I'd love to take @LucyMPowell on a schools tour. One week. Sevenish secondaries. Good ones, bad ones, I'd pick. Coastal, rural, urban. A good mix. We turn up in the morning with DBS's, we tell the schools there are no cameras, no inspections, nothing, we're just here to get a vibe. Go see some lessons. Hit the corridors. Spend time with teachers on duty. Chat to heads of department. Maybe have lunch with some students. Ask the admin team for a flavour of their day and the stuff they are having to deal with. Evenings is drinks. But not swanky things with MAT CEOs and folk with the letters after their names. They're important, but they already have a seat at the table. Instead, we invite front-line teachers and middle leaders. We want to know what life is like on the ground. What are their bosses telling them to do? Do they agree? Do they think there are other things they should be prioritising? What do they think would really help the children they teach? I think Powell would maybe change her mind about some things. About where schools do well, and where they don't. About just how stuck some of our schools are, and how routes to improvement are ordinarily based not in widespread reform, but in the concrete day to day of efficient and effective schools. Rather than grand narratives, simple things like improving behaviour and classroom standards. Getting students out of the corridors and into classrooms, and getting every teacher a working laptop and a board that doesn't keep glitching. Clear escalatory processes, and the manpower and capacity to enforce them. Bandwidth for teachers to deal with the increasing pressures from a broken SEND system and an increasingly demanding parent body. Physical, concrete things. Not educational reform, but direct school actions and strategies. I'd love to do that. I think she'd enjoy it, and I reckon it would be time well spent.

To @andyburnham and @LucyMPowell, There are lots of problems and things to worry about with the introduction of a new technical route at age 14. As mentioned in the article (and flagged by union bosses) there are substantial workload and resourcing implications. Schools don't have lots of slack, and we will be teaching our current curriculums full time as soon as September hits. When will we plan and resource a whole bunch of new technical pathways? Which workforce will teach them, and with what physical infrastructure? How will schools figure out which ones to deliver? How will they be examined? Announcing this in the holidays is traditionally considered a poor move. The Tories were big for it, Labour have consistently done it in the first week back to school to match The Grid, and broadly it is anxiety inducing and not very fun for anybody. I have more substantive issues though: Focusing on your local area's job market somewhat renders the entire project of social mobility dead. The point of schools and education is to take students beyond their horizons, not constrain them within it. Yes, we want students to gain employable skills, and yes, from a purely utilitarian perspective it makes sense for those skills to be local ones, but we cannot lose track of the fact we want students to be *universally* employable, and to communicate to them that the world is their oyster and they can do anything they want. Channeling students into vocational routes at age 14 is - in my opinion - far too young. As much as you say you want parity between the two routes, you won't have it. There is literally an entry in Urban Dictionary for the term "BTEC" to mean a crappy knock-off. The current GCSE regime we have is the best we have ever hand in terms of its rigour, robustness and richness and all students should have the right to access it and carry its credentials with them for life. In the past when we have done stuff like this, it is always "other people's children" who end up doing the technical routes. High performing and middle class schools will magically end up with fewer children in technical routes, and poor performing schools will shovel their toughest students (who are statistically from lower socio-economic backgrounds) into them. This is what happened last time, and it will happen again. It will not help social mobility, and it will ironically decrease employability. Yes, this child might be more likely to be employable as a bricklayer (which, to be clear, is fine), but they will be less employable as a data manager, software engineer, accountant, events planner or retail manager (which, to be clear, is not fine). It's definitely the case that there is a small % of students in a small % of areas that might need different approaches to what we currently have. But it is a logical fallacy to take that small % and extrapolate it to a nation-wide policy change. I would strongly urge you to look at the reams of research that have already been conducted in the area, and established that - potentially alone in the west - our education system is doing pretty damn well. We have a flawed but strong curriculum, improving behaviour and standards across the board and a workforce that is ever more engaged with the research base. After decades of two- and three- tier systems, we have state schools that are now proving that disadvantaged students can leave school with astonishingly high academic qualifications. Let's not row that back. (PS there are plenty of people with rich experience and expertise in this area [who aren't me]. These people are deeply invested in getting the best life outcomes for our students, they aren't fusty old Govian academic snobs. I am always happy to try and help you find them.) tes.com/magazine/news/second…