For those working in post-16 education, disruption hardly feels new. Qualification pathways are changing, funding is shifting and established business models are under pressure. We call this reform – a word that implies the careful improvement of an existing system. But on the ground, it often feels far more disruptive. That’s why for many, disruption signals chaos and cliché. But true disruption isn’t about making incremental changes to the system, disruption is simply the willingness to ask whether the system we have is still the system we need. That is why what I would describe as Andy Burnham’s politics of disruption deserves closer attention from those working across education and skills. Not because every proposal is necessarily right, or because every aspect of devolution is guaranteed to succeed, but because it begins with a fundamentally different premise. For decades, England has designed skills policy from the centre outwards. National priorities have shaped local provision. Funding has flowed through centrally designed mechanisms. Qualifications have sought universal consistency. There are good reasons for this. National standards matter, particularly for awarding organisations. Employers also need confidence that competence means the same thing wherever someone trains. Yet the economy itself no longer behaves in such a uniform way. The industries shaping Manchester are not the industries shaping Norfolk. The growth opportunities in Liverpool are not identical to those in Cambridge. Britain is one country, but it contains many economies. What if skills policy acknowledged that reality more explicitly? From an international perspective, this is not a particularly radical proposition. Germany offers an interesting contrast. National occupational standards provide consistency, but vocational education is deeply rooted in regional economies. Across its 16 Länder (federal states), employers, chambers of commerce and training providers shape skills around local industrial strengths rather than a single, centrally directed labour market. In Baden-Württemberg the focus is on precision engineering, and Hamburg on ports and aviation. The lesson is not that England should copy Germany wholesale, but that national standards and local economic leadership are complementary rather than contradictory. The German model is based on a long tradition of local social partnerships between employers, communities, and training providers. In a less formal way, this is the model I’ve seen flourishing across Southeast Asia. This is why I think Burnham’s logic is particularly interesting. His ambition has never simply been to secure greater devolved funding or additional powers for Greater Manchester. The more significant shift is philosophical. It is to organise public policy around place. Greater Manchester‘s approach increasingly seeks to align skills with transport, employment, health, investment and economic development. Initiatives such as the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate reflect an ambition to create a more coherent local ecosystem rather than simply deliver nationally prescribed programmes. Whether every initiative succeeds is almost beside the point. The disruption lies in changing the organising principle itself. It starts with places. A place has ambitions. It wants to attract investment, improve productivity, support employers, tackle unemployment, and create opportunity. Skills are not a separate public service sitting alongside those ambitions; they are one of the principal means by which they are realised. Colleges become economic engines as much as education providers. Employers become co-designers of the local skills system rather than simply consumers of its outputs. Awarding organisations become partners in regional growth rather than handmaidens of national bureaucracy. Labour markets are evolving faster than national policy cycles, but the future is unlikely to arrive evenly across Britain. Some places will become centres of advanced manufacturing. Others will specialise in life sciences, clean energy, creative industries, agriculture or logistics. Trying to manage such diversity through increasingly detailed national and centralised prescription feels ever more difficult. Perhaps the reason today’s skills reforms so often feel chaotic is that they are being imposed on a legacy system. Qualification pathways are being reshaped, new products introduced, others withdrawn, and funding redirected towards younger learners. Yet the underlying architecture remains largely unchanged. We are disrupting the programmes without disrupting the model. That is the wrong way around. Real disruption should not be measured by the number of qualifications replaced or organisations restructured. It should be measured by our willingness to challenge the assumptions on which the system itself is built. Burnham’s politics offers a useful challenge to our sector. Regardless of political persuasion, it asks whether local leaders should have greater influence over the skills needed to drive their own economies. That is not simply a debate about devolution; it is a debate about how we define economic success. The paradox facing the skills sector is that it simultaneously demands change and craves stability. Yet the two are not incompatible. Done well, disruption is what makes long-term stability possible. If the next decade of skills policy is to be defined by disruption, let’s ensure we are questioning the right things – not simply the qualifications people take, but the assumptions on which the system itself is organised. That may prove to be the most important disruption of all.