The success of the white paper will depend on how we listen and respond locally

By Dr Sam Parrett CBE, CEO, Elevare Civic Education Group

The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper has provided a renewed and welcome national focus on opportunities for our young people. This includes the promise of a Youth Guarantee - which will ensure an automatic college place for all Year 11 pupils without a post-16 plan and guarantees a job for young people who have been unemployed for over 18 months.

Ensuring every young person has access to training and employment is important – and a continued priority for FE colleges. Yet what education policy sometimes lacks is the genuine voice of the learners themselves. How do young people feel about their future and what support do they need and want? We all know that further education plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between aspiration and opportunity, helping learners build the skills and confidence they need to thrive.

But to do this effectively, we must understand their lived experiences: What motivates them? What challenges them? What barriers do they face? So, earlier this year our Education Group undertook an extensive piece of research - the largest survey we have ever conducted. It gathered the views of over 3000 children and young people in our college and schools across the region. The report - Three Thousand Voices: Growing up in South East London – has provided us with important insight about the wellbeing of our learners and their experiences of growing up.

Headlines were that 87% of respondents said they live with people who make them feel loved, which is very positive - but that figure fell to just 54% among care-experienced learners and 55% among those who do not identify as male or female. Similarly, while 82% said their families have what they need to support them, this dropped to 66% for those entitled to free meals and 52% for LGBTQ+ learners.

Seventy per cent of FE learners said they have great tutors who support then – but many expressed anxiety about exams, careers and the future, with worries about making the right choices. Focus groups highlighted that these fears are often tied to the pressure of GCSE English and maths resits, which is something the White Paper is looking to address with new ‘stepping stone’ qualifications for these crucial subjects.

This is encouraging, given that this is clearly an area for concern for our learners. We look forward to contributing to the consultation that the DfE has now launched, informed by our unique evidence-base. Our findings flag where support is most needed and where we should target our efforts, both within the College and through our new charity, the LASER Education Foundation. For example - increasing mental health support, more career mentoring and community partnership programmes that help learners build social networks and real-world experience. But more widely, the research demonstrates that the ambition set out in the White Paper cannot simply be about providing students with access to a course or a job – it must consider the emotional, social and practical barriers that are stopping young people from progressing.

Collaboration is key to this. Our local, data-driven approach is helping us work more effectively with others – employers, local authorities, youth organisations and mental health providers – to co-design interventions that respond directly to what young people are telling us.

FE colleges are uniquely positioned to lead this kind of place-based collaboration. We connect education, skills, employment and wellbeing in a way few other sectors can – but the action we take needs to be grounded in lived experience rather than assumption. As I said when we launched the report, “oolicy change only matters if it improves lived experience. That must become our measure of success.” So, to this end, we are now exploring the creation of a Lived Experience Index, which will help us track progress over time and hold ourselves accountable to the perspectives of our learners.

We hope to repeat Three Thousand Voices at regular intervals. This will enable us to measure the impact of our initiatives and build a clearer picture of what works for our children and young people. We want to celebrate what is working well, but above all – keep learners’ voices at the centre of everything we do. The skills white paper gives us an important national framework. Three Thousand Voices reminds us that success will depend on how well we listen and respond locally.