Lucy Powell was reportedly Andy Burnham’s third choice for Education Secretary after Rachel Reeves and David Miliband turned it down – and judging from her recent intervention in the education debate, it’s not hard to see why. Her claim that a million young people are not in education, employment or training (Neets) as a result of Michael Gove’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ education reforms is almost comically misinformed.
To begin with, the reforms she’s referring to – turning the majority of English state schools into academies, increasing their autonomy and, at the same time, making them more accountable – began with the Education Reform Act 1988, which ushered in City Technology Colleges, a forerunner to academies. Tony Blair continued in the same direction with the Education Act 2000 and Michael Gove put turboboosters under the programme with the Academies Act 2010. To ascribe those reforms to just one education secretary, in office between 2010 and 2014, is astonishingly ignorant. It’s a programme that has commanded cross-party support for almost 40 years.
Contrasting vocational with academic qualifications is fundamentally wrongheaded
Far from being the miserable failure Powell suggests, those reforms have been astonishingly successful. When I co-founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove in 2010 – named the Sunday Times Comprehensive of the Year in December – Finland’s education system was held up as the gold standard. Today, that status belongs to England thanks in part to Gove’s acceleration of the structural changes begun by his predecessors.
This is evident in the OECD’s Programme of International School Assessment, which compares the education systems of different developed countries. English teenagers are now 11th and 13th in a list of countries compiled by the OECD for maths and reading, up from 27th and 25th respectively in 2009. In science, they climbed from 16th to 13th. Those results have been replicated in other international league tables, too. For instance, the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study ranked England fourth among 43 countries, up from 19th in 2006.
Contrast this with Scotland and Wales, which stubbornly refused to replicate any of the changes made in England. Scottish 15-year-olds, who were significantly above England’s in 2010, fell below the OECD average in 2022. Of the three devolved nations, Wales, which has rejected every one of its neighbour’s reforms, experienced the biggest fall in the OECD table between 2018 and 2022 in maths, science and reading.
So what of Powell’s claim that Gove is responsible for the country’s million Neets? It’s not clear how he can be blamed for a UK-wide problem, given that education is a devolved area of policy (although perhaps the new Education Secretary doesn’t know that). But it’s true the majority of Neets are in England. Does that mean the education reform programme dating back to 1988 is a failure? No. We don’t have comparable data for Scotland, but the percentage of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training in Wales is 17 per cent, four points higher than it is in England.
Powell is right to draw attention to the problem, but she’s misdiagnosed the cause. Youth unemployment in the UK was well below the eurozone average when Labour entered office, but is now above average thanks to the tax rises the government has imposed that makes the cost of employing young people more expensive. This will likely get worse when those sections of the Employment Rights Act 2025 come into force that compel employers to offer all new employees guaranteed hours.
What of Powell’s solution, namely, that schools offer more vocational pathways as an alternative to academic routes? That sounds suspiciously like the last Labour government’s cack-handed attempt to prioritise ‘skills’ over ‘knowledge’, introducing a plethora of Mickey Mouse qualifications that had little or no labour market value. For instance, in 2016 around 20 per cent of English 16 year-olds took a European course in computer literacy that could be completed in three days because it counted as the equivalent of a GCSE in the school league tables.
As the educational consultant Daisy Christodoulou has pointed out, contrasting vocational with academic qualifications, as Powell does, is fundamentally wrongheaded as those vocational certificates with the highest labour market value, such as a City & Guilds qualification in electrical installation, require considerable academic ability.
Before sounding off again, the new Education Secretary should do some more mugging up on her subject. She may find that ‘book learning’ is more useful than she thinks.
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