In his by-election victory speech, Andy Burnham reiterated the need for a strong education system that ‘offers a path for everybody, academic and technical in equal balance’. This is in line with recommendations from the recently published interim report, Young people and work, which also called for a stronger vocational education system to help address the fact that nearly one million young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not currently in education, employment or training – the second highest rate in Europe. 

It thus seems timely to reflect on what we mean by high-quality vocational education and what countries with different education systems and lower youth unemployment rates do differently, which is the aim of this blog post.

A few key issues struck me as I was reading through the report. Firstly, whilst qualifications continue to be protective and beneficial overall, they fail to open doors into steady employment or further education for a growing number of young people. 

[N]early 30% are now getting good GCSEs or equivalent, over 21% have a Level 3 qualification and 15% have a degree. Yet the labour market is not absorbing them. There is evidence of a structural weakening of the transition into work.

The growth in the proportion of NEET young people with A Level qualifications or above has outpaced the rise in the proportion of young people attaining those qualifications overall.

Secondly, England’s education system is often hailed as ‘world class’, not least due to its above-average results on the OECD PISA test, and in many regards it is; but a closer look at the data appears to show a system that does less well with supporting students’ mental health and wellbeing and one that works better for high-performing students than their lower-performing peers. PISA results show that English students report significantly lower levels of life satisfaction overall than their peers in other countries. They also show that those students with lower mathematics scores tend to report lower levels of overall life satisfaction and feelings of belonging in school (Ingram et al., 2023). It is exactly those students who are more likely to end up NEET later in life.

27% of white working-class pupils say they rarely or never enjoy lessons, compared with 18% of white middle-class pupils and 12% of non-white middle-class pupils. 23% say they rarely or never feel confident about what they are learning, compared with 13% of white middle-class and 9% of non-white middle-class pupils.

So, what could we do to engage them better with school, where have we gone wrong and what can we learn from other countries?

The report itself points to the potential of vocational education programmes, including apprenticeships, to engage young people with their training and education by providing a closer link to real-world, applied learning and a direct route into employment.

For too long ‘high expectations’ has been understood as synonymous with higher education. This has, in part, been driven by international policymaking, including through advice from the OECD that has long criticised countries with ‘low’ rates of academic graduates in relation to their economic development. In other words, high-income countries are expected to have a high rate of university graduates. To some extent, such an expectation makes sense in a knowledge economy, but arguably only if those university degrees actually help people to get into meaningful occupations, which clearly they fail to do for a growing sub-group of young people in England who end up NEET. 

So what are the alternatives?

Some countries have taken a different approach to education and focused on developing high-quality vocational pathways alongside academic pathways. 

One such example is Austria. I have picked this case study as it is a system I am very familiar with – it’s the country I was born and educated in before moving abroad around eleven years ago – but also because its vocational system is typically considered a positive contributor to Austria’s low youth unemployment rate (OECD, 2025; 2026). Its economic situation is also comparable to that of England when considering GDP per capita, although slightly stronger when considering the whole of the UK, which is largely due to the impact of London’s strong economic situation (World Bank, 2025).

In terms of its PISA performance, Austrian students score above average in science and mathematics and slightly above average in reading, with large discrepancies between students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and their more advantaged peers (OECD, 2022). Despite not counting towards the highest performing countries on the PISA test – a test that is meant to measure how well education systems are preparing students for life – Austria has a youth unemployment rate of roughly 11.5%, one of Europe’s lowest, compared to the UK’s 16%, one of Europe’s highest, as we have already established. 

This suggests that the correlation of high PISA scores and employability is not automatic. While some high-performing countries do indeed also have low youth unemployment rates (e.g. Singapore and Japan), others score relatively highly on the PISA test but still have high youth unemployment rates (e.g. Estonia and England) (Statista, 2025). Yet others have just average or slightly above average PISA scores but low youth unemployment rates (e.g. Austria, Switzerland and Germany). Setting aside a country’s general economic situation, which of course contributes to youth employment rates, strong links between education and the world of work appear to be instrumental in providing better outcomes for young people.

It is not enough to rejoice in high and rising PISA scores. We need to focus on developing a better link between education and employment. 

So what does Austria do differently?

In Austria, only 39% of young people start a bachelor’s degree, compared to the OECD average of 77% (OECD, 2026).

This may shock some readers. Isn’t university what our students should aim for? Well, what if there was a true alternative?

Let me start by saying that there is a lot in the Austrian education system that is far from perfect, starting from an approach that streams students into ‘academic’ and ‘less academic’ pathways based on performance in primary school at the age of 10, to the low rate of students from disadvantaged and immigrant backgrounds reaching university, for which it has quite rightly been criticised (OECD, 2026). Any education system should absolutely allow for any young person who has sufficient prior attainment and wants to go to university to do so, no matter their background. However, it also has to provide real, high-quality alternatives for those who wish to (or need to) join a profession earlier in life, whether through an apprenticeship or a higher vocational education. 

The latter is provided by education systems in, for example, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. This partly explains the relatively low rate of university graduates – the reality is that young people do not necessarily need to go to university. They can join the labour market in a qualified position straight out of their vocational schools, which two-thirds of young people in Austria attend. Indeed, the bar for entering university is relatively low for most degrees in Austria compared to England. For many degrees, ‘passes’ in the school-leaving certificate, which is not standardised across all subjects, is enough to start a university degree, with a few exceptions such as medicine, journalism or sport science, which have entrance exams. This suggests that more students could start university degrees but choose not to as they have the opportunity to enter the job market directly after their vocational school. 

The dual vocational education and training (VET) system combines company-based theoretical training and school-based theoretical instruction. The main pathways are as follows.

Apprenticeships

These typically last three years and combine workplace training with part-time vocational school. In this model, students spend most of their week working for an employer, being paid a nominal wage, and attend school for theoretical instruction. This allows students to gain real-life, practical work experience and the necessary theoretical yet applied knowledge for their profession. Students graduate with a diploma but can extend it to a school-leaving certificate which allows entry to technical universities. Hundreds of different apprenticeships exist, from commonly known ones like car mechanic, retail assistant or hairdresser to much more niche professions, which are closely intertwined with local contexts and needs, such as ropeway technicians, who work on ski lifts, wine technology assistants, who work in Austria’s notable, but little known, wine industry, or stone masons and monument conservators, who work on the many historic buildings around the country.

Intermediate vocational schools

These sit somewhere in between apprenticeships and higher vocational schools. They have a stronger theoretical focus than apprenticeships, and students spend more time in school but combine this time with practical work placements. Students graduate with a diploma that typically does not qualify them to attend university but enables them to enter employment directly. 

Higher vocational schools

These five-year upper secondary schools exist for three main groups of professions: technical/engineering, business and tourism. But they also cover fashion, graphic professions (including photography), healthcare, early years education and agriculture, to name a few further specialisms. 

These are intensive programmes that combine general education with vocational application. For example, language classes focus on client interactions and business-specific vocabulary and text types. Vocation-specific curriculum subjects, such as accounting, cooking, project management and food technology, sit alongside more general subjects like history or geography. These schools offer intensive study programmes and students typically spend more time in school per day than those studying on the general ‘academic’ route (roughly 35 hours compared to 30 hours). Students graduate with a school-leaving certificate that allows them to enter technical or general universities. These schools are often closely intertwined with local and regional employers and it is not uncommon for students to find employment in companies or sectors where they did their summer internships.

The importance of work placements

Intensive work placements, typically during the summer months, form a core component of these schools. In tourism schools, for example, students need to complete 32 weeks of internships before entering their fifth year of study. In technical schools they need to complete eight weeks. In fashion school, it is four weeks (Bundesministerium Bildung, 2026). 

The aim behind these work placements is to increase students’ motivation by showing them how their acquired knowledge and skills can be applied in practice; teach them responsibility in the workplace, including punctuality and reliability; develop their soft skills, such as communication with colleagues and supervisors; and strengthen relationships with potential future employers (Bundesministerium Bildung, 2026).

Higher education

The higher education system is also split into general universities (such as the one I attended), which teach a wide range of subjects, and universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschule), which typically offer more applied study programmes in a continuation of higher vocational schools.

The key features contributing to the success of the VET system are:

• Close collaboration with the world of work through compulsory, intensive work placements and lecturers from industry.
• A demanding academic curriculum, focusing on the application of acquired knowledge in professional contexts.
• Contextualisation – schools typically offer pathways that will allow students to find employment in their local area, thereby increasing their relevance.
• Permeability – choosing a vocational track does not necessarily mean closing the door to higher education.

Taken together, this offer provides a real alternative to the ‘academic’ route, which focuses on teaching general knowledge with the aim to prepare students for university. The fact that two-thirds of Austrian young people study on a vocational path indicates that they are considered a real, high-quality alternative for those who are more interested in applying their knowledge to real-world problems. 

So what does this mean for England? I am not advocating for England to adopt the exact same approach – copying one education system’s approach in another context rarely works. We can, however, take some inspiration and the first step is probably to start questioning some of the values underlying the English education system, which may be difficult to change.

Why is it that we value theoretical knowledge more than applied knowledge?

What if we started to dismantle the idea that theoretical knowledge is inherently worth more than applied knowledge and skills, and indeed that the two are distinct? What if instead we started to understand that the two go hand in hand, and we need both to advance humanity. 

I have a PhD but would not know where to start when it comes to fixing or building a ski lift, restoring a historic building or supporting the highly technical process of wine-making. It just so happens that the type of knowledge I happen to be interested in and enjoy engaging with overlaps with academic credentials. But that does not make it any more valuable than the applied knowledge and skills that we need to keep our world going – some may argue quite the opposite.

Perhaps we can create a system where more students feel like they belong, are encouraged to discover their true passion, and take pride in what they know and are able to do. But this won’t happen through paying lip service to vocational education or by adding a handful of vocational credits to the current education system. We need to create a real alternative that motivates students to learn by showing them how they can apply what they are learning in the real world.

Placing more value on manual and applied labour also seems particularly relevant in an age of AI, as skilled manual labour is generally considered less prone to automatisation – but that’s a topic for a different blog post.

References

Bundesministerium Bildung (2026) Pflichtpraktikum. Available at: https://www.abc.berufsbildendeschulen.at/pflichtpraktikum (accessed 12th June 2026).

Ingram J, Stiff J, Cadwallader S et al. (2023) PISA 2022: National report for England. Department for Education. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pisa-2022-national-report-for-england (accessed 15th June 2026).

OECD (2025) Education at a glance 2025: Austria. OECD Publishing. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2025_1a3543e2-en/austria_28180d4d-en.html (accessed 15th June 2026)

OECD (2026) OECD economic surveys: Austria 2026. OECD Publishing. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-economic-surveys-austria-2026_7cea027b-en.html (accessed 15th June 2026)

Statista (2025) Youth unemployment rate in Estonia from 1991 to 2025. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/811975/youth-unemployment-rate-in-estonia/?utm_source=chatgpt.com (accessed 11th June 2026).

Statista (2025) Youth unemployment rate in Singapore from 1991 to 2025. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/812966/youth-unemployment-rate-in-singapore/ (accessed 11th June 2026).

World Bank (2025) GDP per capita. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=AT (accessed 11th June 2026).