In Conversation with Nick Holbrook-Sutcliffe: On Transitions, Trust, and Rethinking Education

Earlier this year, Policy Connect’s Skills Commission published Earning or Learning: A New Agenda for Youth NEET Reduction, examining why so many young people fall out of education and employment and what a more joined-up system could look like. The Commission’s work on this continues through a new inquiry into apprenticeships, looking at how the system can better serve the young people who stand to benefit from it most. In September, I spoke with Nick Holbrook-Sutcliffe, Assistant CEO for Education at East Kent Colleges (EKC) Group, about his own path into education, what a genuinely joined-up system might look like, and where he thinks apprenticeship policy needs to go next. 

Finding his way into education 

Nick grew up in Pudsey, a small town in West Yorkshire perhaps best known as the origin of the name for Pudsey Bear. He is care-experienced, and was candid that his own path into education did not come from a clear plan. Instead, it was shaped by specific people who chose to invest in him at key moments, giving him a sense of what was possible that he couldn’t yet see for himself. 

“I came into education because at key points in my life people chose to invest in me and believe in me. They helped me see the kind of possibilities I couldn’t see in myself.” 

Since then, his career has moved through nearly every level of the education system. He has worked as a teacher, a curriculum manager and a principal, and now serves as Assistant CEO for Education at EKC Group. The role has taken him from working directly with individual learners to engaging with national policymakers, including the DfE, Gatsby, and organisations like Policy Connect. As his responsibilities widened, Nick was clear that his approach had to change too, though not at the expense of the relationship he’d first had with students as a teacher. 

“As I have progressed through a variety of leadership roles, I have had to broaden my perspective, considering policy, strategy, and their impact on a wider group of learners. However, I have always tried to retain the lesson that first inspired me as a teacher: that education is ultimately rooted in the immediate, human relationship between a teacher and their learners.” 

Misconceptions about young people 

When asked what he had noticed change most about young people over the course of his career, Nick pushed back on the premise of the question. In his view, young people themselves have not changed nearly as much as public conversation assumes. What has changed is the weight of what surrounds them: caring responsibilities, housing insecurity, and family instability that add a layer of pressure many young people today are navigating earlier and more constantly, even if hardship of one kind or another has always been part of growing up. 

“I don’t think young people have changed, the challenges around them have changed… the determinant factor isn’t the young person, it’s the lack of opportunities that are given to them.” 

At the same time, the expectations placed on young people have risen just as the routes into employment have narrowed. We discussed how entry-level roles have shifted, with much of the administrative and repetitive work that once gave young people an informal way to build confidence and workplace familiarity now increasingly automated or absorbed elsewhere. What struck Nick most was a broader erosion of hope among young people, something he felt was only reinforced by a policy conversation preoccupied with the NEET label. For Nick, that terminology, however necessary for policy purposes, risks flattening a genuinely wide range of circumstances into a single reductive category, obscuring the aspiration he insists is still there. 

“I feel like previous generations have eroded the sense of hope in young people. The risk is we interpret these changes as a lack of aspiration, but that’s rarely true.”

Moving past the qualification 

This distinction, between a qualification and the development that happens around it, was one of the threads that came up repeatedly. Nick was not arguing that qualifications do not matter; his point was that a qualification also functions as a vehicle, something young people move through in order to build the adaptability, confidence and broader thinking that will serve them regardless of which sector they eventually enter. As job roles continue to change, it is that surrounding development, more than the qualification itself, that policy needs to recognise and protect. 

“Everything around the qualification is what helps these students, it’s not the qualification alone. It’s not the level as much as it’s the duration, it’s about sustained engagement, building knowledge, skills, confidence and understanding.” 

He pointed to EKC’s shift toward two-year programmes as a practical expression of this. A qualification itself may only be revised every few years, often lagging behind a fast-changing labour market. It is the sustained engagement built around it, over a longer, uninterrupted course of study, that gives a young person room to develop excitement, resilience and a genuine sense of direction. 

Apprenticeships, for Nick, sit at the centre of this. He was clear that he sees enormous value in the apprenticeship model as a route to exactly this kind of maturity and exposure. But he was equally clear that apprenticeships in their current form are not reaching the young people who would benefit from them most. They tend to be most accessible to those already relatively well-positioned to take them up, while the young people who most need that bridge into employment often struggle to get anywhere near it. That gap, between the model’s potential and who currently accesses it, is one of the questions the Skills Commission’s ongoing apprenticeships inquiry is looking to address. 

“Apprenticeships are really important because they’re a genuine bridge between learning and working. But the biggest challenge is that they often benefit the young people who are already relatively well positioned to access them.” 

Building policy that lasts 

A recurring theme across our conversation was frustration with the reactive nature of education policymaking. Across our work with the All-Party Parliamentary Groups and commissions at Policy Connect, we hear similar concerns. Successive governments introduce new qualifications and initiatives in response to immediate pressures, often without a fuller assessment of how they interact with an already complex vocational training landscape. 

“When we talk about simplifying, sometimes what we’re actually doing is pushing the complexity down to the learner. It might be simple at a policy level, but it isn’t for the learner.” 

For Nick, getting that fuller assessment right depends on partnerships. It means colleges, schools, employers and local authorities working from a shared, forward-looking picture of both the young people they serve and the job market those young people are entering, rather than each reacting in isolation to changing funding priorities.  

Partnerships and the journey between institutions 

One of the clearest findings of Earning or Learning was the importance of transition points, the moments when young people move between institutions, or between education and employment, and the risk that they disengage entirely if that handover is not managed well. Nick’s own experience closely echoed this. He described how easily young people can fall through the gaps at these junctures, and asked, by way of example, what it might look like if a further education college took on some responsibility for a young person during their final year of school, and a school retained a degree of oversight through a learner’s first year of college, rather than each simply handing over and stepping back. 

“The biggest barriers to opportunity are those points of transition. This is where we can either accelerate learners forward or we’ll just disconnect them.” 

He was candid that education institutions often default to competing with one another rather than collaborating, but pointed to examples within Kent, including EKC’s work alongside other colleges in the region, of what becomes possible when institutions instead commit to a shared vision. Part of enabling that kind of joined-up working, he argued, has to be reflected in how institutions are assessed. Where accountability frameworks reward institutions in isolation, they can work against the very collaboration that would serve young people best. 

“You need to have shared destinations, shared data and shared accountability. And if you want schools and colleges to act differently, you have to measure them differently.” 

The case for adult education 

Alongside this focus on young people, Nick was keen to stress that adult education can not be allowed to slip down the agenda. He described how disruptions in someone’s life, whether through bereavement, caring responsibilities, or other circumstances, can pause their engagement with education at a critical moment. By the time they are ready to re-engage, they may have aged out of funding eligibility and lost touch with the institutions that once supported them. 

“If we genuinely believe in lifelong learning, we must move past this fixed, linear chronological approach to learning.” 

Without that support, someone in this position may end up in low-paid work with little room for progression. They may never register as a NEET, and so never surface in the statistics that policy conversations are currently focused on, but they remain at real risk of long-term work poverty. For Nick, this points to a wider principle. Policy can not simply be focused on the immediate outcome of getting someone into education or employment, treating that as a box ticked, but must also make longer-term investments that hold up against the genuine unpredictability of people’s lives. Adult education and sufficiently flexible progression pathways, he argued, are as essential to social mobility as anything aimed specifically at young people. 

“Rather than reacting to what’s happening now in this government, you need to invest in where there’s genuine gaps.” 

Looking ahead 

Despite his frustrations with elements of the current system, Nick was clear that he sees real, positive change happening across education and government, and said he feels genuinely hopeful about the direction of travel. But realising that change, he argued, depends on moving decisively away from a tick-box approach to education, and on rooting policy more consistently in the lived realities of the young people it is meant to serve. 

For Nick, that means treating participation not simply as something to measure after the fact, but as a strategic outcome that the education system should actively work towards. This requires greater attention to the points where young people move between institutions and into employment, with schools, colleges, employers and local authorities sharing responsibility for helping learners progress through those transitions. 

“Participation should be a strategic outcome of the education system, not simply an outcome we measure afterwards.” 

Ultimately, Nick argues that policy needs to be judged not only by how individual qualifications, funding streams or institutions perform, but by what they mean for the person moving through the system. 

“I want politicians to understand that most young people don’t experience policy, they experience pathways.”

If interested in contributing to future work on Education and Skills policy, please contact Rhiannon Tuckett-Jones (Rhiannon.Tuckett-Jones@policyconnect.org.uk)