You can't build Britain's future workforce from the sidelines: why technical education reform is only the beginning

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard commentary about the UK’s supposed ‘skills gap’. It’s a frustrating debate because the biggest skills challenge has never been about a lack of talent but the lack of pathways.

How are we living in a reality where we have a million young people not in education, employment or training, at the same time where 75 percent of employers are telling the British Chamber of Commerce that they are struggling to recruit?

That's why in September I welcomed the Prime Minister’s plans to put technical education on an equal footing with the traditional academic route. Giving young people the opportunity to combine classroom learning with technical skills and meaningful employer engagement from the age of 14 is a significant (and long-awaited) step in the right direction.

We can’t just stop there though.

Skills are now a national resilience issue

The debate around skills is often framed as an economic one.

Of course, businesses need people to grow, but for the defence and security sectors it runs a lot deeper than that. The sonar systems that protect the nuclear deterrent, the air defence radars watching UK skies and the systems behind the British passport all depend on people: technicians, apprentices, software engineers and systems specialists. If we cannot train and keep them, sovereign capability erodes with them.

Our ability to remain competitive and secure will increasingly depend on whether we have the workforce capable of designing, building, operating and protecting these technologies. That's why I believe skills have become a national resilience issue.

Education can’t solve this alone

These reforms rightly recognise that employers need a bigger role in education. I would go one step further: UK businesses simply cannot afford to sit back and wait for the education system to fix itself.

If we want different outcomes, employers must become even more active participants in building the talent pipeline. That means opening our doors to younger students, offering meaningful work experience rather than box-ticking placements, and investing in apprenticeships. Education reform can create the framework, but this employer participation is needed to make it a reality.

The pipeline starts long before an apprenticeship

At Thales, one in twenty of our people are at the start of their career, including around 270 apprentices from Level 2 to degree level across all four nations, from Belfast and Glasgow to Templecombe and Crawley. We offer every apprentice a permanent job, and seven in ten stay with us.

But perhaps the biggest lesson we've learned is that the apprenticeship itself isn't where the journey begins. It starts years earlier.

That's why we invest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach, partner with schools across the country, and run virtual work experience programmes through Springpod. In the first quarter of this year alone, more than 570 students completed our virtual work experience programme, while our wider STEM outreach has already engaged more than 77,000 young people across the UK, through partners such as Primary Engineer and our work with schools.

Those numbers matter because confidence matters. For many young people, the first conversation with an engineer or the first visit to a workplace is the moment they realise these careers are both exciting and achievable.

Turning reform into opportunity

One aspect of the Government's announcement stands out to me in particular. These new technical pathways won't be designed solely in Whitehall. They'll be shaped by schools, colleges, employers and local leaders around the industries that matter most in their communities. That's exactly how it should be.

If Britain wants to lead in AI, cyber, quantum and advanced manufacturing, investing in technology alone won't be enough. We need to invest with the same ambition in the people who will build, operate and protect it.