Technical pathways plan: 7 lessons from failed 14-19 Diplomas

Andy Burnham has announced the intention to open up new vocational routes for 14-year-olds from 2028.

There is little detail about what this might mean in practice, and the announcement has the ring of one made to spur the development of policy rather than to implement something already in existence.

That provides an opportunity to shape what comes next. We should start by reflecting on the lessons from the 14-19 experiment of 20 years ago.

Back in 2005, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (Neet) in England was the same 16 per cent as it is today, and there had been much thought given to how to create routes that worked for all young people, culminating in the Tomlinson Review.

• What we know about Andy Burnham’s technical pathways: read our Q&A

The 14-19 Education and Skills White Paper, launched in response, was an attempt to recast the education system to make school accessible and successful for all children, with parity between what had traditionally been cast as academic and vocational routes.

The flagship of these reforms were 14-19 Diplomas, now remembered only by the few who managed to get the chance to work on them and the children who took them during their brief existence.

So, as we try again to understand why our education system is not working for everybody - whether that is through the lens of special educational needs and disabilities and adaptive teaching or white working-class underachievement - what are the key lessons from the development and ultimate failure of the 14-19 programme?

Lessons from past technical education policy

1. Infrastructure

A key component of the reforms was raising the school leaving age from 16 to 18 . This was not just about changing the law and a focus on attendance but also an understanding of how the wider system would challenge and support young people.

At the time this change was heavily based on the role that local authorities would play, a role that does not exist in the same way now.

Today we need to think about the expectations and responsibilities that we place on regional and local government, the role of Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams, and how that interacts with the multi-academy trust landscape.

2. Parity

How do you ensure that qualifications that are necessarily different in terms of their design and purpose have parity of esteem?

Put more bluntly, if you design routes intended to target disengaged young people and support them into jobs in the local community, how do you avoid the sense of a two-tier system, where vocational qualifications are for working-class kids and A levels and the path to higher education are for the middle classes?

3. Functional skills

Diplomas focused on functional literacy and numeracy - for example, how to write a bid for work or cost the details of business plan - without demanding more in-depth knowledge of maths and English.

How far do we need children to understand quadratic equations or Shakespeare if we are more interested in supporting routes into local employment?

Striking the balance between functional knowledge and broader education is not going to be uncontroversial, but it is important if we want to give enough space for vocational routes.

4. Changing minds

One of the concerns Alison Wolf explored in her 2011 review of vocational education (which helped to lead to the end of Diplomas) was that children were able to choose qualifications that limited their earning potential at an age when they could not understand those consequences.

14-19 Diplomas did seek to address that by ensuring that it was possible to switch from a Diploma to A levels at 16, and to take an Advanced Diploma into higher education.

How will any future reforms make sure that young people are not restricted in their choices too early?

5. Wider context

14-19 Diplomas did not exist in isolation. They were part of a wider ecosystem that linked schools and local structures together.

Key components of the reforms included strengthening key stage 3 so that children were able to make informed choices at age 14 and working with wider services to support children who were disengaged.

As the recent Milburn report into Neets acknowledges, schools have only a limited role to play in shaping the chances and choices of children and young people.

Just looking at what happens at 14 or 16 is unlikely to have the impact the government is after.

6. Collaborative planning

14-19 Diplomas were not whimsical. Each Diploma was developed with a combination of higher education institutions and employers, and every aspect was worked through with unions, schools and local authorities.

It required a significant amount of time from civil servants to manage stakeholder relationships, which helped to create robust qualifications with a significant degree of buy-in from all involved.

There is an urgency behind the announcement this week, but it is hard to see how new education secretary Lucy Powell and her team can achieve anything like the same level of buy-in to introduce something new from September 2028.

7. Long-term thinking

Ultimately, 14-19 Diplomas failed to take hold.

Rather than becoming a generation-defining rebalancing of our education system to create responsive routes for every student, they barely had the chance to exist before Michael Gove let them wither.

It could be argued that came down to the single decision not to replace GCSEs and A levels with an all-encompassing Diploma route for all children. As long as GCSEs and A levels can be championed as the “gold standard”, any other qualification is going to fail to achieve parity of esteem.

But it would take some guts to move away from existing qualifications - a move that would open any government up to the criticism that it was sacrificing educational standards.

Can Powell and her team build a broader consensus that ensures whatever reforms are taken forward now are not undone by the next government?

It was this final question that ultimately led to the end of the 14-19 programme.

If we want to avoid an endless back-and-forth in this area, we need a plan that has wide acceptance across the political spectrum. Otherwise it risks unravelling as soon as the next person moves into No 10.

Gareth Conyard is an education policy expert and former civil servant who worked on 14-19 reforms