The areas that could be left behind by Burnham’s education reforms

Rural and coastal areas risk being left behind by Andy Burnham’s technical education reforms to cut youth unemployment, experts have warned. Under the plans, secondary school pupils in England will be able to study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning. Courses will be linked to local industries and include placements to give children a clearer pathway into work. The reforms are based on the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc), an initiative Andy Burnham pioneered while mayor, which is a technical education alternative to the academic English Baccalaureate (EBacc). Shorts But the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has said pupils in areas without mayors to help resource and oversee the schemes may be less likely to benefit. These include areas like Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk which also have among the highest proportions of 16 and 17-year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) in England – and therefore among those most in need of these pathways into jobs. The areas without mayors Tom Middlehurst, deputy director of policy at ASCL, said the plans are intended to be coordinated by mayors and leaders of strategic authorities, but swathes of areas do not have such established leadership structures. A strategic authority is an overarching public body that groups local councils to make joint decisions across regional boundaries. Strategic authorities include combined authorities, combined county authorities, and the Greater London Authority. Increased government funding and devolved powers are granted to strategic authorities, especially to the majority that have mayors. Middlehurst said individual councils and schools are already struggling financially and do not have the capacity to forge partnerships with employers without that overarching support. The Government intends to set up strategic authorities in all parts of the country but they have not yet been fully rolled out. Carl Cullinane, research and policy director at the Sutton Trust think tank, said devolution has progressed further in some parts of the country than others, putting areas without strong, well-established mayors at a disadvantage. Areas that do not currently have strategic authorities or mayors are largely concentrated in the southern parts of England. They include Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset, The i Paper‘s analysis of official records found. Some of these areas – particularly Medway, Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk – already have a high proportion of NEETs, at more than 4.5 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds, according to data from the Department for Education. Rural and coastal areas Cullinane said while the MBacc technical pathway policy has worked well in Greater Manchester, it is an area based around a large city with a diverse economy and many employers. In more remote areas, there are fewer employers and industries, and potentially “weaker” local governments, he said. He said schools already struggle to find enough work placements to fill demand for T Levels, which is even more of an issue when there are fewer employers in an area, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with less capacity to facilitate them. Cullinane there are “particular problems in more remote areas, particularly coastal areas, where there isn’t a big prosperous city nearby.” “There is a danger that this could end up entrenching regional inequalities rather than addressing them,” he said. Middlehurst said rural and coastal areas also have less accessible transport, which will make it more difficult for young people to get to work placements. It is also easier to identify emerging industries to tailor education to in places like Greater Manchester, which is a discrete area with a major city at its centre, he added. “If we expand that out to somewhere like the southwest of England, that’s going to look very different, and we would be talking about potentially multiple bases – multiple market towns, different industrial sites, rather than the centre of one city,” he said. The areas with fewer high-paid jobs Some areas also have far more lower-paid jobs – meaning youngsters in those regions could be shut out from pathways into well-paid jobs. Analysis by data firm The Data City, shared with The i Paper, found that more than half of jobs in the West Midlands, Tees Valley, and East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire were in occupations classified by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as lower-skilled. By contrast, fewer than four in 10 jobs fell into those categories in Greater London, Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Workers in occupations requiring higher skills typically earn more, ONS data shows. Occupations in lower skills categories include administrative, sales, customer service, transport and caring roles. Adam Boxer, an education author and teacher, said: “Focusing on your local area’s job market somewhat renders the entire project of social mobility dead. The point of schools and education is to take students beyond their horizons, not constrain them within it.” But Tom Forth, The Data City co-founder, said varied regional Labour markets mean “the best choice for a kid getting decent grades at a school in Oxford might be different to someone getting the same grades in Middlesbrough”. “Pupils, families, and their teachers across the country consistently show a good ability to make good choices and opening up more flexibility for them to make those choices is probably a good thing,” he added.