The Foundation for Education Development’s 2026 National Education Report says the education system is not delivering on one of its core purposes, preparing young people for life beyond school, and that careers education should be a core entitlement for every learner, shaped with employers, rather than an add-on.1 I agree with all of that. The report also cites evidence that the problem starts early, that aspirations and stereotypes are formed in primary school, and says that incremental change will not be enough.
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
Foundation for Education Development, 2026 National Education Report: Belonging, Capacity and Coherence (June 2026), pp. 44 to 45. The report’s figures of a £96 billion annual cost of the UK skills gap and almost a million young people not in education, employment or training are from Pearson, Lost in Transition (2025) and the ONS respectively.
Alan Milburn, Young people and work: interim report (Department for Work and Pensions, May 2026), foreword and paragraph 77: 84 per cent of NEET young people surveyed for the review said they want to find a job, education or training; “The challenge is not a lack of aspiration, but the barriers that stand in their way.”
Office for National Statistics, Public sector employment, UK: June 2026 (15 September 2026): 28.3 million private sector employees out of 34.5 million in employment, 82.0 per cent. The private sector share includes the self-employed and the voluntary sector. The voluntary sector is 3 per cent of the UK workforce (NCVO, UK Civil Society Almanac 2024).
Ofqual, Provisional entries for GCSE, AS and A level: summer 2025 exam series (12 June 2025): 699,401 people aged 16 in England in 2025, from ONS population estimates. Ten such cohorts is roughly seven million learners.