Andy Burnham: We’ll value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.

What is holding back our teenagers isn’t lack of ambition but the skills and experience to make the most of it says the prime minister writing in todays Times.

Travel a few miles anywhere in Britain and things begin to change. The accents, the food, the footy kits that kids wear — and the history we’re proud of too. Every place has its own story. It’s one of the things I love about this country. But for all that diversity, we still educate our kids like every place is the same.

These new routes won’t be designed by Westminster. They’ll be shaped by the people and places they serve. Working with mayors, local leaders, employers and schools, we’ll identify the industries driving growth in local areas and make sure that local kids have a clear route into them.

Whether that’s advanced manufacturing in the northwest, clean energy on the east coast, life sciences in the Midlands or creative industries in our cities, education will prepare our young people for the future that’s being built around them. And as we work to reindustrialise our regions, these new tech pathways will be designed to ensure growing local industries have the skilled employees they need to succeed.

That’s why I see this as more than just education reform. It’s a different approach to welfare too.

Andy Burnham ‘we must make Britain a technical education superpower’

I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s the legacy of choices Britain made decades ago. As power was centralised and industries disappeared across our towns and cities, we didn’t just lose jobs, we lost the ladders that helped generations of young people climb into them. Local apprenticeships faded, technical education was pushed into the background and practical skills came to be seen as somehow second class.

It was my generation that lived through those choices, but it’s our kids who now face the consequences. Today, as highlighted by the Milburn Review, a million young people are not in education, employment or training (known as Neets).

It would be easy to push the blame on them. Why don’t they work a bit harder? Why don’t they want it a bit more? But the truth is: they are and they do. What’s holding them back isn’t ambition, but the skills and experience to make the most of it. We know that one of the key reasons we have a higher proportion of Neets than other countries is our relatively low take-up of technical education, which has been shrinking over the past ten years.

For too long, we’ve built an education system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk. That opened doors for millions of people, and rightly so. But somewhere along the way, we sent another message too: that if your ambition was to do something that required more technical skills, somehow you were aiming lower.

I think that was one of the biggest mistakes this country has made. In the age of AI, practical and technical skills haven’t become less valuable — they’ve become more valuable than ever. Britain will need brilliant engineers, electricians and cybersecurity experts more than ever before.

Our job — our national task — is to rebuild those ladders of opportunity, rung by rung, step by step, together.

That’s why today we’re putting technical education back where it belongs — not as a second thought, but as a first choice. From the age of 14, we will be giving kids a new option in school: keeping core maths, English and science, but combining them with a real, hands-on technical education. This will include gaining work experience and creating connections with local employers.

Instead of 16-year-olds leaving school with only dead ends, we’re investing early — helping young people build successful working lives from the start. It isn’t the only answer — we’ll need to look at the health of our young people too — but it is an essential part of building a country that supports success rather than pays for failure. I’m determined to unlock the potential of the next generation, tackle the youth unemployment crisis, and bring the welfare bill down in a way that lasts.

But above all, it’s about changing the message we send to our kids. Because there isn’t just one future worth preparing them for — there are many. And it’s about time we treated every single one with the same respect.

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