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
[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).