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]).