BRITAIN is in a familiar cycle of political lip-service about the skills crisis, where bold speeches replace meaningful action. We hear of declining apprenticeships and the ‘urgent need’ to reform vocational education. For anyone in schools, this feels painfully familiar.
As I explore in my new book, Education in Turmoil, our system has spent decades repeating the same mistakes: a ritualistic rediscovery of the obvious, followed by quiet abandonment. Every decade, ministers praise practical learning. Every decade, they replace one vocational framework with another. And every decade, employers say the same thing: young people leave school unprepared for work.
The tragedy is not that we keep trying. It is that we never learn.
The history is depressingly cyclical. Britain once excelled in technical training through rigorous, respected apprenticeships. Then came the great comprehensive experiment, the devaluation of technical colleges, and the rise of a single, all-academic pathway.
The shift towards a performance-driven, data-obsessed school system accelerated this decline. Creative and technical subjects were sidelined to hit Progress 8 targets rather than to serve pupils’ futures. Schools now operate in a culture of ‘impact by PowerPoint’ where leadership is about managing spreadsheets, not shaping skilled futures. Since then, vocational initiatives have rolled out like a conveyor belt: YTS, NVQs, GNVQs, Applied general qualifications (BTECs), Diplomas, and now T Levels. All different in name, all similar in outcome.
The most revealing historical parallel comes not from recent politics, but from Labour’s own attempt at reform in 1965, when Harold Wilson introduced the CSE alongside the more academic GCE O Level.
This became one of the most publicly condemned two-tier systems in modern British education. Parents saw the hierarchy immediately, employers treated the CSE as inferior, and universities largely ignored it. The supposed ‘bridge’ became a wall, and public opinion rejected the reform outright. The government had designed a qualification for other people’s children, and everyone knew it.
Fast-forward to the 2000s, and Labour’s 14-19 Diplomas repeated the same catastrophic mistake. Marketed as equal, they were swiftly exposed by parents, universities and employers as a stealth second tier. Public confidence never materialised, so the qualification quietly died.
This matters because public perception, not ministerial rhetoric, decides the fate of vocational pathways. Politicians consistently fail to grasp that you cannot declare parity: it must be earned through quality, respect, and tangible employer trust. Every time they try to invent a new track, they embed the very hierarchy they claim to dismantle.
For all the political talk about valuing skills, Britain is still ashamed of vocational routes. A student going to university is celebrated. A student on an apprenticeship is pitied. This bias is not incidental: it is engineered into the accountability machinery of the modern school.
Schools, forced into a culture of league tables and inspection optics, naturally prioritise subjects that ‘count’. As my book highlights, leadership decisions increasingly revolve around what presents well on paper rather than what serves pupils or communities. A subject requiring workshops, specialist tools and industry expertise simply cannot compete with a classroom-based academic course that boosts a school’s Progress 8 score.
This creates a vicious cycle. The system devalues practical learning, so fewer students choose it. Fewer students choosing it leads to smaller departments and less funding. The pathway shrinks, proving to policymakers that ‘demand isn’t there’ and the cycle continues. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of neglect.
Each new vocational reform collapses for predictable reasons, drawn directly from the frontline failures catalogued in Education in Turmoil.
The truth is painfully simple: the son of a toolmaker cannot design an apprenticeship for an electrician. Yet this is precisely the logic of our reforms, drafted in Whitehall by policymakers whose understanding of industry is theoretical at best. They create frameworks that look elegant on paper but are unworkable on the ground, ensuring each new initiative is doomed from the start.
A PGCE-qualified teacher cannot replace a master tradesperson, nor should they. Schools are already ‘drowning in bureaucracy, compliance, and inspection frameworks’. They are institutions built for classroom instruction, not workshop training. Expecting them to deliver complex vocational education with authenticity is a fantasy.
A classroom cannot mimic a garage, construction site, studio, farm or theatre. The essential ‘craft’ is learned through doing, alongside experts, in an environment where the stakes are real. Apprenticeships used to provide this, but as they have become formalised and academicised, they have often lost their vital connection to the shop floor.
Britain’s vocational failures are not merely structural: they are cultural. We once built industries that shaped the world. Now we struggle to train enough plumbers to maintain our own infrastructure.
Schooling has become profoundly performative. Leaders produce policies, not provision; optics, not outcomes. This same theatrical mindset infects vocational reform. Politicians love announcing ‘skills revolutions’. They rarely remain long enough to implement them. Initiatives are launched with fanfare, only to be quietly shelved when the political wind changes or the difficult, long-term work of building employer partnerships begins.
We suffer from a collective cultural amnesia, forgetting that national prosperity was built on skilled hands as well as educated minds. This amnesia is sustained by a leadership class in education that often mirrors corporate management focused on growth targets, brand reputation and data returns rather than the slow, hard work of nurturing craft.
To break this debilitating cycle, Britain must confront three unambiguous truths.
Vocational education must be genuinely valued. Parity of esteem cannot be legislated or announced in a White Paper. It must be earned through demonstrable quality, rigour, and clear pathways to good careers. This requires a sustained, cross-party commitment that survives electoral cycles.
Industry, not Whitehall, must lead technical training. Real apprenticeships work when employers shape them, fund them, and see direct value in them. The role of government should be to enable and quality-assure these partnerships, not to micromanage the curriculum from Westminster.
Schools must stop pretending they can do everything. A system already strained by safeguarding crises, soaring SEND needs, and relentless inspection pressure cannot also run credible versions of industry training. We need clarity of purpose. Schools teach foundations. Industry teaches craft. This is not a failure of schools, but a necessary division of labour. Genuine parity begins when we acknowledge that both pillars are equally essential and require distinct ecosystems to thrive.
This is not only an educational debate; it is a cultural one. A nation that forgets the dignity of skilled work forgets how to thrive. The circular history of vocational policy reveals a hard truth: whenever Britain drifts too far into abstraction, bureaucracy, and academic elitism, we end up painfully rediscovering our need for skilled labour.
My hope is that we finally break this cycle rather than repeating it for another generation. The solutions are not mysterious. They require humility to learn from history, courage to challenge the academic orthodoxy, and the political will to empower employers and communities.
If Britain is to rebuild its economy, its communities, and its sense of identity, vocational education must stop being a political gimmick and start becoming a national mission. The lesson has been taught for decades. It is time we finally chose to learn it.
