Andy Burnham has been in No 10 for a week and, as expected, he’s wasted little time making it clear where he wants to take education. Throughout his political career, and in his nine years as the first elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham has argued that Britain has become too fixated on the university route, often speaking about the “degree of snobbery” that we as a country have around traditional academia and the need to raise the status of vocational and technical education.
On Monday, he doubled down on that mission, announcing plans for secondary school pupils to study technical subjects such as manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI) from the age of 14, alongside core academic learning. In doing so, he challenged what has long been one of the biggest unspoken assumptions in the education system – academia is king.
“For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected,” he said. “The whole school system has been built around it and that has let down young people.”
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This echoes his June 2023 speech for the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, where he argued that “we have collectively, as a country, allowed the university route to dominate English Education for decades. Let us be honest: there has been a degree of snobbery about that.”
