Skills Aren’t the Whole Answer – Britain’s Young People Need Jobs to Match

On Tuesday last week, the Prime Minister announced plans to put technical education on an equal footing with academic study. There was more focus on local partnerships, real work experience, and young people getting hands-on time with employers earlier. All of this is welcome. But it addresses only half the problem.

The issue was never skills alone

The issue was never skills alone. Skills and training without good, sustainable jobs is a solution built on one leg. Our research at the Work Foundation found that adverts for starter jobs have halved over the last decade – down by roughly 49%, about 1.6 times faster than the general slowdown in job opportunities across the economy. Over a million young people aged 16-24 are not in education, employment, or training: 13.5% of that entire age group. And 743,000 young people in the same bracket are unemployed – 112,000 more than the year before. Behind every one of those numbers is someone who did what they were told to do – study, apply, wait – and still found no door open to them.

That’s the backdrop against which this announcement needs to be judged. And measured against it, what’s changing is mostly the scale.

A national agenda with local partnerships

From Year 10, pupils will be able to combine core academic subjects – English, Maths, Science – with technical education linked to jobs in their local area, alongside work experience and direct relationships with employers. After GCSEs, the route leads into T levels, apprenticeships, and other technical qualifications. The Government says schools will be funded and measured differently, so that technical provision is treated as a genuine destination rather than a fallback for pupils who “don’t do well” academically.

It’s a national version of something Burnham piloted as Mayor of Greater Manchester: the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, built on the premise that a young person choosing construction, care or coding deserves the same respect, funding, careers advice, and employer access, as one choosing A levels. He has made a version of this argument before, that for too long, England built an education system with a route to university and not enough to say to the other half. It’s not a controversial position, and there is broad support for it.

What’s new is the scale

What’s new is the scale. This isn’t a devolved experiment in one city-region anymore, but instead it’s meant to be how secondary education works everywhere. That ambition, and the accompanying emphasis on local partnerships, is genuinely welcome – and will require strong relationship building at every level. Co-ordinating employers locally is the right aim, and necessary if this plan is to work, but will take time and requires a strong mutual offer.

The problem isn’t shared equally

Another challenge for this agenda is that the barriers young people face aren’t distributed evenly across the country, and a national rollout has to reckon with that or risk reproducing it. Our research found only one job for every six NEET young people in the North East, and only one for every five in the East Midlands.

We need real investment in the areas where there aren’t many good jobs on offer

In communities like these, the pathway from qualification into sustainable work isn’t functioning. And it is unlikely that the private sector will fix that on its own in the near term. A brilliant local technical curriculum, matched to local employers who don’t have jobs to offer, still leaves young people stuck. If we want genuine growth and opportunity in every postcode, rather than just in the places where the labour market is already working, we need real investment in the areas where there aren’t many good jobs on offer – and where insecure, low-quality jobs are concentrated. There is no good signposting to jobs that don’t yet exist, or to bad quality ones.

That’s why we think this points toward a bigger role for the public sector: a stronger Jobs Guarantee for young people. Not one built around placements in sectors that are already insecure, like much of hospitality and retail, but one focused on longer-term positions offering secure, socially valuable work, in care, in local government, in local construction or retrofitting projects, in the services communities actually need more of. Only sustained public investment can do that in the places the market has left behind.

The bottom line

Consensus is building that technical education should be on a more equal footing with academic study. Doing it at national scale with real funding and real measurement behind, as is being proposed, is a bigger step than most governments have been prepared to take.

But unless this reform is matched by investment in the places where good jobs have disappeared, a Jobs Guarantee that offers something more than insecure work, and support for young people that starts now rather than in 2028, we’ll end up with a generation better qualified than ever – and just as short of somewhere to put those qualifications to use. You can’t train your way out of a jobs drought.

By Asli Atay, Senior Policy Advisor, Work Foundation at the Lancaster University