We’ve taught technical education from 14 since 2017 – the curriculum was the easy part

The government’s plan to expand technical education from age 14 is welcome recognition that young people don’t all learn in the same way. We’ve been doing it since 2017.

At South Devon College, those nine years have shown that a strong academic curriculum can sit alongside technical education without limiting anyone’s future choices. They have also shown that the curriculum is only one part of a much bigger job.

South Devon High School opened in September 2017 with 51 year 10 pupils. We could see young people locally who wanted a different key stage 4 experience without giving up the core curriculum, and nobody was offering them one.

The school now has 228 pupils across 11 pathways, including engineering, health and social care, automotive, hospitality, and games and digital development. All of them study English, maths and science throughout.

The approach is finally getting national attention, and the apprenticeship measures announced alongside it will help too, particularly the bursary for families who stood to lose more in benefits than the apprenticeship itself paid.

My concern is that the year 10 reforms will look far simpler on paper than they prove in practice, and schools have until 2028 to get them right.

Behind the visible curriculum

My advice to a school preparing for that deadline is not to underestimate the infrastructure behind the visible curriculum.

The workshop or qualification is only the front end. Behind it sit staffing, equipment, quality assurance, employer engagement, safeguarding, careers guidance and progression planning.

And transport, which nobody ever budgets for properly and which in a county like ours quietly decides who can take part at all.

We learned that the hard way. Pastoral care for 14 to 16-year-olds doesn’t sit easily alongside the more adult atmosphere of a further education college, and it took us a good two years to get that balance right.

You can’t simply adapt an existing college programme for younger learners and expect it to succeed. Behaviour systems, parental communication and transition arrangements all need designing around that age group, and so does the curriculum, which has to be rigorous and properly sequenced rather than assumed to be easier because it’s practical.

Employer engagement takes years to build and constant attention to maintain. It’s not simply a matter of finding businesses willing to offer a placement.

Employers need support to understand safeguarding, the curriculum, the age group and what’s expected of them, and they need it again whenever their own capacity changes.

Our strengths in South Devon are health and care, engineering, marine, construction, tourism and hospitality, and a great many of those businesses are small or medium-sized.

We can’t rely on one large employer offering opportunities at scale, so we work with dozens of organisations that each contribute something different. The answer can’t be to limit a young person’s ambition to whichever employers happen to be within five miles of their school.

This is where colleges can help.

Many of us already hold established relationships through apprenticeships, adult learning, technical education and workforce development, and schools shouldn’t have to recreate those networks from scratch when partnership offers something more sustainable.

Avoid a workforce scramble

Recruiting professionals with current industry expertise has never been straightforward, particularly in coastal and rural areas where geography, housing and transport all affect it.

You can’t expect someone to leave industry on Friday and become a fully formed teacher on Monday. If every school begins recruiting from the same limited pool, we’ll redistribute existing expertise rather than increase it, so curriculum reform needs a workforce plan alongside it.

The concerns raised about funding and capacity are legitimate, because this requires specialist facilities, equipment, consumable materials and sustained employer coordination.

The greater risk is fragmentation. If thousands of schools are separately expected to recruit the same specialists, buy the same equipment and approach the same employers, we’ll spend a great deal while producing uneven provision from one town to the next.

Parity of esteem is earned through quality, not announced.

After nine years of this, my advice is to give the partnerships, the people and the infrastructure as much attention as the curriculum itself. Those are what will decide whether young people get the opportunities this policy promises them.