Tristram Hunt, Labour's shadow education secretary, said the party's priority if it won power on May 7 would be to improve vocational education and the further education sector.
He told political editor Jonathan Walker: "We want to make sure we've got high quality apprenticeships with a job at the end of them.
"We want to make sure teaching and further education colleges have regular contact with industry and business. We want to ensure young people study English and maths after 16.
"And we want to make sure that our best performing further education colleges become institutes of technical excellence, similar to the Singapore model where these are really high-end, high-skilled, high-aspiration centres which are training young people for the jobs of tomorrow."
Labour was also determined to improve careers advice, he said, and attacked the Government for axing a dedicated careers service for young people, called Connexions.
"That has been one of the greatest crimes of this government. They totally destroyed Connexions and withdrew £200 million from the careers budget."
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Labour would reform the school funding system to end the huge disparity in funding for inner city schools and the much smaller budgets allocated to rural schools.
"The challenge in schooling is often in coastal towns, in rural areas, in market towns. And so, over time, we hope to move towards greater fairness in the funding system," Mr Hunt added.
In a bid to help schools which struggle to recruit staff, which can include rural schools as well as those in deprived inner cities, Labour could make working in such a school a condition for promotion, he said.
"We could ask, can you gain a deputy headship or a headship, can you become a master teacher, without having worked in hard-to-staff areas?"
School inspection service Ofsted needed reform and might have become politicised, he said.
And he defended his warning last year independent schools could lose charitable status unless they proved they were working in partnership with state schools.
He added: "I am meeting next week the Independent Schools Inspectorate who we will be asking to take a lead on this issue. We will publish new independent schools regulations to set out a framework in which it will happen."
