thanks to the vigilance of the college community and the swift response from Staffordshire Police, we were able to intervene quickly and prevent any potential harm.”

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.

Burnham: Public contracts must deliver more apprenticeships

Andy Burnham’s first speech since launching his bid to be the next prime minister was widely trailed to go heavy on devolution, but alongside his pledge to shift power out of Whitehall, he set out plans to use government contracts to create apprenticeships and work placements for young people, end a university-first education system and devolve employment support. FE Week looks at what he did and didn’t say.

Andy Burnham has pledged to demand more work placements and apprenticeships for young people in return for giving British companies a better chance of winning government contracts.

The former Greater Manchester mayor said public procurement rules would be changed to help domestic suppliers become “more stable and competitive,” while ensuring firms winning contracts delivered greater benefits for young people and communities.

In his first major policy speech since returning to parliament last week, Burnham attacked a procurement culture he said had focused on “chasing cut-price deals around the world” rather than supporting British-based companies.

He promised “all eligible public contracts” would be subject to “proper social value weighting”, including contracts awarded through the government’s defence investment programme.

Burnham added: “In return, we will recycle maximum benefits for our communities and our residents, for instance by requiring a much greater supply of 45-day work placements and apprenticeships for young people.”

He stopped short of giving any targets or details on what sorts of contracts would be “eligible”.

Burnham pointed to Greater Manchester’s work with employers as evidence that the approach could deliver.

He said the city region had rung round businesses and secured “1,000 extra work placements” over the past year.

“That’s 1,000 extra young lives changed every year, and it shows what a place can do when it works as one,” he said.

However, Greater Manchester’s announcement in January described employers as having pledged 1,000 placements. It is unclear how many have so far been delivered.

Requirements already exist

Using government procurement policy to lever apprenticeships is not new, but evidence the current rules are creating new opportunities is hard to come by.

A policy introduced by the Conservative government in 2015 asked government departments and agencies to consider apprenticeships and skills places when awarding contracts worth at least £10 million and lasting 12 months or more.

It meant bidders could be asked how many apprenticeships they would create if they won, with successful suppliers’ commitments then written into contracts and monitored.

But public bodies were only “strongly encouraged” to do so.

Apprenticeship-specific guidance was withdrawn in 2023 and replaced by a wider central government “social value model”, worth at least 10 per cent of the available score when in-scope bodies assess contract bids.

The model lists apprenticeships, supported internships and T Level industry placements among other jobs and skills opportunities suppliers could offer.

But public bodies are not currently required to demand apprenticeships or work placements. Guidance provides public bodies with a menu of social-value outcomes that they can decide are most relevant to the contract they’re awarding. They also have to make sure those requirements are proportionate to the value of the contract and must not create disadvantages or barriers to potential suppliers, particularly small businesses.

Respondents to a recent government consultation on including a firmer measure on jobs and skills when assessing procurements worth over £5 million warned overly prescriptive requirements could increase bureaucracy and favour large companies.

Burnham did not offer details on overcoming those barriers for smaller businesses in his speech.

Parity klaxon

Burnham also promised a “complete rethink” of how young people are supported into work, saying he was taking “very seriously” Alan Milburn’s recent report on the rise of young people not in education, employment or training.

The report warned as many as one in six young people could be out of education and employment in the next five years, up from one in eight currently, without major reforms.

Burnham said the rethink “has to start with the education system”.

“The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end,” he said.

“University is great for those who want it, but when are we going to focus on the life chances of those kids who want something different?

“The country has not done that for a long, long time.”

Burnham said politicians had argued for years for parity between academic and technical education.

In a speech following Labour’s major local election losses last month, which triggered Burnham’s run for parliament, Keir Starmer himself framed doing more for “the kids who are ignored, frankly, because society often only puts those who go to university on a pedestal” and then pledged to “go much further on our investment in apprenticeships [and] in technical education”.

Burnham echoed Starmer’s sentiment, saying he would build a “clear path” for “every young person into a reindustrialised Britain.”

Today’s speech follows the Starmer government’s claim last week that it will bring to an end a “degree by default” culture through its own “new deal for young people” by removing funding from degree courses that were deemed not to deliver good outcomes.

Burnham didn’t mention any changes to funding or provider accountability in his speech today.

Devolution without the detail

The bigger idea running through Burnham’s speech was a dramatic expansion of devolution across the country.

He described Britain as “one of the most over-centralised countries in the world” and argued that economic growth had been held back by power and resources remaining in Whitehall.

“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down,” he said. “Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.”

Burnham promised what he called the “biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen”, giving regions greater control over public services, industrial policy and regeneration.

That would include powers tailored to the needs of rural areas, coastal towns and places undergoing industrial transition, as well as “more powers for London too, over education and housing”.

But education was not among the three main areas of devolution Burnham went on to identify.

His proposed “Number 10 North” operation in Manchester would support regions with reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and the regeneration of places.

Burnham said the new operation would be “the nerve centre of a rewired Britain” and “the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK”.

It would coordinate national and local government, support areas to set long-term economic strategies and require government departments and agencies to provide local and strategic authorities with staff and resources.

“The days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over for good,” Burnham said.

“I have had 10 years of fighting the Whitehall machine, blocking this place’s progress, the progress of people here, and I am simply not prepared to accept the same for any area coming after Greater Manchester.”

However, Burnham did not say whether his devolution drive would extend to 16-to-19 education, apprenticeship funding or greater mayoral control over colleges and training provision.

Nor did he explain whether the reference to giving London “education” powers would be offered elsewhere or what those powers would cover.

The only skills-related responsibility he explicitly committed to devolving was employment support.

As mayor, Burnham argued that Greater Manchester could not deliver a fully integrated adult skills and employment system because the Department for Work and Pensions retained control over employment programmes and funding.

“We will answer the call from the mayors, and particularly the mayor of the North East, for devolution of employment support,” he said.

Burnham said services should work more through community and voluntary organisations “at a grassroots level”, using organisations people trust rather than requiring them to go to “places that they fear”.

Young people who need mental health support should also receive it as part of help to enter and remain in work.

Burnham claimed the approach would reduce the welfare bill “in a way that is fair and lasting and helps people move forward”.

DWP questions June 2026: live blog

Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden and his ministers will take questions in the House of Commons this afternoon shortly after 2.30pm.

Follow below for live updates

Education has lost the confidence of too many white working class families

I’m rarely shocked or even greatly surprised by statistics that show how unequal life chances are in this country, but I was astounded by some of the findings in the independent inquiry into white working class educational outcomes, for which I was a board member. There are many, but how about this one – only 36 per cent of white working class children achieve grade 4s in English and maths GCSEs at the age of 16, compared with 72 per cent of the whole cohort not on free school meals.

Those findings have helped to shine a light on the fundamental misalignment between what many children, young people and their families want from the education system and what they are being offered. A misalignment that for far too long has been denied or overlooked by government, in the vain belief that ‘making the current system work better’ will close the enormous educational and life outcomes gaps driven by social class.

First of all, the report completely dismisses the myth that poor outcomes are somehow the fault of the children and young people themselves, as did the recent Milburn review report on young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs). White working class families and children do not lack ambition or potential, but they are not experiencing an education system they believe is meeting their needs or aspirations.

Time and again, the surveys, roundtables and interviews revealed a fundamental lack of belief that ‘education is designed for people like me’. For instance, only 43 per cent of parents believe that their child is learning skills they will use in real life.

That misalignment and lack of belief in education results, as the report shows, in large numbers of children disengaging with education because they do not believe it will help them in their lives. One headteacher said that absence has almost become normalised across groups of children and their families. And the data is shocking, with 38 per cent of white children on free school meals being persistently absent and 5 per cent severely absent.

So much for the shocking statistics, and there are many others that we should all be ashamed about. But it is not a report without hope; the inquiry found lots of schools and colleges doing excellent work to buck the trends.

For colleges, there is good recognition of the work they do to help young people belong and engage with a curriculum that inspires and motivates them. The report talks about colleges “as environments where many white working class young people successfully re-engage with education after difficult experiences in school”.

The report sets out a vision of hope and a call to arms, with pragmatic and well-thought through recommendations. For us in post-16, there are good recommendations to properly invest in colleges, in apprenticeships and in new higher education pathways that can be accessed locally. There’s also a focus on free public transport for all under 21s which would be a major enabler for all learners.

I do hope that this work gets the consideration it deserves. Across the education system, we can and must do better, because the ambitions and potential of too many children will continue to be wasted if we dbon’t. I also hope that the government and the education system collaborate now to implement the recommendations and rise to the call for action so that this picture changes, and changes soon.