Over An Imaginary Coffee With Jacqui Smith: A Plea For The Forgotten Many

If I had half an hour with Baroness Jacqui Smith, Minister of State for Skills, over a coffee, I’d love to have a chat about the young people still missing out on education, employment and training.

I have spent nearly 30 years working in education and skills, with the past 23 in the awarding sector and have seen policies come and go and… come back again. 

We have moved from small, locally accredited projects to tightly regulated national frameworks. Funding priorities have swung between freedom and control. Yet for too many 16 to 24-year-olds the outlook has barely changed.

The latest ONS data show around 948,000 young people are NEET, about one in eight. When I began this work the figure was close to 800,000. Numbers have gone up and down, peaking at over a million at times, but the underlying challenge remains. A generation has passed, and the problem is still with us.

A group hiding in plain sight

This is not a small or uniform group. Some have special educational needs, others live with poor mental health, care for relatives or have long gaps in their education. 

One in five NEET young people has no qualifications and almost half report a disability, most often related to mental health. Anxiety and depression now account for the majority of health issues among NEET young people, according to the Labour Force Survey.

I recognise these realities from my own experience. In my early career I helped run a business “learn and earn” course for students who had not thrived in mainstream education. They were capable and ambitious but needed a different style of teaching and assessment. That early lesson has stayed with me.

What I would ask of the Minister

If the Skills Minister were across the table, I would ask for three changes.

• Allow colleges and awarding organisations more scope to meet local needs, not just for adults in devolved areas, but for everyone. Over-prescriptive rules make it harder to design qualifications and courses that work for every learner.

• Open up assessment methods, allowing for accessible and innovative approaches. Practical tasks and hands-on, employer-led projects can give a fair and rigorous measure of achievement for those who do not perform well in formal exams.

• Simplify the funding system. Long moratoriums and complex rules hold back innovation and prevent awarding organisations and providers from responding quickly when they see a need.

None of these ‘asks’ need fresh funding, but they would remove the barriers that stop those working directly with learners from acting.

Lessons from two decades of change

Gateway Qualifications began as a small local network (OCN) registering about 5,000 learners a year. Today we support over 110,000. Over that time, we have moved from paper registrations to sophisticated digital systems and built a broad national range of regulated qualifications. 

Throughout that growth one principle has guided us: flexibility combined with rigour. Yet too often, reforms designed to simplify qualifications have added layers of complexity. 

For the young people I am describing, complexity is not an inconvenience; it is a reason to walk away. 

They rely on trusted providers to map out a route and national policy should reflect that.

Across our centres we meet plenty of young people with sharp minds and wide interests who still fall through the cracks. They might explain a complex topic in detail yet freeze when asked to write it down or lose their way in tasks that involve several stages. 

These learners need routes that value how they think and show what they know, not just how they perform in a timed exam, and many face these hurdles without any formal diagnosis.

Time to act

The Department for Education’s forthcoming curriculum and assessment review offers a chance to make a difference. But this will only happen if the department listens to those who work with these learners every day and acts on what they hear. And I understand this is their intention, which will be welcomed.

I am committed to FE because I know what happens when the right support is in place. Learners who once felt written-off gain confidence, find work and change their lives.

So my ‘Skills Café’ order is simple. Pour some trust into the system, take out the unnecessary grind, and let colleges and awarding organisations serve up opportunities that every young person can experience. 

Only then will the next generation get more than an espresso-sized promise of change.

By Phil Farrell, Director of Awarding, Gateway Qualifications