Andy Burnham’s promise to make technical education at 14 available across England arrives against a backdrop that makes the ambition hard to argue with, even if the detail remains frustratingly thin. Speaking at a train manufacturing site in Derby on 27 July, the Prime Minister announced that from Year 10, secondary school pupils in England would be able to combine core academic subjects with technical courses linked to local industries, covering areas such as manufacturing and artificial intelligence.
The case for doing something is not in dispute. According to the House of Commons Library, 1.01 million people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training in January to March 2026, representing 13.5% of that age group, the first time the total has exceeded one million since 2013. The number rose by 55,000 from the previous quarter and by 89,000 on the year.
What is perhaps more troubling than the headline figure is what lies beneath it. ONS data show that 61% of those young people are not unemployed in the conventional sense; they are economically inactive, meaning they are neither working nor looking for work. Only 39% are actively seeking a job. That distinction matters enormously for policy. Vocational pathways from age 14 may improve the pipeline into work, but they cannot, on their own, reach the majority of young people who have already disengaged entirely.
Why Technical Education at 14 Needs More Than Good Intentions
The scale of structural damage here is laid out starkly in Alan Milburn’s interim report, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2025. Published in May 2026, it estimated the cumulative cost of youth NEET status at £125 billion. Six in ten young people who are NEET have never held a single job, compared with four in ten in 2005.
Milburn’s report, published on the UK government’s official publications page, also noted a 40% decline in the health visitor workforce since 2015 and a 44% fall in spending on early intervention services between 2010/11 and 2023/24. These are not footnotes. They are part of the explanation for why disengagement is now starting earlier and going deeper.
The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee has recorded Milburn describing the rise as ‘a whole system failure’, with ill health characterised as ‘the new kid on the block’, pointing to a 70% increase over the last decade in the number of NEETs with a work-limiting condition. Against that, a curriculum reform beginning at age 14 looks less like a solution and more like a beginning.
The Resolution Foundation, in research published in April 2026, found that economic trends explained around half of the rise in the NEET rate, with broader health trends since the pandemic accounting for much of the rest. That suggests a skills pipeline, however well designed, is chasing only part of the problem.
From Greater Manchester to the Rest of England
The new policy draws directly on Burnham’s own Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, launched in September 2024 when he was the city’s mayor. According to Centre for Cities analysis, the MBacc is not a qualification in its own right but a framework that brings together academic and vocational qualifications with work experience and employer engagement, with a target to be fully operational across the Greater Manchester Combined Authority by 2030.
The government’s ambition is to have some national pathways running by 2028. That is a reasonable timeline for a pilot. Translating a city-region framework built around identifiable industries like green energy and digital into a coherent national programme, including areas with low industrial activity, is the challenge nobody in Tuesday’s announcement addressed directly.
Burnham said the system had been ‘built for too long around the university route’, sending a message to some young people ‘that they’re some kind of second-class citizens, and it’s just not right.’ He is correct on that. T-levels were introduced in 2020 as an alternative to A-levels; V-levels are due from 2027 as a post-16 mix-and-match option. Now technical education at 14 completes the earlier end of that architecture.
School leaders are cautiously supportive but explicitly worried about capacity and funding. The National Education Union warned the proposals would ‘hit the skids unless there is sufficient investment in schools’. The NAHT called for ‘greater clarity’ on funding. These are not obstructionist complaints. They are the realistic concerns of institutions already implementing SEND reforms on tight budgets.
Burnham declined to set a target date for reducing NEET numbers, saying only that ‘the first thing I’ve got to do is to stop that rise.’ On the current trajectory, stopping the rise would itself be an achievement. Whether a curriculum reform, however well structured, can do that without a parallel investment in health, early intervention and employer incentives is the question that 2028 will answer.
