As it all goes pear shaped, can education take a new path?

Labour market statistics for December 2025, put unemployment for young people not in full-time education at over 1 in 8, with another 1 in 6 ‘economically inactive’. Youth unemployment has historically been much worse than for other groups, but these high levels of are symptomatic of broader changes in the labour market, the economy and the occupational (class) structure. which has been recomposing from the 1980s onwards. The traditional post-war social pyramid, has with its ‘upper’ ‘middle’ and ‘lower’ continued to erode, being replaced by an hourglass shaped or more accurately a pear-shaped formation

A very small, but far more internationalised upper/ruling/capitalist/employing class where tech conglomerates have replaced manufacturing and converged with financial interests, continues to be supported by a relatively large managerial and professional ‘middle class’. Yet the future existence, but also resilience of this group is up for grabs – with AI having the potential to seriously disrupt, though certainly not completely eliminate this sort of employment, just as automation/mechanisation started to and continues to disrupt and hollow-out ‘routine’ white collar work from the late 20c.

This group of managers and professionals, declining or otherwise, stands above a new ‘middle/working class‘ of mainly employed but also small employer and sole traders, that the Labour government likes to refer to as ‘working people’. Unlike the previous ‘working class’ with at least a degree of limited ‘class consciousness’ represented, but also carefully mediated through ‘the labour movement’, this new working middle resembles more of a fragmented arrangement, with various strata and sub-strata united only in their determination to avoid relegation, maybe permanently, to the ranks of the precariat below. 

Of course, ‘counter movements’ – rather than visible Marxist style class struggle between the industrial working class and its employers, as the eminent 20^th century social theorist Karl Polanyi referred to, take different forms but as yet have not coalesced into any real coherent alliances. Though increasing disillusionment with ‘centrist’ political parties has seen the emergence of an increasingly polarised politics.

In contrast to their post-war counterparts, today’s graduates in particular face the threat of downward social mobility – being increasingly ‘qualified’ doesn’t provide any real assurance. This has grown since the pandemic with reports now citing a major dip in graduate recruitment, intensified by the international economic uncertainties and those of around AI.  But it’s also important to realise that graduates bump others down the ‘labour queue’ into the precariat. Graduate unemployment still remains relatively low (unemployment rates being around 6%), the NEETs suffer the most.

Reports estimate that over 10%  (approx 4 million) of UK workers are in precarious work — meaning insecure, low-paid, or unstable employment, though this may be a conservative estimate with growing amounts of ‘middle’ and even ‘professional’ work now ‘de-contractualised’   The existence of almost 1 million NEETs, has provided a contemporary dimension to Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’.  If the consolidation of an alliance between the manually working class, ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, and the administrative/managerial/professional non-manually working middle class in the post-war welfare state settlement are no longer credible, the precariat, with some noteworthy exceptions continues to remain largely unorganised, individualistic rather than collective.

Post-war educational programs grew up around a pyramid occupational structure and a belief in an upwardly mobile society. This was given an added twist in the Blairite years when it was decreed that getting better qualified – and by implication, ‘better skilled’ was an imperative to take advantage of opportunities afforded by an increasingly globalised world. Meanwhile, progressives sought to increase participation in education by traditionally underrepresented groups particularly in areas of race and gender.

However, as the post-war education project has increasingly come off the rails it has been superseded by an attempt to secure a ‘great reversal’ of policy designed to create a new correspondence with the new downwardly mobile society – attempts to reduce the number of students on the academic/university track by creating a batch of new vocational qualifications post-16, which have little relationship to the changes in the occupational structure described above, being one example, but also a willingness to allow market forces to facilitate a recruitment ‘free for all’   between schools, colleges and universities, which increasingly reflect wider economic divisions between users. Thirdly, the rolling back of many of the curriculum reforms and practices with the imposition of a more rigid academic curriculum said to disadvantage poorer and minority groups.

Yet the great reversal has been impeded delayed and resisted – even if not representing a coherent ‘counter movement’ – with campaigns against cuts and closures alongside the most extensive industrial for forty years. In particular, attendance at university continues to remain popular amongst UK school and college leavers, many of whom, despite the fees, still sign up for distinctly ‘non-vocational’ courses reflecting a genuine interest.

So as education increasing fails to ‘place’ the majority of students in employment that is commensurate with their qualifications and more schools recognise that they are part of a ‘zero-sum’ system, in which they can only ‘succeed’ at the expense of their neighbours. As it all goes pear shaped;  have new opportunities and conditions emerged for an alternative politics of education?