I Have Just Returned from Australia. What I Saw There Should Interest Every FE Leader in the UK

I have just returned from working with educators and policymakers in Australia on AI and skills. I want to be direct about what I saw: a country building a coordinated national approach to AI workforce preparation that the UK has not yet matched. Not because the UK lacks ambition or capability, but because it has not yet joined up the pieces in the way Australia is attempting to do.

What Australia has announced, and what it is already doing

In December 2025, the Australian Government published its National AI Plan. The Plan is a policy framework, not legislation, and much of its delivery depends on implementation over the coming years. But two things distinguish it from comparable UK documents. First, it explicitly names the vocational education and TAFE (Technical and Further Education) sector as central to AI skills delivery. Second, several of its key programmes are already operational.

The Future Skills Organisation, a government-funded body that partners with industry and the vocational sector, has launched an AI Skills Accelerator programme in collaboration with Microsoft. TAFE colleges across Queensland, South Australia and elsewhere are already participating. Microsoft has committed to helping one million Australians and New Zealanders gain AI skills by the end of 2026. Separately, OpenAI has partnered with Coles, Wesfarmers and Commonwealth Bank to roll out tailored AI training across their workforces, with CommBank making modules available to one million small business customers.

These are policy commitments backed by corporate investment and, in the case of the FSO Skills Accelerator, already in delivery. Whether they produce measurable outcomes at scale remains to be seen. But the architecture is in place: government coordination, industry funding, and the vocational sector built into the design from the start.

What the UK is doing, and where the gap lies

To be fair to the UK, the Government has not been idle. In January 2026, it announced a major expansion of the AI Skills Boost programme, targeting 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The programme has already delivered around one million course completions since its launch in June 2025. Skills England has published an AI foundation skills benchmark, and the partnership includes major employers from Barclays and BT to Amazon and Microsoft. These are genuine strengths, and the scale of ambition is comparable to what Australia is attempting.

AI Skills Boost programme

The gap is not in ambition. It is in how FE fits into the picture. The AI Skills Boost programme is led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, not the Department for Education. The courses are largely self-directed online modules. FE colleges, apprenticeship providers and awarding organisations are not yet positioned as delivery partners in the way that Australian TAFEs are in the FSO Skills Accelerator. The UK has a strong AI research ecosystem, a credible skills benchmarking framework and employer buy-in. What it lacks is the explicit connection between those assets and the institutions that train the majority of the workforce: FE providers.

Entry-level roles: the question FE must answer

Jobs and Skills Australia has warned that while direct impacts on entry-level roles have not yet materialised, it will be critical that the labour market continues to provide the formative experiences that build foundational careers. Entry-level administrative, clerical and junior professional roles are the ones most exposed to AI-driven task automation, and these are precisely the roles that FE prepares people for.

LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise 2026 report found that AI literacy is the most in-demand skill in Australia. In roles most affected by AI, skill requirements have shifted 88 per cent more than in less affected roles. UK-specific data tells a similar story: government research published in January 2026 found that only 21 per cent of UK workers feel confident using AI at work, and only one in six UK businesses were using AI as of mid-2025. The question for FE leaders is direct: are your programmes preparing learners for the roles as they exist today, or for the roles as they will exist when your learners complete their training?

The management shift

Managers will increasingly oversee hybrid teams of people and AI agents. This is already happening in customer service, content production, data analysis and software development. It demands a different set of capabilities: understanding what AI can and cannot do reliably, designing workflows that play to human and machine strengths, and governing data use responsibly.

McKinsey’s 2025 Global AI Survey found that 88 per cent of organisations now use AI in at least one business function, but nearly two-thirds remain in the experimentation or piloting phase. Only 39 per cent report any enterprise-level financial impact from AI, and just 6 per cent qualify as high performers capturing significant value. The survey concluded that the biggest differentiator between those capturing value and those not is not the technology itself but the redesign of workflows and processes around it. That is a skills and leadership challenge, and it belongs to FE as much as to any other part of the education system.

AI Literacy and Governance

When I talk about AI literacy, I do not mean knowing how to write a prompt. I mean understanding what AI is, how it processes information, why it produces confident-sounding errors, and what the consequences of those errors look like in a workplace.

The Gallup-Walton Family Foundation survey (2025) found that 68 per cent of US teachers received no AI training during the 2024-25 school year, and only 19 per cent work in a school with an AI policy. EY’s Australian AI Workforce Blueprint found a comparable gap in the workplace: 68 per cent of Australian computer-based workers had used AI in the previous month, but only 35 per cent had received any formal training. The pattern is consistent across countries: adoption is outpacing preparation.

FE colleges and training providers are not just affected by this gap. They are uniquely placed to help close it, because they sit closer to the workplace than any other part of the education system. AI governance should not be treated as a boardroom topic alone. It needs to be embedded in vocational programmes that touch the workplace.

What this means for FE leaders

FE leaders should not wait for policy frameworks to arrive fully formed. They should invest in their staff’s AI understanding, not tool training but genuine understanding of how AI works and where it fails. They should audit programmes against the changing reality of the roles they prepare people for, and have honest conversations with employer partners about what those roles look like in two years. They should build AI governance into vocational curricula. And they should make their voices heard in the policy conversation, because the UK’s AI skills infrastructure will be weaker without FE at the centre of it.

Australia has put Vocational Education at the heart of its national AI skills strategy

Australia does not have all the answers. Much of what it has announced is still in the early stages of delivery. But it has done something the UK has not yet done: it has placed vocational education at the heart of its national AI skills strategy. Having just returned from twelve thousand miles away, I can see the difference that makes. FE leaders in the UK should be demanding the same.

Professor Rose Luckin is Professor of Learner Centred Design at UCL Institute of Education and founder of Educate Ventures Research. She publishes The Skinny on AI for Education and is the author of Machine Learning and Human Intelligence and AI for School Teachers.