The tragedy of the Milburn report is that it is right on education – but too late

Yesterday’s findings on youth under-employment include serious criticisms of young people’s curriculum and assessment experiences at school. But this government have already reviewed these policy fields, concluding that not much should change.

 

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping aspect of yesterday’s Milburn interim report on youth under-employment is not its set of conclusions, but its timing. 

For this report’s findings on education, drawing heavily on a host of concerning statistical indicators and experiences related to young people not in education, employment or training, contrast with those of a major government inquiry which has already concluded, but pointed in a different direction.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR), led by Professor Becky Francis of the Education Endowment Foundation and which was launched within weeks of Labour’s general election win in 2024, concluded only 16 months later, last November. It essentially came up with recommendations for only minor change, having concluded that England’s education system was, essentially, a success story.

Many people working in schools will no doubt have welcomed this acknowledgement. And the Milburn review – set up under the auspices of the Department for Work and Pensions with a brief to investigate the rise in the number of NEETS – is careful to recognise their hard work.

“Schools and teachers are doing often heroic work to optimise the life chances of their students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds,” it rightly states.

And yet the Milburn report also included a host of concerning data, and descriptions of negative experiences for young people in schools, which appear to suggest an education system which has failed them, in the way it has been set up by policymakers. Staggeringly, neither of those aspects featured in the CAR report, which nevertheless appears to have set the policy trajectory in this field at least until at least the end of this government.

Concerning data pointing towards disaffection

On those concerning data, while the Milburn report highlights statistics pointing in a more positive direction for English schools, such as the above-average international performance of our 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science tests, it highlights a raft of outcomes which suggest a set-up which is not serving at least a minority of pupils well, at all.

As well as the “relationship between social background and educational attainment in England [being] unbroken,” school absence; the numbers of children exiting schools for home education; and the numbers being suspended have soared in recent years, the report found.

In terms of the detailed numbers, “school absence has become a crisis in its own right,” the Milburn report stated, with 18.1 per cent of pupils being persistently absent in 2024-25, compared to 11 per cent before the pandemic, with “severe absence” – pupils missing 50 per cent or more of school time – trebling. The number of children in elective home education in England rose from 116,300 in 2021-22 to 175,900 in 2024-25, with “mental health…now cited as the main reason in 16 per cent of cases, up from 9 per cent” four years ago. And the report states that school suspension rates “have been rising since 2016/17, driven by secondary schools. The overall rate was around 4 per cent in 2024/25, up from 1.6 per cent, with the number of pupils suspended at least once, doubling from 79,000 to 166,000.”

For all that many will argue that these statistics reflect societal problems coming schools’ way, these indicators are not painting a picture of a schools system in robust good health.

The report also states that “only 64 per cent of UK pupils say they belong at schools” and that “just 19 per cent of secondary pupils in England describe themselves as very motivated to learn,” with the UK having seen “the largest fall in sense of belonging in the OECD”.

This last statement above comes with a footnote referencing a report by the Social Market Foundation, a centrist think tank, which itself had reported last year that “curriculum reforms implemented by former Education Secretary Michael Gove increased the number and importance of examinations in the school system, while encouraging rote learning, discouraging school investment in extra- and co-curricular learning, and contributed to high-stress academic environments”.

Interestingly, the Milburn report also found that teachers were in favour of what sounds like more radical reform of the school curriculum than was put forward by the Francis review. A “School Report” published last year by Pearson, the education firm, found only one in five secondary teachers saying that the current system “prepares students for further study or training,” with the Milburn review’s own “survey of teachers [finding that] three-quarters agreed that the curriculum put too much emphasis on passing exams (74 per cent) and not enough focus on preparing young people for employment (73 per cent in agreement) or teaching soft skills for employment (73 per cent).”

Education experiences of NEETs

The Millburn report also has a chapter on NEET young people’s experiences based on work published last week following interviews with 400 of them. It states: “We heard sometimes shocking testimony from our conversations with NEET young people about an experience of school often characterised by bullying and boredom.” 

The chapter on NEET young people’s experiences found that often their talents remained “hidden” at school: “not known about at school, not built upon at school”. A “deficit” model was too often in place, which “asks what is wrong with a young person,” when a “strengths-based model” could ask “what they are good at, what they care about, and what becomes possible when someone takes those things seriously”.

The chapter adds: “Shifting this mindset is important – perhaps the most important first step, because in many of the lives we heard about, the issue was not an absence of ability or ambition, but that those qualities had gone unnoticed…Young people spoke about wanting to work with children with learning difficulties, to care for older people, to build computers, write, design, make things, fix things and help people. Too often, these strengths sat unnoticed by school, unsupported by services or overshadowed by the labels attached to them: absent, anxious, difficult, behind, care-experienced, NEET. The way adults, and in particular employers, see young people, shapes what happens next. A system organised around deficits looks for non-attendance, low attainment, behaviour problems or barriers to work.”

The specific experience of school was characterised in mainly negative terms, for this group. The report found: “Across the country, young people described bullying, low expectations, isolation for minor rule-breaking, and classrooms in which they felt unseen, talked at, and written off. Low attainment, persistent absence, and exclusion are strong predictors of later labour market disengagement, but the deeper damage is often less visible: a loss of confidence, belonging, and trust in institutions…again and again, young people described a system that responded to struggle with isolation rather than support, where they were left alone with work and little help.”

On England’s exams system, around which so much of course revolves in secondary schools, this chapter of the Milburn review had found: “GCSEs themselves were described repeatedly as a source of dread rather than anything that felt fair and useful.”

The Francis review

England’s policymaking on schools, then, needs to take such perspectives – both the statistical indicators cited above, and the anecdotal experiences as written up following the conversations with NEET young people – seriously, would be the logical conclusion from the above, if it is produce a schools system which works better, particularly around halting the increase in NEETs, with the Milburn review stating that youth unemployment costing Britain more than £125 billion a year.

And yet this government’s apparent only attempt to take a serious look at England’s curriculum and assessment system and propose change has already come and gone, with only minor reforms proposed.

Re-reading the CAR, after the Milburn’s review’s devastating critique as above, I was struck anew by how the former failed, almost completely, as far as I can see, to offer any analysis on what the experience of England’s current curriculum and exams offer might look like, from a pupil’s point of view.

There was some acknowledgement that the number of exams taken by teenagers was too high, but only a modest change – a 10 per cent decrease in the volume of assessment, still leaving England well above many other jurisdictions, and despite exam boards having signalled that much greater change could have been possible – was proposed.

Just as shockingly, and as I wrote at the time, the CAR amazingly failed to reference any of the raft of statistics pointing to disaffection with the learning experience growing faster in England than in other countries, such as data from TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) showing that the proportion of English pupils disagreeing with the statement “I like being in school” doubled over the period 2015 to 2023. 

The CAR had seemed too timid in asking the serious questions of the Conservative curriculum and assessment reforms implemented by Michael Gove and the long-serving schools minister, Nick Gibb: has the more traditional approach they championed led to increased disaffection among at least a considerable minority of pupils? I think the indicators are all there for this question to at least have been asked seriously, but the Francis review appears not to have done so, as a result seemingly baking in the essence of those reforms for another decade.

The tragedy of the Milburn report, then, is that the Labour government has already set in train reforms, based on the CAR, which are essentially “steady as she goes,” preserving the status quo. To put it another way, the problematic experiences for many pupils that the Milburn report sets out so powerfully seem unlikely to change, for those who follow this cohort of NEETs, because the CAR found that only minor tweaks were needed to England’s education set-up.

Ironically, while the Milburn report itself rightly criticises the failure of policy to join up across government departments – for example, it says that data on young people’s long-term life destinations sits across three government departments, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the National Health Services – the publication of this DWP report after the DfE had hastily published its curriculum and assessment review, is a vivid case of a lack of joined-up government*.

With the CAR itself recommending that “holistic curriculum reviews” such as the one it itself carried out should take place only every decade, if this is taken seriously Labour has missed its chance to make the changes that the Milburn review suggests are so desperately needed.

Perhaps this could change, with Milburn to put forward recommendations in the autumn, and with – who knows? – a new Labour leader perhaps inclined to re-open this policy field. In my view, that should happen, for all that re-reviewing the curriculum would be seen as a huge upheaval for schools.

There is more to be written about how the CAR, framed as it was from within Labour’s election manifesto not to make too much change, was arguably classic Starmerism in its caution; that its timing, concluding not 18 months into the new government, was far too rushed to consider the very necessary deep look at the weaknesses as well as strengths of England’s set-up and to ask much more searching questions of education’s Conservative policy inheritance; and that the make-up of the CAR panel, with multi-academy trust leaders strongly represented and no place at the table for service users, was unbalanced and too tilted towards those more likely to defend the status quo.

But for now I wanted to conclude with what seems the most serious implication of yesterday’s report. This is that while the concerns it raises about the impact of England’s education system on many young people are powerful and persuasive, a policy review has already been put in place that stands to do little about it. For the generation currently going through schools, this is a huge policy fail.

 

 

*Milburn itself gives a hint at that concern, stating that, while the CAR does recommend some reforms including “a new enrichment framework for schools”, “whether they prove sufficient depends on whether they change the experience of school for those most at risk of  becoming NEET,” adding “The question is whether enriching the school experience with extra activities will be enough to reform the curriculum in ways that allow each child to feel their passions and their aspirations are being recognised. Without that the risk of engagement for those most at risk of becoming NEET will remain high.” From a Labour politician presumably reluctant to criticise another government policymaking exercise directly, setting out the risk in this way is fairly damning.