Rewiring Education

The Centre for Social Justice is embarking on a major mission to improve technical education across this country.

Academic schooling in this country has a deep and rich inheritance, with some of the greatest schools and universities in the world. But we have been left with a profoundly unbalanced education system, where the academic pathway dominates and the technical pathway has been marginalised, misunderstood, and underappreciated.

We need to comprehensively rewire technical education, and doing so means understanding its purpose and value. Shaped by industry, tailored regionally, simple and clear, prioritised earlier, and based on what works.

The academic-technical imbalance we have today has left us with a distorted education system, where those behind at age 11 fall further behind, especially boys, and where London dominates.

This has also left us with a distorted labour market.

We have a NEETs crisis – almost one million 16-to-24-year-olds are NEET, and three in five of them have no qualifications beyond GCSEs.

We also have too many graduates. 37 per cent of graduates are over-qualified for their jobs – the highest rate in the OECD – and graduates from universities outside the top 20 are twice as likely to be in low skilled work as those from inside the top 20.

Accordingly, we also have serious skills shortages. Nearly half of vacancies in the construction sector and skilled trades are the result of skills shortages.

We must rebalance our education system, and create a genuine technical pathway, valued by young people, employers, and the public on its own terms. This report kicks off that process.

Reform of this scale will take energy, focus and time. But a better future for millions of young people, and a more resilient British economy, is the prize for getting it right. Please get in touch if you would like to contribute to our mission to rewire education and restore the place of technical learning for good.