Former Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has said the rise in NEETs is due to COVID and Labour’s tax rises, not education reforms.
Speaking on GB News she said: “I constantly have people from OECD countries coming to see how we turned around our education system and how our school system was performing really well.
“It is worrying because she’s got completely the wrong diagnosis. Perhaps she needs a little more technical education herself so she can read the data. Because actually there were more NEETs under the last Labour government, and then we worked very hard all the way through the reforms to get them down to the lowest level on record.
“And it is true they are back up again, and that is literally down to two things: the knock-on impacts of COVID, where there was a huge impact on attendance for certain groups of pupils, and I suspect many of those have gone on to be NEETs.
“And also, obviously, the impact of the budget on equalising the cost of employing a young person with the cost of employing any person, which means youth unemployment has started to rise quite rapidly.
“She has completely the wrong diagnosis. So I suspect either she knows this and she wants to do what they always do and follow the sort of socialist levelling down, everybody equal but down at the bottom, and follow what they did in Wales.
“I mean, if you look at what they did in Wales, they didn’t have the same curriculum reforms. They’ve got way more proportion-wise NEETs. So it’s completely the wrong diagnosis.
“And to want to undo the reforms that have been much admired, they should be built on because there’s too much back and forth in government policy anyway. The best thing to do is to deliver.
“It’s very hard to build those reforms. It’s very easy to destroy them, and they should resist destroying all the good progress because it does impact our kids.
“If you’re a tiler, you need to work out how many tiles you need to put on the wall, so you’ll need your maths for that. All of our education has maths and English in it, up to a level that makes you employable.
“And when we were in office, we did a lot to reform technical education. We worked with 5,000 businesses to develop the apprenticeship standards. There are now in 700 routes. So literally, almost any job you can name in the country, you can start an apprenticeship, and you can go all the way up to degree level.
“And you could do that at any age. So it’s also there for people who want to retrain, maybe when AI has impacted their job or something else has impacted their job. Again, a system that’s admired by many across the world and I think is organic because it does work very closely with businesses.
“They do set the standards, and of course, they all have a level of maths and English in because you need it literally to function to do everything.
“[Powell] is completely wrong if she thinks that there is not an academic element to most technical jobs, and literally pretty much all jobs, apart from being an academic, are technical to some degree.
“Whether you’re becoming a doctor, a lawyer, we developed apprenticeships in all of those: an accountant, a physiotherapist, literally anything you can think of, a nuclear scientist. There’s technical elements to all jobs.
“So the two of them are very, very closely intertwined, particularly when you cross into the workplace.”
