Table of Contents
TLDR
Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour Party Conference recognised that too many young people are being failed by an education system “built for some and not for all”, and promised more pathways and better support. But what about those who cannot access education through a classroom or fixed timetable at all? With persistent absence remaining high, in this article I’ll argue that a genuinely inclusive skills policy must fund high-quality distance and flexible learning as a core route for 16 to 25-year-olds outside mainstream education and not treat it as an optional extra.
Learners Who Can’t Turn Up: What Andy Burnham’s Speech Means for Those Outside the Room
In 1963, Michael Young founded the National Extension College (NEC) for adults who could not turn up: parents tied to the house, shift workers, people whose circumstances kept them from a fixed classroom. Sixty years on, the people who can’t turn up are younger. The median age of an NEC learner is 20 years old.
Many are young adults for whom school did not work. Their anxiety, health, caring responsibilities or unmet needs made a full timetable impossible. Persistent absence in England rose to 19.05% in 2025/26, reaching 33.84% for pupils eligible for free school meals, and the pre-pandemic rate in 2018/19 was 10.86%.
Those pupils become the young adults who arrive with us with unfinished GCSEs and a badly dented trust in education.
I attended the Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s speech in Liverpool today with them in mind.
Let Us Face the Future: Looking Back at Labour’s 1945 Manifesto
The Prime Minister began in 1945, with a government that set out to build homes, jobs, health and education for everyone, and with the working-class aspiration behind it. That common good, he argued, was lost in the 1980s, when wealth for the many came to be seen as opportunity for the few. Michael Young, who drafted the 1945 Labour Manifesto, made the same argument in 2000 in this article in the Guardian newspaper, describing a golden age that ended in the early 1980s. Eighteen years after 1945 he founded NEC, because the promise of education for everyone had not reached the adults, and now the young people, who could not turn up.
The Prime Minister then turned to young people. He said the number of late teens on benefits has grown, and that youth services abolished in 2010 and cuts to children’s mental health services have left families to battle for help and many young people adrift. His conclusion was blunt: “we invest in our young people or we face failure.”
What I Listened For
Before the Prime Minister’s speech, Education Secretary Lucy Powell told the conference that more than a million young people are not in education, employment or training and that too many feel school is not for them. She promised more pathways, including new vocational GCSEs and a rebuilt further education sector. What she did not describe was a route for the young person who cannot get through the door at all.
So I listened for three things in Andy Burnham’s speech:
- Would he name the young people who are outside the room? – He did, and he spoke of an education system “built for some and not for all”, promising to change it towards a system of comprehensive education.
- Would that mean more routes as well as better ones? – He backed parity between academic and technical routes, with Lucy Powell leading the way, and “good quality pathways for all from 14”.
- Would support be built around the learner? – He said no one should wait for mental health support while growing up, and that young people would be required to take up the help offered.
What I did not hear were specifics on how these pathways will reach the young people who cannot attend a fixed timetable, or how they will be funded.
A Second Chance That Works Differently
For these learners, flexibility isn’t a convenience. It’s what makes learning possible at all: a pace they can control, no classroom to walk into, no fixed timetable to fail.
The National Extension College (NEC) supports students from a range of backgrounds, each with very individual reasons for opting to study by online distance learning with NEC:
- Isla – the flexibility of NEC’s online distance learning courses helped Isla regain her confidence in education after she had struggled in a traditional classroom. After completing her GCSEs she plans to continue studying A levels online and to go on to university.
- Hannah – after leaving school with just one GCSE due to anxiety, Hannah studied A level French online with NEC, successfully preparing herself to attend university to study Law.
- Will – struggling with attendance in a traditional school setting, Will switched to distance learning to study A levels in History and Classical Civilisation with NEC and was supported to navigate the UCAS process for his university application.
- Estrella – traditional schooling hadn’t provided Estrella with the support she needed. Opting to learn online and study NEC’s distance learning A levels in Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy she benefitted from NEC’s dedicated tutor support and the flexibility of being able to fit her studies around other commitments.
Supporting Students in Different Settings
The same principle has been at work at NEC for years in other settings. Working with the Prisoners’ Education Trust, we have delivered the courses and qualifications by distance learning in prisons for over three decades, and we have developed mentors and trainers through our own materials.
In each case, learning without a room only works when someone has built the support around it.
That is my caution about treating flexibility as a bonus. A course delivered at a distance is not enough on its own. A young person let down by one institution needs clear qualification routes, proper support, and a reason to trust the next one. That is the infrastructure a skills policy should fund.
The Risk in Place-based Policy
Local and regional skills strategies make sense, and I welcome them. But a system organised around what is available in one place can miss the learner who cannot get to that place, whether because of health, anxiety, caring duties or distance.
The Prime Minister said Parliament has refused to treat all parts of England equally. I welcome that. But treating every place fairly does not reach the learner who cannot get to any place. A “Britain for everyone” has to include them.
The Ask
- Funded, high-quality flexible routes to GCSEs and vocational qualifications for 16 to 25-year-olds outside mainstream education, sitting alongside local provision rather than beneath it.
- Devolved and local skills funding that explicitly recognises distance and flexible provision as core, not supplementary.
Young wrote in 2000 that “the ghost of Let Us Face the Future is not yet laid to rest.” In 2026 the test is whether it reaches the learners who never make it into the room.
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NEC’s Offer
The National Extension College (NEC) offers a range of online distance learning courses at GCSE and A level, extending opportunities to learners of all ages and backgrounds.