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Andy Burnham has said that Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap in a swathe of new education reforms announced to tackle the one million young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs). But when we face a crisis so large, we can’t limit the definition of technical training to a hard hat. From 2028, 14-year-olds in England will be able to choose technical pathways alongside English and maths, giving pupils vocational skills, work experience and direct links to employers. It’s a positive start, but I think the success of this initiative depends on what we picture when we think ‘technical’.

Here’s what I picture. After more than 20 years in the music and film business and now running a university that trains musicians, filmmakers, performers and games artists, I see a sound engineer balancing a live mix in front of 10,000 people. I see a games developer and a virtual production technician lighting a scene that exists only inside a computer. These are inherently “technical” jobs that just happen to live in the creative industries. If Britain is redesigning technical education around the jobs of the future, then we can’t be restricted by the jobs of the past.

I bring up the future because we’re living in a time of unprecedented technological change. We see daily headlines threatening that AI is coming for our jobs, but the creative industries won’t be one of AI’s victims.

You’re often placed into two camps in the AI debate: the doom-mongers warning of a soulless creative future; or the philistines cheering on the robots at the top of the UK charts.

Artists are voicing valid concerns around originality and intellectual property, but focusing on the extremes of the debate neglects the enormous ecosystem of people and businesses that make up the rest of the industry. There are so many creatives, whether that be videographers, animators or sound designers who are using AI as a tool. Yes, AI can generate a track or a script in seconds, but it needs creatives to deliver taste, nerve, timing or soul.

The creative industries have always been early adopters of technology. This is the sector that took the synthesiser, the sampler, streaming, and virtual production in its stride. AI is no different – over half of creative businesses (51%) already use AI compared with 33% of UK businesses overall. Rather than being swallowed by it, the creative industries are leading the way in AI adoption.

The creative sector adds nearly £146billion into the UK economy every year, and since 2010 its output was more than double the wider economy (60.3% vs 24.3% GVA). Within individual industries, the UK video games industry is the largest in Europe. Film and high-end television attracted £5.8 billion in inward investment in 2025, making Britain one of the biggest production locations outside the US.

Music employs 220,000 people and generated £4.8billion in exports in 2024. Creative services exports were worth an estimated £59.4billion in 2023. Not only is that evidence of a national infrastructure unscathed by AI, but it’s helping create new jobs.

CreaTech, the fusion of creative and technology skills from games engines to AI-assisted design tools, is forecasted to create 160,000 jobs over the next decade, growing around 10 times faster than the rest of the creative industries. It’s a sector that’s actively growing in the AI age, and yet, we treat it as nothing more than a “Mickey Mouse” field.

All this tells us that Burnham’s reforms must seriously consider the creative sector as one of its greatest national assets that continues to grow – 14-year-olds should be able to see the route to the recording studio and the building site.

Burnham risks missing out on one of Britain’s strongest assets. We are redesigning technical education to prepare young people for the jobs of the future at the exact moment AI is redrawing what those jobs are. This industry sits precisely at that intersection by being early adopters of technology and world leaders in output.

Parity between the hard hat and the graduation cap must include the creative sector. That is where Britain's future is already being made.

Olivier Robert-Murphy is CEO and Vice-Chancellor of BIMM University. He initially served as an officer in the French Air Force before beginning his corporate career at Procter & Gamble

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