Briefing
Manchester goes national
The UK has a presumptive new PM. What do we know about Andy Burnham and his successes in Manchester's education sector?
By Tim van Gardingen
1 July 2026
In brief
- Potential UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham aims to take Manchester’s successful regional education model to the national stage.
- He prioritises vocational training and industry links, enabling Manchester’s universities to thrive while many UK institutions face cuts.
- Success depends on balancing academic and technical paths equally, despite the political challenges of implementing local models nationally.
This article was originally published as “Can Burnham take Manchester's education success national?” in the QS Midweek Brief. Subscribe now.
For the seventh time in a decade, the UK will soon have a new Prime Minister. Sir Keir Starmer, having lasted nearly two years, has left 10 Downing street, following five ill-fated conservative leaders to leave the position since 2016, each struggling to hold support post-Brexit. Almost certain to replace him is Andy Burnham, former mayor of Greater Manchester.
The King of the North, as Burnham’s fans call him, has already shaken up education in his city. He has championed vocational education, linked universities into council decision-making, and wants greater local collaboration between education providers and industry for both employment and innovating.
The next step is to see how that might translate onto the national stage.
The Return of the King (of the North)
As the list of universities announcing lay-offs and cuts to courses grows, Manchester has stood out as being strikingly resilient, even flourishing
Burnham was, until very recently, the hugely popular mayor of Manchester. He won his mayoral seat with 62 percent of the vote in 2017, and his approval rating stands at 65 percent when he left the position on 19 June. It is rare for politicians to remain popular for so long in the UK and even rarer to end more popular than they start.
At the national level, and in stark contrast to Starmer’s approval ratings, Burnham is the only public Labour party figure to be viewed positively overall by the wider public and the most popular among labour voters.
Liberal Democrat and Green party voters, in the centre and to the left, tend to see Burnham positively. Conservative and Reform voters, on the right, meanwhile, see him negatively in general, but a sizeable minority do still view him in a positive light.
The likely new PM is an old face of UK politics, walking the corridors of government since Gordon Brown’s leadership in the early 2000s. He was first a member of the House of Commons in 2001 and has held a series of official posts both in government and opposition.
In government, Burnham held posts in the Department of Health, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Treasury, and the Home Office. In opposition, one of his posts was as Shadow Education Secretary.
Now, after nearly 10 years building his reputation in Manchester, Burnham is back in Westminster.
Burnham’s Mancunian dreaming
Burnham’s vision for UK higher education is far from clear yet, but we do know what he thinks about education from his work in Manchester.
“Our education system is not designed to help everyone thrive, from early years right through to further education, and is not responsive enough to the needs of the local labour market”, states the Greater Manchester Strategy, an overarching policy document released by Manchester’s combined authority, with Burnham at the lead.
A combined authority is a grouping of local councils that collaborate to work across council boundaries. Manchester is the biggest example of one.
The strategy says that only a third of young people in Greater Manchester go to university. Those who do not take the university route can struggle to find technical education that leads to jobs in demand in the region.
And therein lies the Burnham approach.
In his by-election victory speech on 19 June, Burnham said: “No more an education system dominated by the university route, but an education system that offers a path for everybody, academic and technical in equal balance.”
This is, as Jim Dickinson at 1 points out, something that MPs have promised at least since the early 1990s and at a stretch since the 1940s.
It is also not that distant from Starmer’s proposals for two-thirds of young people to have some form of higher education by age 25, be that academic, technical or through apprenticeships.
The difference this time arguably, is that a happy vision of higher education and vocational education working together in equal measure appears to be in full swing in Manchester.
Back in 2023, Burnham spoke in the House of Lords promoting the Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc), a devolved version of the English Baccalaureate for vocational studies.
The MBacc is a school level qualification, but the choice of secondary routes available changes how students funnel into higher and further education.
Burnham said at the time the aim was to offer options, not take away from university demand. “In no way am I denigrating the university route at all. It is one of the great strengths of this country, as are our universities. It is tremendous that so many people are on the university route (…) but it is not right for everybody.
“I say this in no way to minimise what our colleges do, or colleges anywhere in England do, but there is a sense that they do everything everywhere and qualifications are not necessarily linked as well as they might be to opportunities in the wider economy.”
What was clear then and remains clear now is Burnham wants to strongly couple training opportunities to industry need, and specifically to local need. He wants young people in Manchester to have a clear understanding of what opportunities exist in the local labour market, and how they can credibly reach them.
Not all are impressed with MBacc. Jonathan Simons, Head of Education Practice at think tank Public First said of the MBacc in a blog post: “it is, in truth, neither a proper qualification, nor something that really sits within Mayoral control – it’s a badge for existing national qualifications and some work experience, wrapped in a Manchester banner”.
But perhaps a Manchester wrapping is a good idea for Manchester students. According to a recent report from the Greater Manchester Civic University Board, 40 percent of graduates stay in Greater Manchester after completing their studies. That means local employment outcomes for Manchester’s graduates is highly important.
The ‘Greater Manchester Strategy’, published last year in July, highlights a need for a balance between traditional university programmes and technical education.
“Our Greater Manchester universities are among the best in the world and are an amazing asset to our city region. They’re working hard to increase access to higher education, especially for young people from working class backgrounds – including through degree apprenticeships”, states the strategy.
According to the strategy, only a third of young people in Greater Manchester pursue a university education. The remaining young people who do not continue onto university can struggle to find the technical education courses and qualifications that feed into the Greater Manchester job market.
But that is strategy. The universities themselves think that Burnham’s leadership has brought tangible change beyond grand policy visions.
“Bear in mind we are now 20 years into the devolution project” says Joanne Purves, University of Salford’s Pro Vice Chancellor for International and Regional Partnerships. Politics has been strikingly stable in the region, benefitting the sector’s long-term trajectory.
Purves told QS Insights that Burnham’s combined authority works very closely with the region’s universities through the Greater Manchester Civic University Board, of which she is chair.
“They want us to grow” Purves said of the combined authority.
Burnham is walking the talk on education-industry links too. The education hubs of Greater Manchester are strongly linked in local industry, according to Purves. Of note is ‘Atom Valley’, a business and innovation hub in development in the north of Greater Manchester, which the region’s universities are feeding into directly.
The collaboration shows up on the university balance sheets. University of Manchester, University of Salford, and Manchester Metropolitan University are all thriving. All run healthy operating surpluses and appear to be growing. That stands in contrast to the many universities quickly entering the red.
New face, old place
It could well be a little too fast to jump to any conclusions about a new PM singlehandedly shifting the direction of universities. The PM is the top position in the country but is only one cog in the monolith of government. It is, after all, only the leader changing, not the party in power.
Burnham’s stance on education is not radically different from what Labour has been saying already, says Purves. It remains to be seen whether Burnham’s work on vocational training in Manchester will work further afield – “whether he translates that to a national level, I don’t know”.
Sources from inside Whitehall and familiar with its turgid processes told QS Insights that any nationwide change will not appear overnight. Andy Burnham’s immediate priority will not be education, but defence, one civil servant said. If there are any changes he needs to push through it will be there.
The civil servants QS Insights spoke to agreed any meaningful change in education policy would be slow, realistically taking between 6 months and a year before anything of substance could materialise.
“It does seem like we have just switched Keir for northern slightly more likable Keir”, said one civil servant.
There is one room however where change will happen immediately and that is the cabinet, the executive heart of UK government. On education, The Guardian reports that current Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson looks to be in a good position to stay. The Independent thinks that a few others will by vying for the education job, including party deputy leader Lucy Powell and culture secretary Lisa Nandy.
The top decision-making body of UK government will, whether directly education or not, change. That could have knock on effects for priorities of government as a whole.
If Burnham becomes PM, it will be on the back of his party’s support, not voters. This was the case for the multiple Conservative leadership changes over the past decade too. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak all entered No 10 only on party support, although it should be noted both May and Johnson went on to win general elections as incumbents to retain power. Starmer became leader on a successful general election, but Burnham returns to the decade-long tradition of entering through a party vote.
For all the initial support back in Manchester, he has not won a mandate of the British public. In the past decade, Prime Ministers have not lasted long in such an environment. It remains to be seen whether a local political superhero who has lifted up his local universities can buck the trend.
A survey, conducted between March and April 2026 by Universities UK (UUK), asked respondents in which areas they had already made cuts due to financial necessity, and where they would consider future reductions if required.
More than 80 percent said they were considering digital transformation, 71 percent were open to shared procurement options and 65 percent had discussed collaborative structures such as federations and alliances.
Staffing cuts were among the most common means of balancing budgets, with almost 80 percent of universities pursuing voluntary redundancies and 79 percent implementing temporary or permanent freezes to recruitment over the last three years.
Cuts to student services had also increased since the previous survey, with 27 percent cutting student bursaries and scholarships and 13 percent reducing hardship funding.
Almost a third of institutions reported making cuts to academic research activity in the last three years, up from 14 percent in 2024. While recent increases to home undergraduate tuition fees were welcomed as having a positive impact on finances, more than 90 percent of English and Welsh institutions said the fee uplift would not fully compensate for the financial impact of other policy changes.
The National Union of Students (NUS) and UUK issued a rare joint statement this month warning that the financial foundations of world-leading universities were under threat. They claimed that the UK government makes the smallest financial contribution to universities of any country in the developed world, and added that recent governments had pushed more of the fiscal burden onto students.
The latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, which has been conducted by the National Centre for Social Research since 1983, found that the proportion of people who believe a degree is not worth the time and money has jumped from 14 percent in 2005 to 34 percent last year. This finding correlates the first ever drop in the proportion of British young people pursuing an undergraduate degree.
The proportion of people who believe those who go to university will end up a lot wealthier than those who do not has plummeted, down from 50 percent to 36 percent.
The right-wing Daily Mail newspaper devoted its entire front page to a story headlined “Is university a waste of money?” reporting think tank research which found that half of all graduates were earning less than the national average five years after leaving university. The Policy Exchange report found that only 57 percent of graduates were employed 15 months after graduating.
Nick Hillman, the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), has a more positive interpretation of the figures. “While university still benefits most graduates most of the time, the lack of substantial economic growth means the rewards are not always as great as people hope beforehand,” he says.
“However, despite years of negative rhetoric, it is still only one in three people who think university is not worth it.”
Nevertheless, the enrolment of international students in the four most popular English-speaking countries – the United States, UK, Canada and Australia – continued to decline in the first five months of 2026. The declines were greatest in Canada and the US, with 24 percent fewer undergraduates in Canada and 24 percent fewer masters students in the US. Australia and the UK saw 16 percent and 15 percent declines in masters students.
A new report published by HEPI, sees demographic decline as a more potent long-term threat to UK universities. The report, Demographic decline and predatory recruitment: The twin threats to English higher education into the 2040s, shows that the young population from whom 80 percent of undergraduate students are recruited, will decline rapidly after 2030, and within 10 years the income universities earn from this source will decline by nearly 20 percent.
However, some universities will feel the effects more than others. The most prestigious universities are already recruiting students whose school achievement is lower than they would previously have considered in order to maintain the size of their intake.
While the 18-year-old population has been increasing (as it will for four more years), some of the lower-tariff universities have maintained their numbers while many have not. However, when the demographic decline sets in after 2030, if the higher-tariff universities continue their recent recruitment practices, HEPI believes the rest of the sector will face real problems.
At UUK’s annual Political Affairs conference, Vivienne Stern, the organisation’s Chief Executive, said universities faced an “extremely messy and increasingly fragmented landscape”, with rising support for the extremes of the political left and right. But she struck a more positive note, urging universities to do more to convince people that their courses represented the best protection from unemployment while their research was an effective driver of growth. “We need universities to be optimistic about the future of the UK,” she said.
The keynote speaker, Rachel Sylvester, Political Editor of the Observer and among the UK’s leading commentators on politics, said universities had the opportunity to influence the government and politics more generally, but would also take a risk in the attempt.
Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, was looking for a legacy, although he had disowned the longstanding target of 50 percent participation in higher education in favour of two-thirds participation in all forms of post-school education. Andy Burnham, his most likely successor as Labour leader had said that universities had been “overpromoted” and only Wes Streeting, of the likely leadership candidates, had cast doubt on the extra emphasis on vocational education in case it presaged a return to attitudes that steered the working class towards vocational courses, with the middle classes dominating academic degrees.
Sylvester said universities should be careful not to be seen as part of the elite – only 9 percent of graduates supported the right-wing Reform Party, for example, compared with 40 percent of the remainder of the voting-age population. But the acknowledgement of the importance of scientific research during the pandemic and in the development of AI more recently were causes for optimism for universities in the struggle for political and public support.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Tim van Gardingen is a freelance journalist and analyst specialising in international higher education and commodity markets. He previously worked for the British Council’s insights and consultancy team in Beijing, where he covered HE sector developments in over 30 countries. Tim holds a BA in German and Chinese from the University of Leeds and an MA in International Political Economy from King’s College London.