Poor teaching risks putting students off vocational routes, warns UTC expert

Given that she is CEO of one of the largest drivers of vocational learning for 14- to 16-year-olds, you might think Kate Ambrosi’s first thought when she heard the prime minister’s plan to rapidly expand such provision would be to celebrate.

But while Ambrosi welcomes this mooted “rewiring” of the school system, she is concerned about how this will play out if there aren’t enough skilled staff to make it work.

Just a week into his premiership, Andy Burnham signalled a secondary education shake-up, announcing that new technical education routes in schools would become available to 14-year-olds as part of a drive to tackle youth unemployment.

But these new routes could risk harming the vocational subjects they are supposed to promote, according to Ambrosi, if Burnham’s ambitions are hampered by a lack of skilled teachers.

“One of our biggest worries is to see technical education taught badly - because it puts people off,” Ambrosi tells Tes.

UTC movement ‘grew so quickly’

Ambrosi is chief executive of Baker Dearing Educational Trust. Perfecting technical education has been the organisation’s mission since 2009, when it was launched by Conservative peer and former education secretary Lord Baker to address a “skills shortage” in England.

Baker Dearing now educates around 21,000 students aged 11-19 at its 44 university technical colleges (UTCs). Each UTC operates as a free school, meaning it does not have to teach the national curriculum - most have two specialisms, such as engineering and digital or health and creative media - and it can set its own pay and conditions for staff.

Capacity issues have previously blighted UTCs, with a 2019 National Audit Office investigation finding examples of schools that were underperforming and sometimes less than half full.

Former Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw had warned in 2016 of UTCs becoming a “dumping ground for the difficult or disaffected”, while former education secretary Michael Gove dubbed technical colleges a “failure” after a series of closures and in 2017 clashed with Lord Baker over UTCs.

When it is suggested that the UTC movement has had lessons to learn, Ambrosi laughs: “That’s a kind way of putting it.”

The main challenges came because it “grew so quickly”, Ambrosi says, adding: “Initially, we were optimistic we would have 100 per cent of young people that just loved the specialism [aspect]. What we got instead was a mixed group of young people who needed different support.”

UTC ‘sleeve’ points way ahead

Ambrosi joined Baker Dearing in 2019 after starting her career as a business, IT and economics teacher before 15 years as head of economic development at Croydon Council. She has witnessed vocational education come in and out of fashion, from “rapid expansion” under New Labour to a subsequent “backlash” during the era of Gove.

However, given the new prime minister’s ambitions for technical education, Baker Dearing’s time may have finally come.

Burnham and his education secretary, Lucy Powell, are intent on “rewiring the entire education system to give young people from all backgrounds the chance to thrive”, and in particular broadening options for students under 16. But this will arguably have to be done from a standing start: only around 9,000 students aged 14-16 studied vocational qualifications in England’s secondary schools in 2025-26, according to National Pupil Database and Individualised Learner Record data shared with Tes last month.

Ambrosi is now in a powerful position to shape education on a grander scale: UTCs are finally in step with political priorities.

Baker Dearing has already been working with Greater Manchester Combined Authority on the MBacc, which offers pathways into employment through technical education. This has been described as not a qualification in itself, but a “wrapper” for a series of qualifications, both academic and vocational.

And Burnham has already seen how Ambrosi and Baker Dearing have fused the academic and vocational: in November last year, while he was mayor of Greater Manchester, he visited a school in a trust that is planning to open a “UTC sleeve” - a new model that could be key to the planned technical routes.

Ambrosi describes a sleeve, an idea first proposed in 2021, as a “miniature UTC” in a school: students do not have to commute and can explore different learning pathways in familiar surroundings, while the approach is clearly less expensive than building brand-new places of learning.

In one of two UTC sleeves to have opened so far - 250 miles apart in Bristol and Barrow-in-Furness - students in Years 10 and 11 can take an “engineering pathway” sponsored by the University of the West of England, Rolls-Royce, Airbus and GKN Automotive.

Don’t do technical education ‘from a book’

The UTC sleeve model - which is in addition to the 44 standard UTCs - may sound more achievable than creating entirely new destinations for students from the age of 14, but in these times a critical question remains: can schools, which are facing major funding challenges, realistically be expected to aspire to facilities and learning like this?

Ambrosi is clear that, for technical routes to be effective, the Treasury will need to open its purse strings.

“It needs additional funding,” she tells Tes unambiguously. Yet so far the government has only indicated that money will come from existing Department for Education central budgets, rather than a new spending pot.

The new technical routes are expected to be phased in from September 2028, but uncertainty over funding has been a focus of criticism from teaching unions since the announcement in late July. Meanwhile, Powell has insisted that nothing announced so far will require extra money.

Ambrosi fears that without more funding, the technical routes could fall short in key areas: “Without employer engagement and without the facilities to show that you’re investing in those young people, [technical education] is not so great.”

Existing UTCs excel, she stresses, when engineering students can use advanced machining, or health and social care students get to work with specially designed life-size dummies in a medical suite and receive training from practising midwives.

She sees a lack of facilities as a particular problem for certain subjects - if students exclusively learn about health and social care “from a book”, she warns, “there is a problem”.

Finding the right measures of success

However, Ambrosi’s greatest concern is about workforce: she wants assurances that there will be enough “really great teachers” to guide students through the new routes.

Although she says Baker Dearing regularly upskills its staff, she recognises this will be a “challenge” for the school sector more widely.

If subjects such as engineering or health and social care are taught badly, she cautions, students may simply decide ”‘we did engineering and it was rubbish’...then they don’t carry on, and we’ve lost someone who had a genuine interest”.

The sector still has more questions than answers about the new technical routes, including workforce, resourcing, the role of existing qualifications and, crucially, what Ofsted’s role will be in inspecting the quality.

Ambrosi is also concerned about what happens if performance measures are not adapted for the new routes: she warns that “if you continue to only measure schools on maths and English outcomes”, the policy could face a major “barrier” to success.

She hopes that the Milburn review - which is investigating why almost 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not in education, employment or training (Neet) - will assuage such concerns.

Technical routes should not necessarily be judged on getting a particular result, she stresses - some “brilliant” UTC students have found employment before finishing the qualification they had been working on, so that they never got to complete it. Her point is that it would be illogical to record this as a failure.

For an education system to be serious about “really preparing [all] our young people for great destinations”, Ambrosi underlines, it’s not enough to have more high-quality technical education - you’ve also got to have “a clearer steer on what you’re expecting it to actually achieve”.

‘No better place’ to study technical education

Ambrosi says that the previous capacity problems UTCs faced have been turned around, with more than half of technical colleges now currently oversubscribed.

“If we’re turning away thousands of young people, where are they going to go and do those technical qualifications?” she asks.

Burnham’s big plan for education means he will need experts like Ambrosi to guide him - and she is eager to grasp this long-awaited opportunity to take UTCs into the spotlight.

What they ultimately do, in her view, is marry academic and technical education in a way that combines and improves both - students become “better in maths and English because they understand why they’re doing maths and English” - and “inspire and engage young people”. In turn, students will “attend at a higher rate because they’re doing something that’s purposeful and meaningful”.

In short, if done right, the new technical routes will not be remotely tokenistic or substandard education pathways - they’ll just be “really excellent practice”.

It all comes back, though, to whether there will be the money and expert staff to emulate UTCs on a grander scale.

As far as Ambrosi is concerned, the government’s technical routes plan has to work, because if a UTC or something like it is right for a student but they are not aware of that option - if they cannot find the educational path that works for them - “then that is a terrible thing”.

For a large number of students, Ambrosi insists, “there is no better place”.