Are we holding young people back needlessly, and damaging their life chances for no good reason?

Every year in England a third of 16 year olds leave school without a grade 4 in English and maths. GCSE grades are pegged to what similar cohorts achieved before, so a third of people fail by definition. Roy Blatchford, who chaired ASCL’s commission on this, coined the name: the Forgotten Third. One third must fail, the commission noted, in order that two thirds pass.^[1] What happens to the Forgotten Third is the most fixable thing in education, and fixing it is the biggest opportunity the skills sector has had in decades.^[2]

Last week I argued that the bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing, and that it was never much of a training ground. This week: the people we’ve been holding back.

People are capable of more than their qualifications say. The skills sector knows this, because it has watched it happen at the top. Andrew Walker, managing director of TQUK, part of the AQA group, left school into a YTS in 1997, took a vocational path rather than the college and university route, and was running TQUK by 2012; his degree came afterwards, part-time, while he was already running an awarding body. The late David Gallagher decided against university, was working at BT in his mid-twenties, and became chief executive of NCFE, one of the country’s oldest awarding bodies, at 38. When he died in July, aged 45, the tributes came from every corner of the sector. The people who run the qualifications system did not climb it in order.[2]

So, here is the opportunity, and it is a big one. Get clear about the skills that count now. Design qualifications and curricula around them. Route young people to the highest level they can reach by playing to their strengths, rather than the lowest level permitted by their weakest subject. There are good reasons to think many of the Forgotten Third can skip the bottom rungs of the ladder and start adding value much earlier. The ladder forgot them. The world of work has no reason to, and every reason not to. That is why I think their rise is coming, and we have the opportunity to help.

I’ve spent six years running careers programmes for 16 to 24 year olds, in schools, colleges and a Jobcentre referral group, and I’ve written up what I learned separately.^[3] The short version: people surprise you. At one school, four Year 12s had been tracked off A levels so their results wouldn’t pull the school’s averages down; one of them was as sharp an entrepreneur as I have met, and I’ve interviewed a lot of people. In Tower Hamlets there was a girl, young for her year, who would give a talk with real presence and then, the moment she finished, slump, cover her mouth and giggle, back to being a child. Just before Christmas she stood up to present on her career aspirations and it burst out of her: space technology, researched properly, specific companies, specific jobs. Nothing in her file predicted it.

Real people’s skills are spiky. I’ve worked with a very academic learner with weak social skills, and with a young man without Level 2 maths who was a natural leader; let him lead, and get someone else on the team to do the maths. I’ve worked with a maths-phobic Level 2 learner who was, by any honest measure, a Level 6 or 7 mentor. And I know a college tutor who doesn’t tell her Level 2 learners that the award they are taking is Level 3, because “they can feel so frightened when they hear ‘Level 3’”. The label was the barrier; the content never was. Academic cognitive skills matter less than they did, because that is exactly what AI does, and with those skills no longer scarce there is a unique opportunity to let the Forgotten Third play to their strengths. The rest of the profile is where those strengths are. (I could do a whole piece on spiky profiles; if you’d like it, say so in the comments.)

This is not a plea to drop every requirement and hope for the best.^[4] Some requirements are genuinely necessary for the job; but many of the ones we use are just old habits, kept because we haven’t got clear about what counts now. Of course, what counts is changing. So look out for the rise of the Forgotten Third.

By the way, a consensus seems to be emerging on what work stays valuable for humans as AI enters the workplace. More on that coming up.

Notes

[1] The Forgotten Third, final report of the ASCL Commission of Inquiry chaired by Roy Blatchford, September 2019.

[2] The resit route is widely judged to have failed. Lucy Powell calls it a “hamster wheel” and has committed to a stepping-stone qualification from 2028 (statement on post-16 English and maths, Aug 2026). Aug 2026 resit results: 13.6% maths, 18.8% English (17 to 19 year olds). Seema Malhotra, “Functional skills aren’t functioning”, LabourList, 27 Aug 2026 (”confused high expectations with identical expectations”). Schools Week, 29 Apr 2026: of those without Level 2 maths at 16, 83.5% still without it at 19. Employers: only 6% of 5,000 UK job adverts analysed in summer 2026 asked for a degree (HR Press, Inside 5,000 UK job adverts, Jun 2026).

[3] Six years in the room (In Practice).

[4] Dropping a requirement without replacing the signal does little on its own. A grade 4 tells an employer something beyond arithmetic, which is that this person persisted. And when American firms dropped degree requirements at scale, most changed in name only, because the hiring manager just reached for the next proxy: Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, Feb 2024 (45% of firms changed “in name only”; net effect fewer than 1 in 700 hires).

The career ladder is breaking down. The bottom rungs especially are hollowing out, and a lot of serious people are talking about it. Alan Milburn’s review for the government found that “the first rungs on the old career ladder have weakened”, with apprenticeship starts for young people down by more than 40 per cent.^[1]

Not all of this is due to AI. The decline predates ChatGPT. In addition, the cost of employing an 18 year old is up 40 per cent since 2015.^[2] But AI is an accelerant, and it is not the first. I’ve watched the PC, Office, the internet, offshoring, the cloud and SaaS each take a layer of work that used to occupy people, make it cheap, and make the rest of us more productive.

Here is what my own first rung taught me. In the late 1980s I joined a property developer, with six months on another firm’s graduate scheme already behind me. On one of my first days, I went to a colleague and asked if he had any work for me. He was in the middle of something that actually mattered to the company, and I was in his way, so he gave me a task. We both knew it was made up. He didn’t care whether I did it, and I did it anyway, because that is what the bottom rung was. My boss had told me on my first day that I would be useless for two years. I thought three to six months. He was right, and I suspect he was being generous.

Anyone who has designed a work-experience placement knows this from the other side. Giving a young person something useful to do, that isn’t a drain on every member of staff involved, is very hard to do well. Very often the value of the placement to a firm is negative.

Much of the work that once kept juniors busy can now be done by AI that an experienced person puts in place. So it’s getting harder to design junior roles. The bottom rung existed because there was grunt work that needed doing by someone who couldn’t say no. Whatever the junior learned, they learned by osmosis, from whoever happened to sit nearby, over two or three years. It was never designed as teaching, and it was not particularly good teaching.

Policy responses are arriving to fix the creaking first rung. Alan Milburn launched First Chance last week, asking employers to open entry-level jobs, work experience and apprenticeships to young people; Royal Mail, Octopus Energy, Greene King, Lloyds and NatWest have signed up.^[3] In Preston, a pilot is putting young people at risk of becoming NEET through three weeks of AI training with apprenticeships at the end from BAE Systems, Heinz and JD Sports.^[4] I hope all of it works.

I’d argue that if rebuilding the first rung is going to work, it must teach something on purpose, and we need to decide what that something is. That raises a question this publication exists to answer: which skills count now? We need to get clear about those, then teach them formally, rather than hoping they arrive as a by-product of donkey work that no longer exists. Some employers have already started thinking this way. Lucy Beaumont of SHL, which assesses graduates for employers, describes a large bank now recruiting psychology and law graduates on the grounds that the technical skills can be taught, and “it doesn’t really matter where you’ve come from.”^[5] That instinct is right, and it needs a framework behind it, so that colleges can teach to it and employers can trust the certificate. In the meantime, anyone signing up to First Chance can start by deciding what their placement will teach before the young person walks in.

That is what After the Ladder is for: to understand, articulate and build frameworks around the skills that count now. We must help people to find and build on their strengths, carry responsibility earlier than the ladder allowed, and multiply what they can do using the tools and people around them. A consensus is emerging on this, which I’ll come to in future posts. The young people I meet on careers programmes are not asking for a forecast of which jobs will go. They want to know how to succeed at work, and they need us to chart a positive way forward for them.

One more thing. Everything above still assumes young people need years of drudgery before they can be useful. I’ve spent six years working with 16 to 24 year olds and I no longer believe that. Next week: The inevitable rise of the Forgotten Third.

Notes

[1] Young people and work: interim report, Alan Milburn for DWP, 28 May 2026. Also: six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job (four in ten twenty years ago); nearly 30% of NEETs have good GCSEs, 15% a degree (gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report). In the United States, Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab finds employment among 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed jobs running 19 per cent below trend, almost entirely through hiring that never happened (Canaries in the Coal Mine, updated Sep 2026; thesignal.substack.com/p/ai-is-phasing-out-the-entry-level). The Open University Business Barometer 2026 reports 19% of 1,500 UK business leaders have already cut entry-level recruitment; of those, 42% cite AI. And the people who hire graduates for a living are blunt about what that means: entry-level jobs, says Lucy Beaumont of SHL, “are your training ground. If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder” (CNBC, 23 Sep 2026).

[2] Tony Blair Institute, reported by the Independent, 23 Sep 2026

[3] First Chance launch, FE News, 22 Sep 2026

[4] The Guardian, 13 Sep 2026

[5] Lucy Beaumont, SHL, interviewed by CNBC, 23 Sep 2026 (see [1]).

Those are the eight business functions every organisation needs. In a two-person start-up, the same person who writes the pitch deck is also chasing the invoices and fixing the website. A multinational corporation has a department for each function full of specialists. The eight:

• Sales

• Marketing

• Customer Support

• Finance

• HR and Training

• IT

• Project Management

• Team Leadership

I call them Portable Skills, because they can travel with you1. They are everything that isn’t product- or industry-specific, and that is exactly why they are portable. Get good at one of them and you are employable in any industry, at any age, in any economy.

Portable Skills are the durable architecture of work: the structural walls stay put but get painted a different colour. By framing employability in terms of industries rather than Portable Skills, young people are exposed to every swing of sectoral churn, at exactly the moment the swings are getting bigger.

I’ve spent some years now working with young people, many of whose futures the system has already started to close down, prematurely in my view, because they have real potential. Holding people back to retake GCSE Maths is a case in point. More than a thousand young people have now been through a short online unit on Portable Skills with my skills training business.

They rated their strengths and weaknesses across the eight Portable Skills and named their strongest. For the learners it was eye-opening. Nobody had told them before.

Here is the puzzle. Everyone in skills education agrees that employability matters. Yet almost nobody teaches Portable Skills. What gets taught instead is “soft skills”: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, resilience. The sector has been talking about soft skills for thirty years without employers feeling noticeably better served. For nearly twenty of those years the CBI’s employer surveys reported two thirds of employers dissatisfied with school leavers’ “business and customer awareness”22, and in all that time nobody has written a curriculum for it.

What’s wrong with soft skills

Nothing, as far as they go. The trouble is you can’t prove them and many people find them too woolly. “I’m a good communicator” is a claim that employers have learned to ignore. Learners are told to develop communication skills, but often don’t know specifically how to improve. The same goes for time management: everyone agrees it matters, and almost no one can say what getting better at it involves.

Now swap the frame. Instead of “I’m curious”, a learner builds a spreadsheet that models a small business’s profit and loss and recommends where to save money. Now that’s something every employer understands.

Why the sector misses Portable Skills

Four reasons, I think.

• Who writes the frameworks. Employability frameworks are mostly written by professional educators, and this is no criticism of them, but 82 per cent of jobs in the UK are in the private sector 33. The eight Portable Skills are not what a working life in education is organised around.

• Terminology lock-in. Policy and funding bodies talk about “soft skills” and “transferable skills”. Colleges mirror that language, because it is the language they are funded in. Employers use it too, but find it too vague to hire on.

• The system certifies inputs. Qualifications certify what you know and what you can do, not the value you can deliver to someone else. A unit on “communication” fits that system neatly. A unit on “can this person run the customer-support inbox for a week and make good decisions” does not. So the system has quietly selected the thing it can assess rather than the thing employers need.

• Sectoral slicing. Where employers do get a seat at the table, in apprenticeship standards, their brief is to defend their own sector. That is fine, but it means the world of work is sliced into more than seven hundred apprenticeship standards (Germany manages with under five hundred), 44 and a seventeen-year-old is asked to pick one. Most freeze. Eight Portable Skills is a list a person can actually get their head around.

The wrong question

The sector has been asking the wrong question.

• Sectoral lens: “Which industry will this learner work in?”

• Portable Skills lens: “What will this learner be able to do for any employer?”

The first is a gamble; industries rise and fall. The second is insurance; the eight Portable Skills are always needed.

A Portable Skills checklist isn’t polite: it might say “you’d be good at finance and mediocre at sales”, and the sector is not comfortable saying that to a seventeen-year-old. It should be. It’s the most useful thing anyone told me at that age.

The checklist I use for assessing Portable Skills is free for non-commercial use; it’s in the Frameworks menu, at the top of the page. If you run a college or employment programme and you think it is useful, please subscribe and download it.

Notes

England’s 38 Local Skills Improvement Plans, written between 2023 and 2025, asked employers about the skills gaps in their local area. They keep naming soft skills and work-readiness, especially in young people.1 So, I want to share my experience from the field delivering work-readiness programmes including soft skills to young people in different settings.

It’s tempting, when thinking about preparing young people for work, to treat them as one group. But they aren’t. The 17-year-old on a two-year BTEC, one resitting GCSE maths for the third time, a sixth-former with a university offer and a NEET 22-year-old referred by a Jobcentre want different things from a work-readiness programme and respond differently to the content.

This is a practitioner’s map of those groups, drawn from six years of designing and delivering programmes and qualifications in essential work skills, much of it in the room as well as online.

The extent and limits of my experience

Set out below is my experience at the time of writing, October 2026, so you can judge what transfers to your own context. You may have more experience than me in your area of specialism.

I have taught work-readiness and entrepreneurship face to face in five schools in north-west London and Tower Hamlets, including a day a week for two years at a Tower Hamlets school with two cohorts of BTEC students aged 16 to 17.

Working with a team, we created online units from the material previously delivered face to face. This was quality assured and endorsed by an awarding body as a Level 3 Award in Essential Work Skills, and since extended to Levels 1 and 2. I watched the online version being delivered in seven FE colleges and one sixth form college in England and one college in Wales, mostly with Level 2 and Level 3 vocational learners and less often with A level students and adult learners.2 This included a complex implementation at one FE college across four campuses, with 371 learners and 17 college tutors delivering the programme in 13 subject areas.3 I spent four years working on the delivery and support model that sits behind the online units. I have worked with one NEET group: eight young adults aged 19 to 24, referred through a Jobcentre in Somerset.

My Level 1 experience is thin, as is my experience in higher education. I have no experience with NEET groups aged over 25, which a prime contractor bidding for employment-support work asked me about recently; I had to say no.

The programme materials (described for context) are short units of three to eight hours in financial literacy, public speaking, developing a winning mentality, entrepreneurship, mandatory topics such as Prevent, consent and fundamental British values, and something we call Portable Skills. Portable Skills are the eight business functions that exist in every commercial organisation: sales, marketing, customer support, finance, HR and training, IT, project management and team leadership. Learners explore which of the eight is a good fit for them, and how those functions fit together in an organisation. The units make up the Level 1 to 3 Awards I designed, so that is my interest, on the table.

What follows is the settings I have worked in, the groups inside each, and how they respond to work-readiness provision of this type.

Further education

For readers who came up through sixth form and university, a word on FE, because in England roughly half of 16 and 17-year-olds in education are at an FE college or sixth form college.4 A general FE college teaches a wide range of vocational qualifications including business, IT and cybersecurity, media and games design, health and social care, education and early years, construction and the trades, art and design, sports, hospitality and catering, and travel and tourism, cabin crew included. Many also teach some A levels. The vocational qualifications are BTECs and T Levels, with changes on the way. FE also contains two things school sixth forms barely do: whole Level 2 and Level 1 cohorts, on their own courses with their own timetables.5

Level 3

Level 3 learners are typically on a two-year BTEC or T Level. As a group they are bright, keen and confident, and they know where they are going: most into work, some into apprenticeships (hard to get), some stay in college and take Level 4 or 5 courses in their field, and some go on to university. An education and early years group I met in Essex (all girls) could tell me their future route in detail: which course next, how many years, whether nursery or primary school, special needs or mainstream. Level 3 learners are willing to complete online learning partly in their own time. They relish being given a degree of independence and colleges encourage this too. Of the groups I have worked with, Level 3 learners at FE need the least support from the delivery.

What Level 3 learners need from provision: stretch and relevance. They like the material to provide challenge. They need to see specifically how the content will help them be successful in their future career. The message that employers want ‘soft skills’ is too generic to be credible for them.

Level 2

Level 2 is typically a one-year course, and the group is defined less by what they study than by what they don’t have: a grade 4 in GCSE maths or English, usually maths. The year includes a resit, which is compulsory, demoralising and, for more than four in five of them, unsuccessful.6 The Level 2 plumbing group I met in Essex (almost all boys) was a different picture from the Level 3 education and early years girls described above: several had chosen plumbing as a best guess, and their route beyond the course was hazy.

It’s interesting to see what happens when a Level 2 group meets a spreadsheet for the first time in the financial literacy unit, the hardest unit, of our programme. A typical task is a personal budget in a spreadsheet: income at the top, outgoings below, a total at the bottom. Very few of our learners (10 to 15%) have ever used a spreadsheet before. In the first lesson, maybe two or three learners in a Level 2 group of 15 or 18 need support from their tutor. The tutor goes round, one-to-one, pointing at cells. Change the green cell, watch the yellow total move, cut the cost of takeaways, see what happens at the end of the month. The learners get it, and start working on the scenario. They don’t think of it as maths. To them, it’s just an ordinary task in a lesson. And in the next lesson involving a spreadsheet task, they don’t need tutor support.

It makes me feel disappointed that we’re holding young people back who didn’t get a grade 4 in GCSE maths. I have written about this elsewhere.7

An employability coach at a London college didn’t tell her Level 2 learners that the award they were taking was a Level 3 award until they had finished it: “They can feel so frightened when they hear ‘Level 3’ and I don’t want to put them off.” They passed it. At Level 3. The label frightened them more than the content did. It’s worth saying that nothing a plumber or a teaching assistant does all day needs GCSE maths as such. The GCSE maths ‘gate’ is in the entry requirement, not the job. And I’m glad they can now use a spreadsheet.

What Level 2 learners need from provision: a tutor in the room, and broadly the same content as Level 3, but with more support from delivery. In my experience, they are much more capable than many people think. I’d question whether the Level 2 label is helping them.

Level 1

My experience at Level 1 is thinner, so weigh this accordingly. The groups I have seen include a higher proportion of learners with special educational needs, and the surprise, for me, is they are more able than I expected. Level 1 learners can access the content but have a harder time staying on task. Some of them struggle to regulate themselves in a room. Level 1 groups need more staff per learner than Level 2 or Level 3 groups. Lots of emotional support and one-to-one time. Colleges know it, which is why these groups get the most supervision on the timetable.

What Level 1 learners need from provision: classroom management and emotional support. The content itself needs some simplifying, but less than I expected. Again, these young people are capable of more than many people think.

A level

A level learners presented similarly whether at FE college or secondary school. They are harder to engage in skills content than learners on vocational pathways, and it is not a lack of ability. They are strong on cognitive skills, which is why they are doing A levels, and that gives them an advantage in learning practical skills too: they pick the content up fast and do it well. What they lack is a reason to engage in it. They are focused on going to university. In their minds, university is the golden ticket, and anything about skills for work feels like it belongs to a later chapter.

I also see a bias against practical skills among A level students, who may see them as lower value or status than academics. Maybe it is the legacy of ‘working with your mind’ being seen as more valuable and higher status than ‘working with your hands’. The sixth form group I worked with most completed the programme and did well, but needed more pushing and different hooks than the vocational groups I have worked with.

What A level students need from provision: the content itself they handle very well. Colleges and schools need to ensure A level students can see the value of spending time on careers and practical skills qualifications, which isn’t obvious to them. And it wouldn’t hurt if such qualifications were able to attract UCAS points.

Secondary schools

Secondary schools use our programmes with Year 10s and Year 12s, and sometimes Year 9s. Rarely Year 11s or Year 13s. Schools see the value in careers programming, and often have aspirational straplines saying so, but under pressure on exam results they limit curriculum time in an exam year (GCSE and A level) to things that count directly towards exam results.

University

I spent an evening with about 20 undergraduates at my old Cambridge college and found them similar to the A level groups, if anything more so: more convinced that a Cambridge degree is the golden ticket, less inclined to see the point of practical skills, dismissive even, notwithstanding they are closer to the workplace than sixth formers.

This was me, of course, 40 years ago, and it’s surprising how little has changed. I came through a good school, A levels and university, but arrived in the workplace underprepared in practical skills. Many people I talk to outside education feel the same disconnect: that the education system doesn’t do well enough at giving people the practical, non-academic skills to succeed at work and in life. That disconnect is getting bigger as AI hollows out the early rungs of the career ladder where graduates used to learn practical skills on the job.8

NEET aged 19 to 24

My NEET experience is one group of eight, aged 19 to 24, referred by a Jobcentre in Somerset, so this is a small sample. The circumstances in the room correlated strongly with the public reports: care leavers, neurodiversity, a dropped apprenticeship, caring responsibilities at home, severe anxiety, very low prior attainment.9[9] I had met all of those circumstances previously at FE, so none of them was new to me. The main difference was that there were Level 1, 2 and 3 participants all within the same group, and we needed to modify delivery to accommodate that range.

None of that changed how the learners related to the content itself.

The surprise for me was that the participants wanted to work; what they lacked was a practical way into a job that suited their strengths and interests, and where they could see themselves succeeding. They kept turning up every week, which for that group is significant. The first thing we did was ask what they were good at within the eight Portable Skills, with a checklist to help. Participants who arrived believing they had little to offer were naming roles they wanted to pursue within the first session.

From the Jobcentre side there was a higher level of support than in other settings: two to three staff for eight participants. This was appropriate and needed and is clearly an expensive model. The staff had a strong one-to-one relationship with individual participants. They believe the young people are capable of anything they set their mind to. And the young people respond accordingly, which suggests they are probably right.

What NEET participants aged 19 to 24 need from provision: a facilitator who believes in them, a spread of Level 1, 2 and 3 content that helps them identify existing strengths and interests within things that are needed in the workplace and which they may not have previously considered, and practical next steps into a job.

Content differences

A few things I learned about the content, as opposed to the learners.

Academic content versus practical skills content

In an earlier edtech business I wrote and commissioned online revision content for GCSE subjects. When I came to design practical skills content, the difference was dramatic: practical skills need several times less content than an academic subject. That is interesting for the system, because it implies that teaching practical skills at scale is a much easier problem than is generally assumed, provided they are kept as a subject in their own right rather than embedded across the curriculum. Online turns out to be a good medium for teaching topics where the expertise may not be in the room. There is a lot more to say about this, but that is for another post.

Financial literacy

Using spreadsheets is a gateway skill within financial literacy. Very few learners, at any level, had used a spreadsheet before, and I suspect that is true of most school leavers and a good many graduates. Three or four in 20 need help the first time they use a spreadsheet but get over it in one lesson. There is a big spread in aptitude, however, in understanding what the numbers say and what to change for a better outcome: the same budgeting task takes one learner two or three minutes and another needs help to finished after 40. The spread in aptitude doesn’t correlate with Level as much as you might think. And appears to be separate from ‘maths’ skills.

Public speaking

Comfort with public speaking varies enormously; ability varies much less, and tracks neither level nor the introvert and extrovert split. The boy who is mortified to stand up can be compelling on a subject he knows. Our unit is based on the Toastmasters philosophy that public speaking is mostly about practice: how many times you have done it. That has been my experience delivering our programme.

Portable Skills

Nobody I worked with had been told previously how work is organised: the eight business functions that every commercial organisation must do (sales, marketing, customer support, finance, HR and training, IT, project management and team leadership), or where their strengths lie within them. It’s a very good thing for young people to know early in their career. We needed to contextualise this content for learners on vocational pathways according to subject area, so learners could see the relevance to their chosen vocation.

Staffing considerations

Across every setting I have worked in, FE, schools and the Jobcentre, I have met tutors and facilitators who love the kids and build strong relationships with them. Young people respond to that: they step up, stretch themselves and enjoy the process. What those tutors often lack is a curriculum to work from, so the information young people are given about the workplace is inconsistent. A consistent, expert-written curriculum would let those tutors do the part they are good at.

In conclusion

Looking back across the groups, the content needed didn’t change much. What changed was the support: very little at Level 3, a tutor in the room at Level 2, more staff per learner at Level 1, two or three staff for eight at the Jobcentre. If I were designing provision for a region, that is the variable I would plan and cost by group, and I would expect the money to run the opposite way to the numbers: most learners in the cheapest-to-serve groups, most cost in the smallest.

That is the field guide. I hope it helps you navigate provision in your context. If your patch looks different, I would like to hear it; you may have more groups of learners behind you than I do.

Notes

My experience is different. I’ve spent six years in rooms with 16- to 19-year-olds, in state schools, private schools, colleges and a Jobcentre, and I haven’t seen the gap in aspirations the report describes.2 I’ve met 17-year-olds who want to work, want to do well, and have never been told how. Alan Milburn’s review found the same at scale: 84 per cent of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) said they want a job, education or training, and “the challenge is not a lack of aspiration.”3

It’s worth bearing in mind that 82 per cent of UK jobs are in the private sector.4 Most young people are going into companies. From my experience, the ones who are better prepared learnt it at home.

It is a literacy gap, not an aspirations gap. Schools teach two literacies with great seriousness, maths and English, and measure them to the decimal point. Nobody teaches a third: how a business works, what it pays for, where you’d fit in one and what you’d need to show to be hired. Families who have that knowledge pass it on over dinner. Families who don’t, can’t. Before the Elementary Education Act in 1870, access to numeracy and literacy depended on family circumstances, and it took a national education system to make access universal.

So why has 20 years of careers policy not closed the gap for work-readiness? Two reasons. First, none of it counts. Schools and colleges do what performance measures and university admissions reward, and careers activity isn’t a qualification recognised in school performance tables, or expected by admissions tutors or employers. Second, the expertise isn’t in the building. Teachers are very good at teaching academic subjects. Nobody hired them to know what a commercial workplace will want in 10 years. It’s no criticism of teachers to say so. Asking teachers to embed commercial skills across the curriculum asks for knowledge that isn’t widespread in the profession.

“Fundamental reform” isn’t needed. A light, universal entitlement at secondary level: an hour a week over two to four academic years would solve the work-readiness problem. Online delivery would work well because that is how you deliver cheaply and consistently to every learner in a situation where commercial experience in the building is thin. The content required is small. In my career, I’ve built revision material for 27 GCSE subjects; it turns out the commercial content a young person needs is a fraction of that. Much of it already exists: Young Enterprise has run student companies for decades; several companies offer online courses and qualifications for work-readiness; my own skills training business included. What none of it does is count: none of it is recognised in performance tables, or in the criteria admissions tutors or employers take seriously. Make work-readiness qualifications eligible for school performance measures and let them count towards university, college, apprenticeship or a job, and the change will happen on its own.

Try instead to embed careers education across the curriculum and I’ll see you in 10 years, when it still hasn’t happened. Ten years is ten year groups, around seven million young people in England, not being adequately prepared for working life, which is the hidden cost of an attempt at educational reform that won’t work.5

Keep the provision light, make it count, and we can solve the problem in two to three years rather than, effectively, never.

Notes

I’m optimistic about the future of work

Like everyone else and their dog, I’ve got opinions about the future of work. Mine come from thirty years of building EdTech businesses through every technology wave since the PC, and from spending a lot of time with the young people the future of work is supposed to be about. So I’ve got that on the dog. Whether it makes me right, you can judge.

The AI-and-work debate risks settling into a dour consensus in which serious people compete to be the most worried. I’ve been to the meetings. Nobody is having a good time, including the people who are right. I’m going to take the other side: not because the fear is unfounded, but because it’s half the picture, and I think the smaller half. The opportunities are bigger.

Predicting the future is a dangerous game. Some things about the future are predictable, and some are not. And it’s helpful to know which is which. I feel there is easily enough that’s predictable about the future to build effective strategies … either as an individual or for the system as a whole.

The opportunity

The tools now arriving let one person do what used to take a team. They make expertise cheap and put capabilities in the hands of a nineteen-year-old that were reserved, ten years ago, for people with a department behind them. If we are heading towards anything like the abundance that Bill Gates and others describe, the scarce and valuable thing won’t be knowing how to do the work. It will be being the person who can be trusted to deliver an outcome: someone who can hold real responsibility, direct capable tools and colleagues, and answer for the result. That’s a bigger role than most entry-level jobs offered before, a more interesting one, and there will be more of it to go round, not less.

The problem is that how we educate people doesn’t prepare them for it.

One small group

Here’s what it looks like when you ask a different question. This summer I was working with a small group of young adults referred by the Jobcentre in Taunton, Somerset: people who’d left education early or been told they couldn’t progress. The first thing we did was ask what they were good at, with a checklist to help. Within the first session, people who’d arrived believing they had little to offer were saying ‘actually, I can do that’ and naming roles in finance, in care and in management that they wanted to pursue. They kept turning up every week, which for that group is not nothing, and within a few weeks most had a direction they hadn’t had before. It’s one small group and I won’t over-claim from it. But it is not what the dour consensus predicts.

I’ve seen this before, kind of

I’ve spent decades building technology businesses through the eras of the PC, the internet, cloud and software-as-a-service. Each wave did the same two things at once: it took over some of the work people used to be paid for, and it made each hour of the remaining work worth more. Adam Smith’s pin factory, again and again. AI is bigger and faster than previous waves. It is unique in certain ways. But so were all the others. And what each wave left behind was the same: the parts of the job that can’t be automated, which mostly means being the person accountable for the result. I’ve watched that responsibility move up the organisation with every wave. This time it moves further and faster. That’s the whole problem, and the whole opportunity.

For what it’s worth: SAM Learning, which I founded in 2000, ran in hundreds of UK secondary schools; Penda Learning did something similar in the US; about five million students have used EdTech software my companies have built. In 2014 my wife Maxine and I funded research at Alliance Manchester Business School into the gap between what education produces and what employers value. In 2022–23 I led a consultation on innovation in education for the Foundation for Education Development, and a couple of dozen serious people (a former Permanent Secretary, awarding-body directors, academy-chain leaders, a Brookings fellow, some determined sceptics) read a draft and gave me feedback. That’s the method here too, so please do share your thoughts on anything you find here.

What you’ll get

Once a month, a long post of my own on the skills that count now, and where people still count alongside AI. Most weeks, something shorter, usually a response to what someone else has said. Subscribers see frameworks and position papers in draft, before anyone else, and get to tell me where they're wrong. Everything here falls under one of eight themes, listed below and in the Themes menu at the top of the page. Taken in order, they're the argument.

Three of them are about the commercial world. If you work in education, you may not much like that world. But you know that many young people are going into it, and the cost of arriving unprepared falls hardest on the ones whose families couldn’t tell them how it works. Preparing young people to thrive at work is part of what education is for.

The argument, in brief

The Creaky Ladder

The career ladder is not what it was. It’s losing its bottom rungs. Entry-level jobs are thinning out and the data says so from several directions. AI is speeding this up. I’m not going to pretend that’s fine. But it does mean the ladder is no longer as fixed as it was. And there are greater opportunities to skip rungs. Some entry requirements are still needed: nobody wants a surgeon who skipped anatomy. But some are just in the way. Telling the two apart, and helping people reach the highest levels they can in an area they’re good at, is the biggest opportunity the education and skills sectors have had in decades.

Accountability

Responsibility for a task can be handed to software. Being answerable for the result can’t. A driverless taxi will still, eventually, hurt someone, and somebody will answer for it: the operator, the insurer, the manufacturer. Never the software. Being the person who carries the outcome is where the value is going, and it runs all the way down the organisation, from the chief executive to the entry-level job that owns whether the mailing went out on time. It can be taught and it can be certified. It’s the most hopeful claim on the site and the one I expect to be argued with most.

Every teacher already knows the difference between the student who hands the work in and the one with a story. Higher up, it’s the difference between a department head taking responsibility for his team’s results versus one who makes excuses; or a safeguarding lead taking responsibility across the institution.

The Customer

The qualifications system certifies knowledge, skills and behaviours. Employers hire on the strength of it. But the money that pays the wages comes from somewhere else: a customer, who is paying for a result, a product or service delivered at a price.

As AI arrives, jobs will change quickly. The customer won’t. If you’re publicly funded you have a customer too (DfE, DWP, the combined authority) and they behave like one: a fifth of an apprenticeship’s funding arrives only when the apprentice completes. What a person’s work is worth now depends less on their knowledge and skills, and more on the results they can deliver to someone else.

Portable Skills

There are eight job functions most organisations need: sales, marketing, customer support, finance, HR and training, IT, project management and team leadership. Those are the skills that get people hired, and they travel with them when their company or industry falters. Employers value them, even if they can’t always get their head around “soft skills”. Most people are a good fit for at least one of the eight, but almost nobody is told which one.

Personal Development

Everyone agrees education should develop the whole person. Where human work stays valuable, that narrows to something specific: how much responsibility a person can carry. Carrying responsibility takes real development, and it goes hand in hand with higher earnings and higher standing. It’s what employers look for when they decide who rises. One measure is how many people’s interests you can hold in view at once: your own career, then a team, then an organisation and its customers. Educators already know this. They can tell a Level 1 learner from a Level 3 learner at fifty paces, and they can see it in their colleagues. My contention is that it can be taught and certified.

Multipliers

Two plumbers, identical skill. One works alone by the hour; the other has two apprentices, a booking system and his name on the van. That’s the whole gap, and it isn’t talent. It’s multipliers: anything that lets one person’s work count many times over. If the other person has them and you don’t, your talent won’t save you. Multipliers are teachable, but rarely taught.

The Transition Economy

The period in which humans and AI work alongside each other, and there’s still a place for people in work. We’re in it, near the beginning, and it’s moving fast. The immediate problem is that AI is taking over the doing of skilled work faster than the world can work out who now answers for it. Where it ends, I don’t know; there’s a point past which I decline to speculate.

But bear in mind, the education and skills sector has a part to play in the debate about how AI should be regulated. The skills frameworks we adopt to navigate the Transition Economy will to some extent define the areas where human work remains valuable. And of course, if we can define it, we can teach it and certify it.

This is an area where some of the longer pieces in After the Ladder will live, including the draft paper this autumn, which I’ll send to subscribers and people who know more than I do. Please take part via comments on this Substack, and make your voice heard.

In Practice

Everything above can be taught, measured and certified, and I’d rather show it than say it. I’ll share lessons from the frameworks and qualifications I’ve built in my day job; the shareable parts sit under Frameworks in the menu. Reports from delivery in colleges, schools and Jobcentre referral groups, on what happens when a programme meets real people. Sometimes it goes to plan. The interesting weeks are the other ones.

The obvious question

You’ll have noticed I’m cheerful about this. That’s partly experience, and partly because I’ve been working on it for a while and can see the opportunity. It’s also because I’ve got three children, two of them at university, so none of this is abstract in my house. I’d rather hand them a future worth being hopeful about than a gloomy forecast about the job apocalypse.

I should also put on the table that I’m building a company in this space, National Talent Academy, which I’ve invested in and am proud of. Bear that in mind when reading anything I say, and be sceptical if you want to. But the question remains: new approaches are needed. What would you do?

Free to subscribers:

• Futureproof Careers Framework 2.0 - the three things to prepare for whatever the future holds. COMING SOON

• Multipliers. Things that multiply someone’s efforts many times over. Draft framework for consultation. COMING THIS AUTUMN.

• After the Ladder consultation. Draft paper on what the skills system should certify after the ladder. COMING THIS AUTUMN.

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