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.