This article explores the previously quite marked absence from English policy debates on 14-19 education of issues that, in other developed countries, would be seen as key elements in the policy landscape. These are: the role of employers as providers of learning; the structure of employers' demand for skills, their recruitment and selection practices and the incentives this creates; the impact of labour market regulation on patterns of post-compulsory participation in vocational education and training. This article argues that these issues help explain our comparatively modest participation rates at 16-18 and that failure to confront such underlying structural factors makes progress on the kind of agenda raised by Tomlinson and the subsequent White Paper extremely problematic. It is suggested that recent developments may mark the start of a change in policy, with labour market issues gaining a new prominence. The article concentrates on the English institutional context, but many of the general points about the labour market and its interaction with young peoples' decisions about education and training hold good across the whole of the UK.