As Australia steadily works on implementation of the Higher Education (HE) Accord, UK Ministers have recently set out proposed post school reforms in their Post-16 Education and Skills ‘white paper’.
Both nations are grappling with like challenges: skills shortages, equity gaps, research impact, regional reach and lifelong learning. Unlike the HE Accord, the Post-16 ‘white paper’ is conceptually of immense breadth, complexity and integration, starkly different to Australia’s more separated policy approaches. This analysis is a short ‘fast flyover’ review.
Ambition: Comprehensive vs Siloed
The Post-16 ‘white paper’ casts its ambitious reform arms around driving national renewal. Education and skills are seen to encompass whole of economy, all institutions, all citizens, every region, and all employers. It’s education and skills remit spans workforce inclusion, covering poorly skilled and disengaged youth, stretching to university-led research in advancing innovation and industrial leadership. Employers will be expected to contribute to employee skilling, in closer links with training institutions. Workforce plans directing education and skills, underpinned by enabling elements like health, transport, and social services are envisaged, this built ground up under regional leadership, with this all then aggregated into national plans.
By design it is interventionist. It proposes a unified Post-16 system that stronger fuses: all essential job entry skills targeting disengaged youth/adults; majorly reshapes the roles of further education (FE) and higher education (HE); and bolts in employer-led training, all under one strategic umbrella. Skills England, further empowered, will sit at the apex of all labour market intelligence and all connections with industry and regions with its work then informing funding flows. Provider regulation of both HE and FE institutions will be led by the Office for Students.
This comprehensive Post-16 revival has multiple redesigned resources: e.g. Youth Guarantee, Universal Credits, Pathways to Work Guarantee (youth), Adult Skills Fund and Jobcentres, a revised Growth and Skills Levy (business), Higher Education Innovation Fund aligned to Industry Strategy (universities), Local Innovation Fund, universal Life Long Learning Entitlement (students), Industry Exchange (LE teachers), Technical Excellence Colleges (higher tech. quals).
By contrast, any Australian approach to such mega reforms would more typically emerge in policy silos, with different timing, under ~3-4 discordant policy white papers to cover the width of terrain the Post-16 ‘white paper’ has courageously attempted. Australian education and skills are structurally split and part federated. Notably UK policy is also part devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Whilst the HE Accord posits the need for much improved HE/VET ‘harmonisation’; it has no conception of a deliberately connected system as in the ‘white paper’.
Funding: Flexibility vs. Fragmentation
The proposed UK’s Growth and Skills Levy (GSL) will replace its Apprenticeship Levy with a more flexible, employer-driven model. The fundamentals of the Apprentice levy are retained but now employers can use funds for modular training, short courses, or apprenticeships, delivered in-house or externally so long as they align with national/regional priorities and quality standards.
This is paired with a Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), a learner-account system that supports modular, stackable learning across Levels 4–6 (Aus ~AQF 5-7), across providers and accessed by students life long as a tuition fee loan. It will replace current HE student finance loans and advanced learner loans for (UK) levels 4, 5 and 6 qualifications.
Flexibility and choice will be the new norm. New learners can access up to the full entitlement of £38,140, equal to 4 years of FT study based on academic year 2025/26 fee rates, as well as gaining access to maintenance support loans, on a means tested basis, to cover student living costs, e.g. for courses with in-person attendance. International student visa revenue is planned to be directed to help part cover these domestic student costs.
Australia’s funding reforms are less imaginative. The Accord proposes managed growth and targeted funding for equity groups and regional students. Micro-credentials and credit portability are encouraged, but there is no equivalent to the UK’s dual-track public and employer funding model intended to support students/employees in national skills co-investment. In Australia there is at present no industry skills levy contributions by employers and no means to create a coordinated public/private strategy in a nation-wide skilling and productivity push.
Metrics: Near Targets vs. Distant Trajectories
The Post-16 ‘white paper’ reform agenda is anchored in clear, near-term metrics. The standout is the CHEP25 participation target, which aims for two-thirds of young people to be engaged in higher-level learning (Levels 4–6) by age 25, with a deadline of 2030. This is not a vague aspiration, it’s a measurable, time-bound KPI tied to funding, regional planning, and institutional accountability. Skills England will publish near real-time dashboards tracking employer investment, regional skills gaps, and provider performance. Students will get online credit tracking of their LLE accounts. Employers can expect to submit annual Skills Investment Statements detailing use of their Growth and Skills Levy funds. Progress can be measured and made public.
By contrast, Australia’s HE Accord sets its sights on 2050, with a headline goal of 80% tertiary attainment across the working-age population. Whilst bold, this way off distant target is wholly untethered from a credible delivery roadmap. The Accord proposes a suite of reforms; limited demand-driven funding, managed growth, needs based equity frameworks, regional supports etc, but lacks clarity of short to mid-term metrics/targets that would focus system-wide change.
This divergence reflects deeper cultural and institutional differences. The Post16 ‘white paper’ is betting on modular accountability: stackable credits, regional dashboards, and employer co-investment. Australia is still operating in a trajectory mindset, betting that structural nudges and re-designed funding will gradually bend the curve toward equity targets and skills productivity.
Institutional Reform: Specialisation vs. Increments on Status Quo
A further striking difference between the Post-16 ‘white paper’ and Australian reform agendas lie in the expression of institutional purpose and structure. The former calls explicitly for greater specialisation and diversity across the post-16 landscape. It will strong-arm encourage institutions to define their core mission – whether as research-intensive universities, teaching-focused providers, or technical and applied learning hubs – to which their funding and accountability will be accordingly aligned. It directs specialisation only in areas of strength, otherwise expecting productive collaboration. The desire is regional consolidation and focus.
This is not just rhetorical. The ‘white paper’ proposes differentiated support for distinct types of research activity to get the right balance across research funding priorities: to protect and promote curiosity-driven research; support R&D for the delivery of government priorities, missions and the Industrial Strategy (e.g. net zero, AI, nuclear, health innovation); and provide targeted innovation, commercialisation and scale-up support to drive growth.
Institutions will have to define and hold to any chosen focus in their core competitive research, aligned with demonstrable regional economic connections. Any practice-based research in technical institutions will be preferentially linked to uplifted pedagogy and delivery innovation.
This signals a deliberate move away from the one-size-fits-all model of university aspiration. It sets the ground for localised institutional cooperation, with FE colleges, universities, and employers co-designing provision through Local Growth Plans and Skills Improvement Plans. The ‘white paper’ envisions a system where institutional roles are more complementary, not competitive, and where regional jobs/skilling ecosystems – not rankings – drive value.
The HE Accord, by contrast, was notably silent on need for rational stress testing of institutional differentiation. Other than regional identity and support, it stopped short of deeply exploring any presently unproductive homogeneity of institutional missions. There was no explicit challenge for teaching-specialist universities, no framework for research intensive institutions, and no mechanism to support practice-based research in TAFEs or dual-sector institutions. There was no conception of institutions focused solely on an industry engagement mission, undertaking only applied skilling activities locked on industry benefit, and devoid of any discovery research.
This omission matters. Without purposeful differentiation, Australian institutions risk mis-matched arm wrestling in a prestige race chasing rankings, duplicating offerings, and wide felt underfunding for any to excel over the long term of pure/applied research. The risk is a ‘straight-jacket’ system, with institutions less able to express differential strengths via mission diversity.
The Post-16 ‘white paper’ more strategically and courageously asks: What should different institutions stand for and how should they be accordingly funded? Absent of ATEC/university ‘compact’ outcomes being majorly more encouraging of differentiation, Australia is confined to lone voices that politely entreat no one gets to reach the highest hanging research fruit if you chop up the few needed long ladders and share bits around to make everyone feel more equal.
The ‘Middle’ Emphasis vs Sector ‘Harmonisation’
Another consequential difference lies in how each nation treats the ‘Post-16’ sectoral overlaps. The ‘white paper’ majorly boosts (UK) Level 4 and 5 qualifications as a new prominent strut in a reshaped ‘higher technical education’ architecture, these embedded in regional growth plans.
The UK intent is to best fuse together FE, HE, and employer-led skilling. Institutional specialisation in new Technical Excellence Colleges is expected, with training at designed, for purpose institutions. Learners will be able to apply for funding to study modules of Higher Technical Qualifications and modules (levels 4-6) of full level 6 qualifications, or in subject groups that address priority skills gaps and align with the government’s Industrial Strategy.
The need for a specialist, prestigious FE sector in Technical Excellence Colleges is argued to address the ‘missing middle’, this being higher technical/professional work-integrated learning. The evidence for this is an estimate that two-thirds of additional jobs in priority occupations, critical to delivery of the Industrial Strategy, require qualifications at level 4 and above.
In Australia, the ‘equivalent’ AQF 5 and 6 levels (Diplomas and Associate Degrees) remain more marginally used. They typically span the sectoral hinge coloured by stale debate on RPL/credit transfer. It remains to be seen what impact a new AQF7 VET Vocational Degree makes when tossed into the wash of hundreds of existing ‘industry applied’ HE AQF7 offerings. Any new products of TAFE CoEs will add to this wash, each and all chasing national uptake and scale.
The Post-16 ‘white paper’ sets out to gang tackle key reforms, with funding flexibility, to solve the ‘missing middle’. Australia tinkers under its ‘harmonisation’ hood, working out the engine parts.
For the Future
The scope of the Post-16 ‘white paper’ is all encompassing. If fully budgeted and gets real world traction, it offers a provocative if imperfect model. It may not succeed and has early detractors.
Critics say: it risks employer dominance in skewing provision to short term needs; it will further disrupt already fraught HE funding regimes; it lacks funding detail and adequacy to meet targets; it risks regulatory overreach if the Office of Students is to close ‘low quality’ courses; it risks adequacy of funding for higher technical focussed FE institutions; and it risks rampant confusion in multiple levels of skills planning culminating in peak Get Britain Working Plans.
Its ambition is unmistakable. At high level ‘fast flyover’, its solutions are challengingly different.
Australia’s approach to galvanising the potentials of all its assets in post school education, training, skills, research and industry engagement is, by contrast, disjointed and too pedestrian for future times. At best it offers evolutionary, politically prudent, contested improvements on what exists. Players fast protect status quo and public fundings. This squashes any collective inspiration for ‘national renewal’, so no quantum leap in policy ambition, no decisive urgency.
The outcomes of the Post16 ‘white paper’, if it ever launches and flies, is worth watching, not for what it gets right and wrong, but far more for what it dares to attempt.