Construction’s talent pipeline has been hiding in schools for years

I read Building magazine’s recent articles by editor Chloe McCulloch and Turner & Townsend’s Patricia Moore about the skills debate triggered by Andy Burnham’s recently announced reforms with a mixture of agreement, optimism and some frustration. 

The debate is really important. We need a much better relationship between education, skills and employment, and construction cannot afford to sit back and wait for government to solve its workforce challenges.  

I also wholeheartedly agree that presenting technical and academic education as opposing choices has done young people and our industry few favours. Construction needs exceptional tradespeople, technicians, engineers, surveyors, architects, managers and digital specialists. It needs people entering through entry-level apprenticeships, further education, university and higher and degree apprenticeships - different pathways into the same extraordinary industry. 

Sadly, there’s still a sense that we’re starting this conversation from scratch.  As Building’s editor recognises, we aren’t.  

In 2009, from the North-west of England, Class Of Your Own began developing an approach to built environment education based on a simple premise: if construction wanted a genuine talent pipeline, young people needed the opportunity to understand the industry while they were still at school. That approach had to be “academic” in nature, to ensure it had the respect of education professionals, and parents. 

“Design Engineer Construct!” was the result. A major learning and teaching programme with recognised qualifications launched in 2013 with the support of all the big names in architecture, engineering and construction, including Keith Howells, then chairman of Mott MacDonald, a champion from the start.  

Children and young people, many starting at around 11 years old, began learning through authentic design projects that connected traditional subjects to the real world of the built environment. They encountered architecture, engineering, surveying, digital modelling, sustainability, construction and project management, worked with industry professionals and began to understand how a multidisciplinary industry actually functions. 

Thirteen years later, we can see where some of those young people went. DEC students have progressed to university and degree apprenticeships in building surveying, civil engineering, architecture, architectural technology, building services engineering, geospatial science and mapping, construction management and project management. Some progressed directly into the same organisations that had supported their education at school. 

That gives us something rather valuable in today’s skills debate: evidence over time. 

From talent pipeline to social value 

There is, however, another part of this story that I believe construction needs to confront. 

Over the years, major contractors, consultants and professional bodies have invested considerable time and expertise in schools delivering DEC. Companies have “adopted” schools, provided professional mentors, introduced real projects, supported teachers and helped young people understand careers they may never previously have encountered. 

Too often this work has sat within the industry’s social value activity rather than its talent pipeline strategy

Yet too often this work has sat within the industry’s social value activity rather than its talent pipeline strategy. 

Social value is important, but the distinction matters. If engagement with a school is primarily measured through volunteering hours, numbers of students reached or activities delivered, the relationship can effectively end when the social value commitment has been satisfied.  

Yet, if the same school is viewed as part of a long-term talent strategy, very different questions follow. What are those students learning? Which qualifications are they taking? Where do they progress at 16 and 18? Can the employer maintain a relationship with them? Could work experience lead to an apprenticeship? Or scholarship through university? Could an apprentice eventually progress to professional status? 

The irony is that industry has sometimes been standing alongside its future workforce without recognising it as such. 

Education policy made the job harder 

There is another uncomfortable part of this history, and construction needs to understand it if we are serious about responding to the prime minister’s skills ambitions. 

Schools operate within an accountability system. However compelling an industry programme may be, school leaders have to consider curriculum time, staffing, budgets, attainment measures and the qualifications for which they are ultimately held accountable. 

After five years holding academic equivalency, DEC qualifications lost their place in school performance tables in 2018. 

I challenged that decision then, right through to the House of Lords, and I have continued to challenge its consequences ever since. 

It created a fundamental problem. We were asking schools to devote serious curriculum time to a rigorous programme, supported by employers and connected directly to an industry with substantial skills shortages, while the accountability system gave school leaders progressively less reason to accommodate it. 

For a headteacher deciding how to use finite curriculum hours, that matters enormously. 

This is something industry sometimes underestimates. We can tell schools that construction desperately needs young people. We can provide mentors, projects, technology and enthusiastic professionals. We can demonstrate exciting progression routes. But if the qualification through which that sustained learning takes place does not contribute to the measures against which the school itself is judged, we make participation considerably harder to justify. 

That is not a failure of teachers or school leaders, but a structural contradiction. 

And I have long believed politics got in the way. 

Successive governments have changed the name, the status and the perceived value of technical and vocational education, while employers have continued to report serious skills shortages. Programmes can find themselves encouraged by one part of the system and disadvantaged by another. Industry then returns several years later asking why more young people have not chosen construction. 

We should at least be prepared to ask whether the incentives we created for schools contributed to the answer. 

What do we actually want schools to do? 

This is why the current debate matters so much. 

If government genuinely wants young people to experience high quality technical and professional education alongside strong academic learning, it needs to make it possible for schools to take those opportunities seriously. We cannot ask headteachers to prioritise something nationally important while simultaneously signalling through accountability measures that it is institutionally less valuable. 

We cannot ask headteachers to prioritise something nationally important while simultaneously signalling through accountability measures that it is institutionally less valuable

Likewise, construction cannot continue treating sustained built environment education predominantly as a social value exercise and then express surprise when its talent pipeline remains fragile. 

There needs to be a joined up proposition. 

Teachers should be equipped to deliver high quality built environment learning through the curriculum. Industry should provide the professional context, current knowledge, technology, mentoring and real projects that make that learning authentic. Qualifications should give students meaningful recognition for what they have achieved. Employers should then be capable of maintaining sight of those young people as they progress towards further education, higher education, apprenticeships and employment. 

That is a talent pipeline, not a careers talk. 

Inspiration has never been enough 

I have spent years watching brilliant people from industry inspire young people in classrooms, and I will always value that contribution, but inspiration without sustained education has limitations. 

A civil engineer can transform a student’s perception of engineering during a one-hour school visit. The following morning that student returns to a timetable in which the built environment may never appear again. 

Teachers have always been central to DEC. Industry professionals cannot and should not replace them

This is why teachers have always been central to DEC. Industry professionals cannot and should not replace them. A trained, confident teacher can make connections between mathematics, science, geography, design, digital skills and the built environment week after week. Industry then provides the authenticity that a teacher cannot reasonably be expected to provide alone. 

That combination is powerful, but schools need permission within the education system to make room for it. 

We have more than a decade of evidence 

The North-west provides a very timely example to examine what happened when schools did make that room.  

Children began DEC at 12 years old. They completed recognised qualifications, encountered employers, discovered professions they had not previously known existed and progressed into further study, degree apprenticeships and careers. 

We know these young people and still follow their journeys. They are now DEC ambassadors, returning to schools to support teachers and students. 

We ask them which interventions mattered, what their teachers contributed, what role employers played and whether studying the built environment at school influenced the choices they subsequently made. They continue to shape our decisions going forward. 

But we should also ask a more difficult counterfactual question: how many more young people might have followed them if schools had been encouraged, rather than discouraged, to make curriculum space for this kind of learning? 

That evidence could tell us considerably more about solving construction’s workforce challenge than another short term campaign to raise awareness. 

The solution has been hidden in plain sight 

The prime minister’s skills agenda creates an opportunity to think differently, but I hope construction resists the temptation to respond by simply creating more initiatives. 

We should first look carefully at what we have already built. 

We should first look carefully at what we have already built

For more than a decade, employers have supported young people studying the built environment in schools. Recognised qualifications have existed. Teachers have delivered them. Students have progressed. Employers have recruited. We have real people whose journeys from classroom to industry can now be traced. 

Yet somewhere along the way, two things happened. Industry frequently categorised this activity as social value rather than workforce development, while education policy made it harder for schools to justify giving curriculum time to it. 

Those two issues are connected. 

If Andy Burnham’s government genuinely wants to rebalance education and create credible pathways into the skilled professions and industries Britain needs, construction has an opportunity to bring evidence to the table rather than another promise. 

We need to stop asking only how many young people we can inspire and start asking how we educate them, recognise their achievement, maintain contact with them and create visible routes into employment. And most importantly, how we can better support the teachers who get them there.  

The hard hat and the graduation cap were never the problem. The problem is the disconnected journey between the classroom and the workforce. 

Construction’s future professionals have been sitting in front of us for years, but so often filed under social value. Hidden in plain sight. 

Alison Watson is founder and chief executive of Class Of Your Own