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GCSE results day was marked with the usual front pages filled with pictures of beaming students. What you didn’t see was the invisible third of 16-year-olds in England who failed their maths and English GCSEs, the obstacle to their future.
That’s 360,000 failed in a system designed by Michael Gove as education minister to mark out winners from losers. It’s a cast of mind shared by many in his party who still yearn for the 11-plus, which consigned a random number of children to failure before they’d hardly begun. A few councils still do it.
Once failed, this one-third must resit English and maths to do any other course: colleges cannot provide them with a blessed start from failed schooling, as they are refused funds for any student not taking repeated resits. Only about 17% of the wretched resitters ever pass. Quite apart from the despair, David Hughes, head of the Association of Colleges, points to the waste: of the far-too-few 16 teaching hours a week for students on post-16 study courses, resitters must be taught seven hours of hated English and maths that most of them will fail. That leaves just nine hours for the vocational courses they choose. No wonder UCL research shows the damage done: self-confidence is lost, many drop out altogether. That doesn’t happen in Wales and Northern Ireland, where resits are not mandatory for continuing study.
Labour gets it. Both the previous education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and the current, Lucy Powell, well understand the damage done by this Gove-devised torment: finally compulsory resits will end in 2028. Instead, those who fail can take a new “stepping stone” qualification in functional maths and English, proving adequate literacy and numeracy skills.
But an ideological dispute remains among Powell’s advisers. They will still make every 16-year-old take English and maths GCSE in the first place, even if they will probably fail. Many only need the stepping-stone qualification anyway. This doesn’t sit well with Andy Burnham spreading his successful Greater Manchester baccalaureate (MBacc) nationally, a scheme that offers vocational courses suited to local employers alongside academic subjects from age 14, to keep them engaged and avoiding Neet status: not in education, employment or training.
But ideological purists think dividing them early between GCSE groups and stepping-stone groups sets up a two-tier discrimination, downgrading some who might have passed a full GCSE. But with a million Neets, the key priority must be making school encouraging, not rejecting.
Gove sticks to his Gradgrind resits. He calls Burnham’s approach “bring back stupid”, anti-intellectual and hostile to ambition. But had he invested in nursery education, where destinies are most surely set, there might be fewer 16-year-olds with failing grades to bully now. New research reported by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows how entering childcare one year earlier gives an average 10% improved maths score by age 14 to 15, and a 28% higher score for those with a mother without qualifications.
The good news is that Labour’s emphasis on skills has been infectious, with a surge in applications to technical courses, well beyond the current demographic bulge, while university applications still rise by 3%. Alan Milburn’s commission to solve the crisis of 1 million Neets has real policy steam behind it to urge more skills training.
But further education (FE) has a lot of catching up to do. There are many ways England has not just neglected but discriminated against non-academic education. Despite recent extra funding for colleges, this still doesn’t cover the entire cost of any extra student accepted, an additional 25,000 are expected to enrol this autumn, and colleges lack space and staff after colossal cuts in the Tory years: over-19s adult education fell from £5bn in 2002 to £1.5bn in 2025.
Recent extra money for pay “only stopped the gap getting wider”, Hughes says, when FE staff are paid £10,500 less than school teachers, and are in short supply when construction and engineering jobs pay so much more. Why, he asks, do colleges pay VAT costing £200m, while schools are reimbursed?
The spur of Labour’s new growth and skills levy is incentivising employers to take on beginners with short courses. But as applications quadrupled for degree apprenticeships, more sought-after than Oxbridge places for earning while learning, places have halved.
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Why do university students get maintenance loans, but FE students can’t? “Because too many will never earn enough to pay them back,” says Hughes bluntly. Worse still, Neets on benefits are barred from full-time courses, which is perverse.
Needless barriers need fixing. Neets who need driving licences for jobs and apprenticeships, essential from care to plumbing, find the waiting time for a driving test is 21 weeks or more.
Burnham’s eloquence on valuing “the hard hat as much as the academic cap” earns Gove’s contempt, but it has raised FE spirits. Talking to college heads, they see that Labour knows what to do. As ever, the problem is overcoming Britain’s forever low esteem for technical education. It will take heavy lifting to shift mentalities towards encouraging that third of 16-year-olds instead of tormenting them.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
