'Andy Burnham Has The Chance To Transform Britain By Closing The Respect Gap'

There’s a simple test for what Britain really believes about work. Ask yourself which job sounds more impressive: an electrician or an economist, a bricklayer or a banker.

Of course, all are valuable to society.

But if we are honest, people sometimes have instincts that place one above the other, and that tells us something about how different kinds of work are valued. Until we confront that, we will struggle to fix what is not merely a skills gap. It is a respect gap.

A few months ago, I toured Switzerland with their government and found something striking. There, vocational and academic routes do not compete. They sit alongside each other, with parity of esteem baked into their very constitution.

Two-thirds of young people choose a vocational route, and they value it. I met apprentices training as railway engineers alongside others who had followed the same path into senior roles in business and government. Ernst Tanner, Chairman of Lindt, started as an apprentice. In Switzerland, this is entirely normal.

Britain has UCAS, a well-understood front door largely into higher education rather than other routes. It has become a brightly lit conveyor belt directing young people to university, while apprenticeships are harder to find. UCAS had over 50,000 undergraduate courses, compared with around 6,000 in the separate Find an Apprenticeship service.

We need a single post-16 platform that brings the alphabet soup of past, present, and future together. Vocational and academic routes include apprenticeships, BTECs, T Levels, NVQs, V-levels, GCSEs, A-levels, HNDs, and degrees. How about a single account to track the qualifications you accrue over your life?

Routes should be permeable, too. Why should a biology student not pick up a horticulture qualification, or a welder take a physics module? Switzerland is already doing it. We could too.

Cultural signals matter early in education. School trips to universities are commonplace.

Visits to places where things are actually built are far rarer. Why? Work experience is too often a tick-box exercise. Imagine if every child were partnered with a local employer before their GCSEs. With nearly a million 18- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEET), that would be a radical change.

As a dad of two, I cannot help thinking that if my boys were shown that learning to weld could mean building a stadium for a ‘Northern Olympics’ or laying the foundations of Britain’s next major rail line, they would see those paths as the skilled and ambitious jobs they are. Schools should champion those routes as confidently as the path to a degree. Being able to point with pride at a home you have built with your own hands is as important as any graduate job.

Andy Burnham has argued that Thatcherite neoliberalism has quietly broken Britain, and he is right. Universities can expand freely, yet remain harder for disadvantaged students to navigate, often leaving them with significant debt, while colleges must, bizarrely, ration places. The result is a system that undervalues technical routes, falling hardest on working-class children.

As he argued in Leeds the other week, millions of young people who want to pursue technical routes have been overlooked and written off. Swiss cantons shape skills systems around their economies, and we should do the same. The Manchester Baccalaureate, based on high-growth industries, points the way.

In Makerfield, Burnham may be running against a plumber, but he has done far more to back the trade than his opponent. Representation is about what you fight for, not who you are.

We are the Labour Party. Work is in our name. The people who build, fix, and make things work are who we are for.

I’ve heard that argument on countless doorsteps in Wigan. Hopefully, it won’t be long before it’s being made again in Westminster.

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