Teach Them The Trade, Then Give Them The Yard

Paul Knaggs writes:

This August, a few hundred young people in England will collect results in a qualification that no longer accepts students. The Onsite Construction T Level has been closed to new entrants. Uptake was limited and demand was judged insufficient, so the September 2024 intake became the last. 

Read that again slowly. A nation that cannot build enough houses, that cannot find enough bricklayers, roofers or groundworkers, has just shut down the technical qualification for building houses. Not because the work dried up. Because the pipeline into it was too thin to justify keeping the door open. 

That is the country Andy Burnham inherited. And it is why the announcement he made this week deserves something the Tribune does not hand out often: credit.

WHAT HE HAS ACTUALLY SAID 

Speaking at a train manufacturing site in Derby, Burnham said: “We’ve had a system built for too long around the university route and it sends a message to some young people that they’re some kind of second-class citizens, and it’s just not right. 

“They need an education system that works for them as well, that offers a path to all young people, that’s balanced between academic and technical.” 

The prime minister said he was “on a mission” to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training – known as “Neet” – but declined to put a target date on his ambition. 

“The trend is rising at the moment, so the first thing I’ve got to do is to stop that rise,” he said. 

“It’s hard to put a firm date on the moment when you can say there are fewer than now.” 

From September 2028, pupils in England will be able to take technical education pathways from the age of fourteen. From Year 10, students will combine core academic subjects such as English and maths with technical education linked to the jobs available where they live, paired with work experience and connections to local employers. Ofsted will change how it inspects and measures schools so that high quality technical provision counts for something. The Prime Minister framed it as ending the idea that only the academic route earns respect, telling young people they can choose “construction, coding or classics” and be valued either way. 

The backdrop is a NEET figure now above one million. A million young people not in education, not in employment, not in training. Not idle. Unused. 

The Ofsted change matters more than the headline. School league tables have been the engine of the problem for thirty years. A head teacher judged on Progress 8 and university destinations has every incentive to shove a child towards A levels whether or not they belong there, and no incentive whatsoever to build a workshop. Change what you measure and you change what schools do. That is the one lever in this announcement that is genuinely load bearing.

WE HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS 

In 2021, this publication asked how twenty pence per day was supposed to help the children in our patch catch up, and made the argument that education policy in Britain has been built almost entirely around the cleverest poor children and almost not at all around the rest. Maurice Glasman put the collapse in terms that still sting: in 1972 there were twice as many apprenticeships as undergraduates, and now there are ten times more undergraduates than apprenticeships. 

That inversion was not an accident of the market. It was policy. Polytechnics became universities. Manual labour was assumed, by people who had never done any, to be on its way out. The professional class redesigned the education system in its own image and then expressed surprise that the sons and daughters of the heartlands did not thrive in it. 

The 1944 settlement promised a technical tier alongside the grammar and the secondary modern. It was barely built. Every attempt since has followed the same arc. 

THE GRAVEYARD OF GOOD INTENTIONS 

Britain does not lack ideas about technical education. It has a cemetery full of them. 

Sir Mike Tomlinson reported in 2004 and recommended a single unified diploma framework covering academic and vocational learning, ending the two tier settlement outright. The Blair government rejected the core proposal and kept only the 14 to 19 diplomas, which were introduced and then wound down when the coalition took office in 2011. Sir David Bell, a former Chief Inspector, has called that refusal the greatest missed opportunity in English education since the war. 

Then came T Levels. Six years in, the numbers tell their own story. 27,446 learners started a T Level in 2025 to 2026, up from 25,508 the year before. Against that, 1.5 per cent of sixteen and seventeen year olds in England were studying T Levels in 2023, compared with 45.2 per cent doing A levels. Around a quarter of the 2023 cohort did not complete the course. 

Twenty-six years of ministerial speeches about parity of esteem have produced a technical route used by one child in sixty-six. 

So the honest question about Burnham’s announcement is not whether the intention is good. The intention has always been good. The question is what makes 2028 different from 2008, and from 2020, and from 1944. 

THE CASE AGAINST, PUT FAIRLY 

The objection deserves a proper hearing, because it is not stupid and it is not made in bad faith. 

Sorting children into tracks at fourteen has a history, and it is not a happy one. The eleven plus branded children failures before puberty and the damage followed them for life. Michael Young saw it at the time and spent his career building ladders back up for the people it discarded. Move the sorting age to fourteen and you have moved it three years, not abolished it. 

Worse, everyone knows which children get sorted where. The technical pathway will not be filling up with the sons of Cabinet ministers. It will fill up with our children, in our towns, and if it turns out to be a holding pen rather than a route, we will have volunteered a generation for it. 

Then there is the delivery problem, which is dull and decisive. Colleges cannot recruit specialist teachers, because anyone qualified to teach electrical installation can earn considerably more installing electrics. The funding uplift for providers moving to T Levels was cut from ten per cent to five. You cannot conjure workshops, lathes and qualified instructors out of a press release, and no government since the war has been willing to pay what they cost. 

All of that is true. None of it is an argument for the status quo. It is an argument that the announcement is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, and that the missing piece is not in the classroom at all. 

THE COUNCIL YARD IS THE MISSING HALF 

Here is what has been wrong with every technical education reform in living memory. Each one has tried to fix the supply of skills while leaving the demand for them entirely in private hands. 

You can teach a sixteen year old in Salford to wire a consumer unit. Whether there is a firm within twenty miles willing to take him on, train him properly and pay him decently is a matter over which the Department for Education has precisely no control. That is why the construction T Level died. Not because the skill was unwanted, but because the route from the qualification to a life was too uncertain for young people to gamble two years on. 

Which brings us to the thing this publication has argued for since 2024, and which Burnham has stopped just short of. 

Councils used to build. Direct Labour Organisations put up the estates, maintained them, and trained the tradespeople who did it. Then the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 forced DLOs to compete for their own construction and maintenance work, and the Local Government Act 1988 extended compulsory tendering across local authority services. Britain became the only country in Europe where competitive tendering for local government services was compelled by law. The yards were broken up, the apprenticeships went with them, and the training of Britain’s tradespeople was handed to a contracting market that trains only what it must. 

The bill for that has now arrived. The CITB forecasts that construction needs an average of 41,200 additional workers every year between 2026 and 2030, warning that too few people are entering, too many experienced workers are leaving, and that the strain falls directly on housing, infrastructure and retrofit. 

So build the council homes, end the Right to Buy that hollowed out the stock, and bring back the council yard alongside them. 

A local authority building and maintaining its own housing has permanent, predictable, publicly controlled demand for exactly the trades the new pathways would teach. It can guarantee the apprenticeship at the end, which no white paper can. It can pay the rate, which no charity can. The surplus from rents goes back into services, parks and community centres rather than into a landlord’s second home. And a fourteen year old choosing the technical route would be choosing something with a visible destination at the end of it, which is the only thing that has ever made a vocational qualification credible to a working class family. 

That is joined up thinking. Skills policy and housing policy and industrial policy are the same policy, and they have been filed in separate cabinets for forty years.

WHAT TO DEMAND 

Burnham has opened a door. Three things determine whether anyone walks through it. 

Funding attached to the announcement, published, ring-fenced, and sufficient to buy workshops and pay instructors what the trade pays them. Without it this is a rebadging exercise. 

A guaranteed destination. Every technical pathway must terminate in a named apprenticeship or job, and where the private market will not supply one, the public sector must. Council yards, direct labour, retrofit teams, and the maintenance of the homes we are about to build. 

And an honest answer on the timetable. September 2028 means the first cohort sits nothing until summer 2030, well past the next general election. A government that means it starts the funding now and starts the yards now, rather than leaving the delivery to whoever is standing there afterwards. 

We have been told for eighty years that the technical route is coming and that it will be respected. It has never been respected, because respect in this country is measured in wages and security, not in ministerial adjectives. Give a young person a trade and nowhere to practise it and you have not opened a door. You have shown them the wall it was painted on. 

Teach them the trade. Then give them the yard.