Seven of Blackpool’s neighbourhoods sit in the top ten most deprived in the country. FCAT’s education, employment, and training rate is 98%. From Blackpool to Stoke-on-Trent, what inclusive pathways for young people with SEND look like when places stop waiting for national policy to catch up.
Last week, I was in Blackpool with The Edge Foundation and Deeper Learning UK, visiting schools and colleges across the Fylde Coast Academy Trust. Seven of Blackpool’s neighbourhoods sit in the top ten most deprived in the country. Half the population lives in the bottom decile of the Index of Multiple Deprivation. If you were designing a place where young people with SEND would fall through the gaps between education, employment and support, this would be it.
And yet FCAT’s education, employment and training rate is astonishingly high.
I want to explain how. And why it matters for every school, college and local authority trying to build inclusive pathways.
A parent’s principle
Earlier this year I sat with a parent who was talking about her son, a young man with SEND navigating the move from school into adult life. She said something that has stayed with me:
“You wouldn’t tell someone in a wheelchair to improve their walking skills. You can prepare them for the world, but you also have to prepare the world for them.”
That phrase, prepare the world for them, captures something the SEND system has been circling for years without quite landing. Too often the focus is on making young people ready for a world that has not changed to meet them. The harder question is how to design a different relationship between the young person, their family, the employer, and the system that holds them.
What I saw in Blackpool last week was a place that has understood this and was building an ambitious working infrastructure.
Not a better programme. A better system.
Carolyn Hall is Director of Culture and Climate at FCAT, a trust of ten schools serving six thousand students with eight hundred staff. Her team has built a universal offer at Key Stage 4 that gives every student a genuine choice: technical and vocational pathways through Blackpool and The Fylde College (construction, health and social care), land-based studies at Myerscough College, academic routes through Blackpool Sixth Form College, or sport and community through Blackpool Football Club.
These are not enrichment add-ons. They are structured pathways, each leading from Level 1 to Level 2 to a foundation of mastery that supports the next transition. For young people with SEND, this matters enormously because the pathway does not require them to fit a predetermined route. The curriculum is designed around what Blackpool’s young people actually need and where Blackpool’s labour market is actually going, drawing on the Youth Futures Foundation and Dartington research on ripple effects.
Simon Hughes, Executive Principal at Blackpool and The Fylde College and a trustee of FCAT, described the thinking behind Compass, a programme that started as a response to the gap between education, employment and the support systems around young people. Compass works across ages 11 to 24. Not a referral pathway. A single partnership that gets above the existing system and takes collective accountability for outcomes.
His starting point is direct: NEET is a system failure, not a personal one. National pathways do not match local realities. Technical skills build sustainable careers. Clear occupational pathways matter more than short-term fixes. Follow the data on what works.
Caroline Waering, Head of Further Education, reinforced the point from the post-16 side. Her focus is on inclusive, high-quality vocational pathways that change what happens next for young people, and on the need to strengthen provision from age fourteen onwards, using local labour market intelligence to align what is taught with where the opportunities are. She named the tension honestly: the intention around universality (open, equitable, accessible) comes with real financial implications. And success depends as much on the quality of delivery partners as on the curriculum itself.
But the result is visible. Students who were disengaged are now thriving. And the number, 98% in education, employment or training, speaks from a place where most people would have predicted the opposite.
What the policy landscape is doing, and not doing
Blackpool is doing this work in a policy environment that is not making it easier. The defunding of BTECs in England is removing qualifications that served exactly the young people these pathways are built for. T Levels are designed as a replacement, but the transition has been uneven and the coverage is not yet broad enough. The Milburn social mobility reviews have laid out the evidence for years: place matters, pathways matter, early identification matters. The gap between the evidence and the national offer remains wide.
Scotland and Wales are both moving. Scotland with a new technical education framework, Wales with a new strategic direction for vocational education and training. England is still debating which qualifications to fund rather than which systems to build.
What Blackpool has done is stop waiting for national policy to catch up. It has built something around the reality of its place.
The person, not the pathway
For too many young people with SEND, the transition from education into employment or training is the point where the system lets go. The support that existed in school falls away. The pathways on offer were not designed with them in mind. Parents become the case managers, the advocates, the navigators of a system that was never built to include their children.
What Blackpool has done is turn that around. Instead of asking young people to be ready for a system, it has built a system that is ready for them. Inclusive practice that has moved beyond policy and into structure.
That is the principle. Prepare the world for them.
Not just Blackpool
What I saw last week was not a showcase or a pilot. It was working infrastructure: a trust that has built pathways around its young people rather than around a framework imported from somewhere else, alongside a college that tracks outcomes from 11 to 24 and takes shared responsibility for what happens next. An FE system that uses local data to connect what it teaches with where the jobs actually are.
And Blackpool is not alone. In Stoke-on-Trent, four multi-academy trusts, Three Spires Trust, Alpha Academies Trust, Potteries Educational Trust and The Societas Trust, have come together with the Staffordshire Chambers of Commerce and the Edge Foundation to build better post-14 pathways collaboratively. Their myFuture programme is designing vocational routes, employer partnerships and industry-informed curriculum around the realities and opportunities of their place. As they put it: education is less a conveyor belt and more a bridge, connecting young people not only to qualifications but to identity, aspiration, belonging and future possibility.
Two very different places, with the same instinct: that it is possible to build something better around the young people in front of you, without waiting for the system to change first.
What both places share is agency, courage and collaboration, people in a place deciding that the young people in front of them mattered more than the framework above them and pushing forward regardless of the challenges.