“It’s been a terrible year to graduate and find a job” said a recent headline in the Financial Times.

Other newspapers have also chipped in with equally gloomy headlines such as “Where have all the graduate jobs gone”, “It’s a jobs desert” and ‘It’s so demoralising’: UK graduates exasperated by high unemployment”.

So why are so many seemingly well qualified young people finding it hard to get a job? To what extent is AI to blame for graduates’ labour market woes? And are the challenges facing graduates likely to get better or worse in the coming years? 

My guests are Sarah O'Connor, the employment columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times, and Stephen Isherwood, the joint Chief Executive of the Institute of Student Employers, a membership body that supports organisations who recruit graduates.

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Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you’ve all had a great start to 2026.

Last year concluded with an action-packed autumn term of education policies, including the Curriculum and Assessment Review, a Post 16 White Paper and a new levy on international students along with several announcements on extra funding for schools and families.

But fear not, because this year is already poised to offer plenty more drama and debates. A Schools White Paper is expected in the coming weeks, including reforms to the support for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, or SEND for short, and that all comes on top of simmering tensions over this year’s teacher pay awards and Ofsted’s controversial new inspection framework.

To share his views on what is coming up in 2026, I’m delighted to be joined by Pepe Di’Iasio, the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents over 25,000 leaders in primary, secondary and post-16 education.

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In January 2025, I recorded an episode of Inside Your Ed titled ‘Will the debate over vocational and technical qualifications ever end?’.

It is therefore rather fitting that my final podcast of 2025 will prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this debate shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

In November this year, the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review proposed the creation of V levels - a new set of vocational qualifications for 16 to 19 year olds that are intended to sit between academic A levels and technical T levels.

The Government accepted this recommendation and has since launched a consultation on the design and implementation of V levels in order to get these new qualifications ready for September 2027. 

So what problems are V levels supposed to solve? What opportunities and risks lie ahead for learners and providers with this new brand of qualifications? And will V levels be seen as a prestigious choice for young people or will they struggle to compete with A levels and T levels in terms of their visibility and profile?

My guests are Professor Dame Alison Wolf DBE, the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at Kings College London and author of a government review of vocational qualifications in 2011, and Shaun Hope, the principal of Bishop Auckland College, which delivers further education, vocational training and higher education to over 4,000 students across Durham.

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For the Higher Education, or HE sector, it may be starting to feel like one step forward is almost immediately followed by one step backward.

Last year, the announcement of a rise in tuition fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a large increase in taxes on employers, including HE providers, which probably wiped out some, if not all the extra fee income.

This year, the decision to again raise fees in line with inflation was accompanied by a brand new tax on HE providers in the form of an international student levy.

Needless to say, this new levy comes at a time when many universities and other providers are known to be struggling financially, and that’s before you even consider potential problems with the levy itself.

So what is this new international student levy? Are there likely to be winners and losers in different parts of the HE sector following the levy’s introduction? And are there ways that the levy could potentially be improved, or should the sector just keep fighting against it regardless?

My guests are Rose Stephenson, the Director of Policy and Strategy at the Higher Education Policy Institute, and Chris Havergal, the editor of Times Higher Education.

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“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.”

Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short.

A significant part of this new system was Education, Health and Care Plans, or EHCPs, which would identify any additional needs of children and young people aged up to 25 and set out the extra support that they are legally entitled to receive.

Just over a decade later in 2025, and the SEND system is widely regarded to be complex, fragmented and facing financial ruin. What’s more, the current government’s planned reforms to SEND, which were scheduled for this autumn, have been delayed until the New Year.

In October, IPPR, a progressive think tank, published a new report called ‘BREAKING THE CYCLE: A BLUEPRINT FOR SEND REFORM’, which set out their proposals for putting special needs provision on a better and more sustainable path.

So what did this new report identify as the main problems facing the SEND system? Does SEND provision need major investment, major reform or both? And when the financial pressures on local and national government are so acute, can EHCPs survive in their current form for much longer?

My guests are Geoff Barton CBE, chair of the IPPR Inclusion Taskforce that fed into this new report and also a former headteacher and union leader, and Eleanor Harris, co-author of this new report and also the Director of Policy, Impact, Research and Communications at The Difference, a charity focused on inclusion.

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The goal was evolution, not revolution, and when the final report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was published on November 5th, that is precisely what was delivered.

Across primary and secondary education in England, the Review proposed changes to the system as a whole as well as individual subjects, with all the changes firmly rooted in the evidence that the Review’s expert panel had received.

The Government has accepted a large number of recommendations from the Review but, rather unexpectedly, ministers have also decided to ignore some of the Review’s evidence-based recommendations and instead announce their own reforms.

So what were the main proposals in the Review’s final report? Was the Government right or wrong to reject some of the Review’s proposals? And does the goal of evolution not revolution mean that debates over some controversial topics are far from over?

My guests are the same two experts who joined me to digest the interim report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review back in April - Mary Myatt, an education adviser, writer and speaker, and Dale Bassett, the director of curriculum and assessment at United Learning, a group of over 100 schools.

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It is entirely normal for a Government to announce plans to reform either Higher Education (HE) or Further Education (FE). What is much less normal is a Government announcing a plan to reform HE and FE at the same time.

The Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on the 20th of October, sought to do precisely that, as it set out the Government’s plan “to educate and train the workforce of the future and give people the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.”

So what are the main proposals in this White Paper? How much control do ministers even have over universities, colleges and other local and regional stakeholders? And will the plans in the White Paper bring HE and FE closer together or merely reinforce the status quo?

My guests are Shane Chowen, the editor of FE Week, and Nick Hillman OBE, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer generated plenty of headlines at the Labour Party conference in late September when he set a new target of two-thirds of young people completing some form of higher level learning beyond school or college.

Rather than hitting this target purely by expanding university degrees, the government has set an extra sub-target of ensuring that by 2040 at least 10% of young people pursue higher technical education or apprenticeships by age 25, a near doubling of today’s figure.

However, as two new reports from the Edge Foundation explained earlier in September, young people can face many barriers when trying to access apprenticeships, while employers can face many barriers when trying to recruit young apprentices, particularly small and medium-sized companies - often known as SMEs.

So what are the barriers facing young people and employers? Should tackling these barriers be a local, regional or national responsibility? And is more funding the key to unlocking more apprenticeships for young people, or are there better solutions out there?

My guests are Anna Ambrose, the Chief Executive of the charity Workwhile, and Katy Dorman, the Apprenticeship Strategy Manager at Norfolk County Council.

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If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle.

The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was swallowed up by the simultaneous increase in National Insurance costs for employers, including HE providers, while this summer’s Spending Review across all government departments offered no solutions to the sector’s funding woes.

In contrast, this academic year has started with HE in the news for a more positive reason, with the announcement on September 10th that the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent intended to “formally collaborate” to create a new “super-university”, provisionally titled the London and South East University Group.

So what is this new university group, and what is it trying to achieve? Could other universities be tempted to follow suit by setting up their own group-like structures? And is the notion of university groups the future of HE in this country or merely a distraction?

My guests are David Kernohan, the Deputy Editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site - and Rachel Hewitt, the Chief Executive at MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities.

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When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning.

That’s not to say that an inspection system is ever likely to be universally loved, but Ofsted’s original plans – which we discussed on this podcast back in February – created a huge backlash.

So Ofsted went away and had another go, culminating in their new set of proposals for conducting inspections, released on September 9th. Unfortunately for Ofsted, the response from all the major unions has been just as critical at the second time of asking.

So what changes has Ofsted announced to their upcoming inspection framework? Are these changes the ones that critics wanted to see? And which parts of future Ofsted inspections are likely to prove controversial for many months to come?

My guests are Helena Marsh, the principal of Linton Village College, a comprehensive secondary school in South Cambridgeshire, and Mark Enser, a writer and columnist and also a former Ofsted inspector.

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