Joe Shalam, policy director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Lucy Powell has saved Alan Milburn the trouble of finishing his independent review of youth worklessness. Like a Scooby-Doo villain, the true culprit behind the Neet crisis has been unceremoniously unveiled. It was Michael Gove all along. Apparently.
According to the new education secretary, the introduction of a knowledge-rich curriculum, rigorous examinations and focus on attainment after 2010 has had devastating consequences. Her central argument is that an “over-focus on academic outcomes” has “left too many young people behind”, with technical education undervalued and the one in three pupils who fail their GCSEs thrown on the scrapheap.
The Spectator editor, for his part, said Labour’s plans amounted to “bringing back stupid”, pointing to schools such as Michaela and Mercia that take children from disadvantaged backgrounds, hold them to the highest academic expectations, and produce outcomes most private schools would envy.
While we all love a good political bust-up, I fear the dust kicked up by this debacle risks obscuring both the real causes of the Neet crisis – and the truth to be found on both sides of this important debate.
Let’s start with the Neets. More than one million 16 to 24-year-olds are now not in education, employment or training – almost one in seven. That is a scandal of wasted potential. But school reforms introduced more than a decade ago are not responsible.
Broken incentives, from employer costs to welfare to immigration, are all fuelling the surge. Employing a young person has become around a third more expensive in real terms over the past seven years. Mental health benefit claims are out of control, with related inactivity up 70 per cent since 2019. Meanwhile, since 2020 the non-EU workforce aged under 25 grew by 290,000, compared to just 11,000 extra young UK nationals. Neets rose by 200,000 over the same period. These are the ultimate drivers of the crisis.
Insofar as we can test the education system’s role, Wales provides a helpful control as Daisy Christodoulou has pointed out. The Welsh government rejected the Gove settlement and pursued its own curriculum reforms, yet official figures record a Welsh Neet rate of 17 per cent, higher than the UK’s. Hardly a smoking gun, then.
By contrast, the Gove-Gibb reforms did what they promised: England rose up the international rankings, with pupils performing above the OECD average in maths, reading and science. It remains a lasting achievement of the Conservative years in office, one that should be protected.
Still, none of this means Lucy Powell and Andy Burnham are wrong to say Britain can get better at technical education. In fairness, they are driving at a longstanding failure in the wider system, which has been its preoccupation with university enrolment as the measure of success and focus of state subsidy. This, as the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) argues in a new series of reports, has broken the link between education and employment, deferring any serious alternative until after pupils have been told, in effect, that they have failed.
A quarter of a century on, Blair’s fifty per cent target still looms large. Schools prize their university outcomes. “The first in my family to go to university” is a phrase that continues to resonate. Over half a million enrol ,into undergraduate courses each year, compared to just 80,000 teenage apprentices.
Yet there is mounting evidence that this pathway is letting down, even ripping off, growing numbers of young people. Around 700,000 working-age graduates are out of work and claiming benefits. Above-inflation loan repayments bite into monthly payslips. And three in ten degrees now deliver zero economic return, alongside £50,000 of debt.
Earlier in the year the CSJ revealed that higher apprentices now comfortably out-earn university graduates taking lower value courses a decade after qualifying – by well over £10,000 and without any debt – despite apprenticeships falling by a third in recent years.
Consider a different approach. While England produces roughly three graduates for every person completing a vocational qualification, Germany produces close to one of each; in the Netherlands, more vocational than general graduates.
These countries combine strong educational foundations with technical specialisation, employer involvement and workplace learning – and their school-to-work transitions lead the way. The Netherlands had the EU’s lowest Neet rate in 2025, at just 5.3 per cent.
Of course, it is wrong to bluntly partition children into those who are “academic” and those who are “technical”. Engineers need mathematics. Electricians running businesses need literacy, numeracy and know-how. As artificial intelligence transforms the economy, depth of knowledge will remain as important as it always has been as the building blocks of both skill and creativity. Every pupil should study a demanding core of English, maths, and science.
But from 14, the CSJ has called for that foundation to be combined with the option of more ambitious technical courses, building in employer programmes and work placements shaped by local areas. The PM’s Manchester Baccalaureate points in the right direction. A national version could recognise pupils combining core subjects with high-quality technical qualifications, harnessing University Technical Colleges and technical routes within mainstream schools, following the positive example of the Dutch.
The irony here is that Lord Gove’s record shows the way. It was his reforms, after the Wolf Review, that stripped out the pseudo-vocational qualifications that led nowhere yet were declared equivalent to GCSEs by ministerial diktat. Ministers similarly cannot announce “parity of esteem” into being. Any plan to raise the standard of earlier technical learning must include more demanding qualifications, better teaching and a clear progression into skilled work. And it must jam the conveyor belt from school to low-value university degrees, ending taxpayer support for poor-return courses and radically expanding apprenticeships – as the shadow education secretary has rightly proposed.
Let’s be clear, education reform alone will not reverse the surge in Neets. Government must reduce the cost of hiring young people, reform welfare and tackle the broken incentives in the labour market.
But Conservatives would be unwise to cede the technical learning agenda to Labour. The task must be to complete the Gove project, to keep the rigour and high expectations while building a clearer path for young people to leave school and move into work. “University at any cost” should be unmasked as the true villain, once and for all.