July 2026
Andy Burnham (would he sound more Prime Ministerial if it was Andrew Burnham?) announced this week he would be changing the curriculum to include technical and employer-led education for 14 year olds.
All and sundry piled in on X. People's misconceptions and dogma shone through.
"We're dumbing down the curriculum" was the dominant refrain.
Grade hungry heads will shovel thick kids into the technical pile and the gap between smart and dumb will grow. Ofsted will judge schools based on GCSE results, which will incentivise this game further. Failures will be "off the books", never to stain a pass rate ever again.
But is this true?
A world-class technical education must contain rigorous academic topics. I wouldn't drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who couldn't add up, nor would I turn my radiators on if the pressure was calibrated by a plumber who thought 2 x 2 = 26.7. The "basics" of a rigorous education we foist upon our young people still hold, but would have a different context.
And might actually mean something to the kids who don't want to sit in a classroom and be drilled to pass a GCSE, all the while failing to see the point, and likely struggling to pass anyway due to incurable boredom, salved only by the thought of playing football when they get home.
A well-designed technical education should appeal to geniuses and dummies alike. In fact, I'd strongly argue dummies are only dummies as we're measuring them against the yardstick that deems them dummies.
As Ken Robinson said, much of education is like sticking flippers on a pigeon and calling it shit at swimming. Maybe I misquote.
The current system lauds the people who can sit down, shut up and pass exams.
It exalts the very people who exhibit the same attributes their teachers find attractive in themselves. "I was smart, I am now successful, I studied hard, therefore, in order to be like me (and why wouldn't you want to be), you have to behave exactly like me, exactly when I say". It's the same with Government ministers. They all, to a man (or woman — thanks, Loretta), went to university. The obsession with others following the same academic pathway is thinly-veiled self-congratulation. I am mint, therefore, you must do what I did to be mint.
Not true.
There are a million ways to be mint. Lads who I went to school with who struggled with the basic premise of opening a book the right way up are now thriving because they found something they were good at. After being told for years they weren't much good and would likely be a failure.
And so it is with technical education.
People say 14 year olds don't know what they want to do, so why make them choose? 14 year olds, however, likely know the opposite. I bet a heap of them would not choose to sit in a maths class. At all. But we expect them to do so. And then punish them when they do not do so quietly. Why? Because we said so. They don't currently have any choice whatsoever. We ordain them to study what we believe is good for them, or more accurately, we ordain them to study what we ourselves enjoy and feel good at, and believe that everybody else should enjoy and be good at.
Am I erring down the trite road of "let them choose what they want to do"? No, I don't think I am. As somebody pointed out, if you let a 14 year old choose what they do want to do, it probably wouldn't be learning (obviously there are exceptions — in this essay, both before and after this point, where "14 year old", read "Phill at 14").
So how do we solve that problem?
We provide leadership.
We identify what that person would be good at, and encourage them to follow it. Oftentimes, people cannot see their own potential, especially if they are forever told "you are not great at maths", "you struggle to concentrate", and "why are you so disorganised". So we need others to do it for us.
You'd be a terrific engineer.
You'd be a great nurse.
You'd be brilliant working with your hands.
Not "you're not academic, therefore, have you considered the thick route?". Genuine positivity. Seeing potential. Recognising something in a child that could light the fuel of enthusiasm. I mean, isn't that how they advertise teaching? To be the difference in a child's life?
Most education professionals aren't geared up for this.
They have gone from school, to college, to university and back to school again. They have been told innumerable times that grades are important, but have never used the currency to try to buy anything other than more education. Teachers are then under pressure to deliver exam results, so what stick do they use to beat kids with to extract these results? The stick of "this is important to your future". The incentives of people directing our kids isn't what's best for our kids. The system serves the metrics themselves and not the outcomes.
And this harks back to the paragraph regarding the incentive of Ofsted. If we measure results, and judge schools by results, heads will (not all) game the system. We've seen off-rolling and the usage of vocational courses to remove the children who we feel won't pass our precious exams. Any technical route has to address this off the bat. Schools should also be judged by their impact across the board. Scheisse technical education should equal a scheisse Ofsted grade. Or let's make something better than Ofsted, it is, itself, scheisse. I'll write a new essay on that.
Technical education suffers from a marketing problem, and again, I'd put the blame squarely at the door of education types who see their academic route as somehow superior. What was the route they took? Why sir, their route was academic, which in common parlance can be taken to mean irrelevant and of no practical use. The result was academic; of no import to the wider situation. I jest, but you get the point. The world doesn't end in academia, and non-academics also help to fuel its rotation.
So problem 1 to solve is to get rid of the arrogance that an academic route is superior. And that starts with self-reflection of our educationalists. Yes, we get it, you are smart. But does everybody else need to compete in that arena to be considered a success? 100% not. In fact, there's probably some deep-seated psychological trauma surfacing there. Maybe some non-academic kids you were jealous of or got bullied by once upon a time, salving your wounds with the comfort of "yeah, but they're thick. One day I'll be a government minister and they won't be so smug then".
Michael Gove did not help at all with his essay "We're bringing back stupid". The only way we could bring back stupid would be to reappoint him as Education Secretary.
How do we incentivise schools to champion these routes?
I would take away exam pressure from teachers and never judge them by pass rates again. Kids should be responsible for their own results. Sometimes, they'll get a bad teacher, but that's how life works sometimes. Suck it up. Free to teach without judgement on their results, teachers might stop seeing some children as an obstacle and a problem to solve with care, empathy and enthusiasm.
Would this result in a lowering of standards?
Maybe, but the standards we speak of here are the academic standards we currently uphold to be without reproach and the north star of all that is good. Perhaps if a kid comes out of a history classroom after a year and remembers one cool story, that's a great outcome? In another history class, the kids might be capable of producing university-level essays on the Cold War…the aspirationalists will claim that we should be pushing classroom 1 to be like classroom 2, but surroundings are everything.
We are very much shaped by our surroundings.
If you're in a class of kids who all get As (or 9s today), then you're likely to do the same, pushed by your environment. The reason people at Eton all get As is that everybody else around them gets As.
How do I know this?
I did some teacher training at a grammar school. The kids all got As. I taught them for a term, and was god-awful. They all got As on the end of unit test. I'm convinced you could've put a traffic cone at the front of the class and they would've got As. The teachers thought they were mint as their kids got As. But, the kids were mint and they drove each other.
The teachers were the same, if not worse than what I'd seen in other schools.
I taught a lesson on the scientific method. What's a hypothesis, I asked? A guess! Yes, good, good…but it's a guess you are trying to disprove via experiment. I.e. falsification. Karl Popper 101. The best hypotheses are the ones most easily proven wrong, that haven't been yet. Anyway, that wasn't correct, apparently. My mentor marked me down for "poor subject knowledge". No amount of protest would convince her otherwise, "Karl who?? Did he teach his children to get As at GCSE Chemistry? Thought not! His last name is an illegal substance under the school's drugs policy. Never mention him again. And I think you'll find an experiment should try to prove a hypothesis correct. Just like I am. Back in your box."
The classrooms were pin drop silent. Eerily so. The kids hung off my every word, pens poised, ready to learn. One of them would actually notice if I waffled a load of rubbish. The scheme of work had a booklet. I would hand out the booklet, and the kids would complete a section per lesson. And that was it. And they did it, in silence, and to the best of their ability. No love for chemistry, no curiosity…just "I've been told to do this, so I will, and I'll get it all correct". Most secondary teachers would think this bliss. It wasn't. It was boring and unchallenging. The kids were mint, and nothing I did would make them minter. But I had some satisfaction in the knowledge that the teachers who were wetting themselves over how mint they were, were actually misguided. The traffic cone test would show them.
Turns out my anecdote has a study! A DfE study (LSYPE2, 2018) found that 84% of the variation in GCSE attainment was attributable to the pupil, and just 16% to the school. The report even notes that the school's 16% partly reflects the kinds of pupils who attend it. And I wrote this before I even realised. I am mint!
The lone A in a sea of Cs is much more impressive. I think university entrances are now making allowances for this context, but the reason I cite it is that educationalists look at their own education and feel it succeeded because of its rigour. I'd argue it was allowed to be rigorous because it had a class full of kids who wanted it to be. If you have one kid tuned into it, and the rest chewing their blazer sleeve, it has to descend to engage the majority. The teacher's job becomes a nightmare. It's not as simple as "have higher expectations and teach the complicated shit I learnt as that's what made me smart."
Want true equality of education? Make it random. Randomly assign kids at 4 to their school track for life. Tarquin can go to Scumbag Comp and Little Jimmy to Eton. Parental cash has no bearing, you get what you're given. The whole gamut of social strata is represented in every class, never allowing privilege to concentrate in any one spot. I'm sure if rich folk had to forego their advantage and compete without it, equality would suddenly seem less of a good idea. "I want everybody to do well, but not quite as well as me, and never to my disadvantage".
I would also make parents responsible for school judgement. I'd form a committee of judge-parents and give them inspection powers. Schools should be answerable to the communities they serve. The government is too far removed to make good judgement. Standard education is not desirable. Some schools deal in contexts where getting kids to turn up is outstanding.
Does this limit the aspiration of some communities? Maybe so. But that, again, is a problem we can solve locally. I'm not sure how yet. Leave it with me, but I would never foist external standards on a school and vilify them when they do not meet them.
More choice is only a good thing. The ability to direct kids onto courses they would be great at, genuinely, is something we should embrace. The dumbing down of education is not to be feared, as, if we pick the right kids for these courses, we can create rigour as they'd be in an environment to flourish.
We need the sorting hat from Harry Potter. Let's create enough routes for kids so we can sort them into the place they will fly. They often won't know themselves, so they need help, and sometimes need to be told. But we need a system weighted towards trying to find what these kids are good at rather than one designed to tell them what they're bad at, and then to lead them there. Teachers and parents should have the choice of course to lead their proteges into situations where they will flourish. And that's what teaching is. It's not stuffing receptacles with useless data. It is leadership. Identifying potential and coaxing it out, no matter how difficult. Never getting frustrated because our target can't meet our standards yet, because we cannot put a timeline on potential. It reveals when it's ready.
Greater technical choice will provide more platforms for potential to flourish. The hindrance to achieving this is our own deep-seated impressions of what education is. And to solve that problem, we need to let go of our own snobbery and meet people where they are.