Four ways Burnham could change your child's education

With Andy Burnham now the clear frontrunner to take the keys to No 10, the policies he has spent eight years testing in Greater Manchester suddenly matter to every parent in England.

And his views on education have been made particularly clear.

He traces the near-million young people not in education, employment or training – known as NEETs – back to the UK’s school system, which he believes is “built for some young people rather than all”.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Here are four ways a Burnham government could reshape the classroom your child sits in.

This is the oldest item on Burnham’s education wishlist – and the one most likely to land directly on family finances.

In both his 2010 and 2015 Labour leadership bids, the new MP pledged to scrap upfront tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax – a system where, instead of taking on a loan when they start university, graduates pay a little extra on their income tax once they are earning.

His pitch then was that no young person should begin their career weighed down by what he called the “millstone of debt” – a phrase he has never really retired.

However, as always, the devil is in the detail. A graduate tax leaves universities with a short-term funding gap that has to be filled somehow, and Burnham has previously talked about instructing a commission to work out the details.

But for parents, the trade-off is real: no eye-watering loan balance hanging over a school leaver, but potentially a tax that follows a graduate for much of their working life.

It is also worth noting that he has committed to Labour’s promise not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance on working people – so how a graduate tax would be squared with that pledge is one of the first questions he would face, if, as allies expect, he returns to this policy again.

Burnham has also long argued that financial support shouldn’t stop at university.

Alongside the graduate tax, he has previously proposed extending student finance to people taking apprenticeships, and building a “UCAS-style” national application system for them – the idea being that the technical route should be funded and respected on the same terms as the academic one.

If there is one cause Burnham has been utterly consistent on, it is this.

He believes that English education is weighted toward the academic route – and that this leaves the majority who don’t go to university without a clear path forward.

As he told The i Paper earlier this month on the Makerfield by-election campaign trail, some children reach the middle years of secondary school and “can’t see where school is taking them”.

His flagship answer is already running in Greater Manchester: the MBacc, a technical pathway pupils can choose at 14 to sit alongside the academic English Baccalaureate.

It steers young people toward seven “career gateways” tied to the strongest parts of the local economy – from engineering and digital to health and the green economy – each leading on to T-Levels, work placements and other technical qualifications, with a careers application service designed to mirror UCAS. The goal, he says, is “parity between academic and technical”.

Crucially, Burnham wants this backed by hard guarantees. In Greater Manchester, that has meant a free bus pass for 16 to 18-year-olds, which he wants matched to “a guarantee of a work related opportunity at 16” and a 45-day work placement.

He also recently announced plans as the Mayor of Greater Manchester to use “full social value weighting” in public procurement, so that every state contract can be made to require work placements or apprenticeships for teenagers.

Scaled-up across England, that would turn the Government’s own spending power into a machine for creating opportunities for young people. For a parent, the practical upshot is a child who could choose a technical route at 14 with the guarantee of a real job placement attached.

One ally of Burnham said he ideally no longer wants there to be a distinction between further and higher education.

Few areas of education are in deeper crisis than provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and it is one topic Burnham keeps returning to.

He told The i Paper that children with additional needs too often “find their needs are not met and they drift away from the labour market” – a failure that begins in school and follows them for life. In a constituency, and a country where families routinely battle for an education, health and care plan (EHCP), that is likely to resonate.

On the campaign trail in Makerfield, he sat down with mothers of SEND children to hear about long waits for support, the pressure on schools and the sense that families are left to fight the system alone.

His principle is that SEND reform in England should take nothing away from families – a pointed position at a moment when national reforms have made some parents anxious about losing legal protections.

In February, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced sweeping reforms to SEND which will mean EHCPs will be reserved specifically for children with the most severe and complex needs. She said that those currently holding an EHCP will retain it until they reach a natural transition point in their education. At this point, they will be reassessed.

Burnham has also backed work to cut school exclusions and move away from blanket behaviour policies, which can fall hardest on children with additional needs.

The Government’s 2026 Schools White Paper proposed shifting more SEND support into mainstream classrooms through new “inclusion bases” and a tiered system of support, though the legal changes aren’t expected to take effect until 2029.

Burnham positions himself firmly on the inclusive end of that debate – for earlier, better support inside ordinary schools, and against a system that pushes children out.

Burnham doesn’t just want children to pass exams – he wants to know whether they feel any hope about the future.

This instinct produced #BeeWell, the survey he set up as mayor – now the largest exercise of its kind in the country, hearing from more than 60,000 teenagers across nearly 200 Greater Manchester schools every year about wellbeing, their sense of belonging at school, and their optimism for what comes next.

Engagement, he told The i Paper, “is high when they come in Year 7, but it drops right down by Year 10”. And the question that troubles him most is: do you have hope for the future? In parts of his city region, he claimed, “that number is way too low”.

For Burnham, a disengaged, hopeless 15-year-old isn’t a discipline problem – it’s the early warning sign of a young person who will later show up in those NEET figures.

What makes this a genuine policy is that the data is fed back to individual schools and used to shape what they offer – turning wellbeing into something measured and acted on.

A national version of this would mark a significant change: schools judged not only on grades, but on whether the children are happy and hopeful about their future. For any parent who has watched a bright, eager child slowly switch off somewhere around Year 9, it may be the pledge that resonates most.

One signal that Burnham could be about to embrace a more wholistic approach to education is the name of the Whitehall department that oversees school policy. One ally suggested there could be a return to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which was created by Ed Balls when he was education secretary in 2007 under Gordon Brown.

The former Labour prime minister wanted his New Labour government to shift the focus from just teaching and exams to a more holistic, “joined-up” approach to a child’s wellbeing.

Together, these four ideas began as Greater Manchester experiments.

With Burnham now on the threshold of Downing Street, they read less like a regional mayor’s list of pet projects and more like a manifesto of what the next government could do for your child.