Beyond jobs: What is education actually for?

Andy Burnham is right that vocational education deserves greater respect. But if we design schools around today's labour market, we risk preparing young people for jobs that may not exist tomorrow. Education's purpose should be bigger than producing workers.

Exam results week has once again reignited a familiar debate. Are our schools preparing young people for the world they are about to enter? The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, believes the answer lies in bringing education closer to local labour markets. Under his proposals, schools would work alongside employers to tailor technical education towards the industries their regions need most, with vocational qualifications finally given equal status to academic ones.

At first glance, it is difficult to disagree.

Britain has spent decades telling young people that success comes through university, while apprenticeships and technical careers have too often been treated as second-class options. The result has been a labour market full of shortages in skilled trades alongside an oversupply of graduates competing for too few professional jobs. If technical education finally receives the respect it deserves, that is undoubtedly a positive step.

Yet I cannot help thinking that we are asking education to solve a problem it was never designed to solve.

The debate assumes that the purpose of education is to produce workers. It asks how schools can better supply the economy with the people businesses currently need. But economies are not static. Industries rise and fall. New technologies appear almost overnight. Entire professions disappear while others emerge that nobody could have predicted a decade earlier.

How, then, can we reasonably expect schools to prepare fourteen-year-olds for a labour market that does not yet exist?

When Robin and I discussed this week's article, he made an observation that has stayed with me. When he was at university, everyone studied law because that was where the jobs were. By the time they graduated, the market had become saturated. Too many graduates, too few traineeships. It is a pattern that repeats itself generation after generation.

Today, Scotland's universities face a crisis of their own. Falling numbers of international students and unsustainable financial models have exposed just how fragile the sector has become. Meanwhile, many of the careers that once justified expensive degrees no longer offer the certainty they once did. At the same time, the cultural pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Tradespeople who were once encouraged to "aim higher" than apprenticeships now frequently earn more than graduates carrying years of debt. The supposed winners and losers have quietly exchanged places.

This is precisely why designing education around today's labour market is so dangerous. Today's shortages become tomorrow's surpluses. We risk educating children for yesterday's economy.

None of this means Burnham's proposals are misguided. In fact, one of his central arguments is entirely right; Britain has undervalued vocational education for decades. Technical expertise should command the same respect as academic achievement. A skilled electrician or engineer contributes no less to society than a solicitor or lecturer.

Countries that have embraced this parity offer valuable lessons. Germany has long operated a dual system in which vocational and academic education are viewed as equally prestigious. The Netherlands, meanwhile, consistently records one of the lowest proportions of young people who are not in education, employment or training anywhere in Europe. Nearly seventy per cent of Dutch upper secondary students enter vocational education, with apprenticeships embedded into learning from an early stage. By the age of nineteen, most young people already possess meaningful workplace experience.

The lesson, however, is not simply that vocational education works better. It is that successful systems integrate education, employers and public policy into a coherent whole. The Dutch approach combines technical training with local employers, generous hiring incentives and personalised support for young people struggling with mental health or long-term illness. Education is only one part of the ecosystem.

“Today’s shortages become tomorrow’s surpluses. We risk educating children for yesterday’s economy.”

Britain's growing NEET population cannot be explained simply by curriculum choices. More than one million young people across the UK are currently not in employment, education or training, the highest figure since the aftermath of the financial crisis. Some are graduates. Many struggle with anxiety, poor mental health or a lack of confidence after growing up through the disruption of COVID-19. Others face housing costs, insecure work or a labour market increasingly hostile to inexperienced applicants. These are not problems that changing a timetable can solve.

There is another assumption running through this debate that deserves greater scrutiny. We increasingly speak about education almost exclusively through the language of economic productivity. Schools produce workers. Universities produce graduates. Students become human capital. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking a much older question: what is education actually for?

Historically, the answer was never simply employment.

Plato founded his Academy not as a training college but as a place where students could pursue truth through rigorous inquiry. Centuries later, philosophers such as John Stuart Mill argued that education should cultivate judgement by exposing people to disagreement, teaching them to test their own beliefs against competing arguments. Jean Piaget saw education as nurturing intellectual development rather than simply transferring information, while Sir Ken Robinson spent years arguing that standardised systems too often suppress creativity instead of encouraging it.

Different thinkers, separated by centuries, reached remarkably similar conclusions. Education is fundamentally about developing human beings. Of course, schools should equip young people with practical skills. Numeracy, literacy and technical competence matter enormously. But those skills alone will never future-proof anyone's career. Artificial intelligence is already reshaping professions that seemed untouchable only a few years ago. Entire industries will continue to evolve faster than governments can rewrite curricula.

What endures are not particular job skills but habits of mind. Curiosity. Critical thinking. Adaptability. Creativity. The confidence to learn something entirely new when circumstances demand it. Ironically, these qualities are precisely what employers repeatedly say they struggle to find.

This is perhaps where I part company with those who see education primarily as labour market policy. Rather than asking schools to predict which industries will need workers in ten years, we should ask how schools can produce people capable of succeeding in whatever world they inherit.

That means teaching students not merely what to think but how to think. It means cultivating resilience alongside technical competence. It means encouraging curiosity rather than compliance. It means recognising that learning is not preparation for a single career but preparation for a lifetime of adaptation.

This is particularly important for my generation. We have grown up through financial crises, a global pandemic, the explosion of social media, artificial intelligence and one of the fastest periods of technological change in history. Many of the assumptions previous generations held about work, housing and security no longer apply. The careers we eventually retire from may not even exist today. Against that backdrop, an education system built around today's vacancies feels oddly short-sighted.

Perhaps the purpose of education was never to anticipate the future with perfect accuracy. Perhaps its purpose is something much simpler, and much more ambitious. To produce citizens capable of navigating uncertainty with intelligence, confidence and curiosity.

Vocational education deserves equal dignity. Burnham is right about that. Scotland, too, should continue challenging the outdated hierarchy that places academic routes above technical ones. But if we reduce education solely to supplying workers for today's economy, we risk forgetting the very thing that makes education valuable in the first place. Jobs matter. Economies matter. Skills matter. Yet education's greatest achievement has never been producing workers. It has always been producing people capable of becoming whatever the future asks of them.