Does the Budget deliver Skills and Curriculum Reform?

The past few months have marked a significant moment for education and skills policy, with the publication of the Skills Bill, the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR), and the Keep Britain Working review. We (finally) saw the first revised Apprenticeship Standards offering some clues to the over 650 still to come. Anticipation surrounding the Budget added further weight, with many watching closely to see whether funding commitments would match the scale of proposed reforms.

Keep Britain Working

Alan Milburn’s leadership of the Keep Britain Working review provides a compelling and urgent analysis of the challenges facing young people as they move from education into the labour market. His findings highlight persistent barriers, poor mental health, disability, limited access to personalised support, and fragmented systems that leave too many young people navigating education, employment, and welfare structures in isolation. Central to Milburn’s recommendations is the call for genuinely joined-up services: education, careers guidance, employment support, and health provision working together, not in parallel. The emphasis is on early intervention, tailored pathways into work, and building resilience for those at greatest risk of falling out of the system entirely.

In last week’s Budget, the UK government committed to invest £1.2 billion per year in skills and training, with the aim of supporting over one million young people into training and apprenticeships. Additionally we saw the biggest funding increase for apprenticeships in England with funding rises to over £3.075 billion, around a 13% cash increase.

The most substantial shift in curriculum and assessment thinking in more than a decade

These priorities resonate powerfully with Professor Becky Francis’s Curriculum and Assessment Review. CAR proposes the most substantial shift in curriculum and assessment thinking in more than a decade. Its recommendations call for a broader, more inclusive curriculum that gives equal weight to academic and vocational pathways, embeds essential life and work-related skills, and equips learners with the flexibility needed for a rapidly changing labour market. Crucially, CAR questions whether current assessment models genuinely reflect the diverse talents of young people or whether they inadvertently contribute to disengagement, particularly among students at risk of becoming NEET. By promoting more adaptable and authentic forms of assessment, the review aims to re-energise learners who feel alienated by high-stakes, one-size-fits-all systems.

Did the Budget deliver the funding needed to undertake these reforms within the tight timescales given?  On the face of it the overall schools and further education funding has been increased: the schools budget will grow over and there is funding allocated to rebuild schools and invest in infrastructure. However given the previous reductions at first glance this looks like maintenance and certainly not investment in the new qualification requirements including expansion of costly T Levels.

The document underpinning the post-16 reforms, the Post‑16 Education and Skills White Paper signals a review and potential redesign of adult essential-skills provision, both in reskilling and upskilling, but with no current detail and presumably to be funded through the funding announced today.  

Seen together, these reforms are not isolated interventions but parts of a coherent, mutually reinforcing strategy:

Up and Downstream

CAR tackles the upstream causes of disengagement, reshaping what young people learn, how they learn it, and how success is recognised. Keep Britain Working addresses the downstream effects, ensuring that young people have the support, confidence, and opportunities they need to transition successfully into employment. Within both of them are proposals that can begin the tackle the issue of young people not in employment, education or training.

The Budget, via the Youth Funding package allocates over £145 million for 2025-26 to youth programmes, including more access to enriching activities for young people regardless of their background. Equally the announced support for “employment support programmes” and upscaling of training/apprenticeship provision suggests a hopeful readiness to support young people transitioning from education into work, which resonates with the aims of the Keep Britain Working Review.  Of course we have yet to see the employer response to the changes to the national minimum and living wage and that may impact the immediate life chances of this cohort in particular.

The alignment of education policies provides a rare opportunity: a joined-up roadmap that treats education, wellbeing, and employability as interdependent rather than separate agendas. If implemented collaboratively, and crucially supported by sufficient investment, the combined vision of CAR and the Keep Britain Working review could represent a pivotal step towards a system that supports every young person, from their first experiences of learning to their long-term prospects in the labour market. However, this needs significant investment across the sector as a whole if we’re to achieve quality outcomes, from regulators to Awarding Organisations to schools to colleges and indeed to Higher Education Institutions and whilst the devil is in the detail, it doesn’t feel like we saw that investment last week.

Together, these initiatives carry a clear message: meaningful reform requires both stronger foundations within the curriculum and a more responsive, human-centred employment system. Only by bridging these two worlds can the UK genuinely improve outcomes for the next generation – surely an investment that needs making.

By Heather Akehurst OBE, Chief Executive Open Awards