Keir Starmer has dropped Labour’s long-held target of ensuring at least 50 per cent of young people attend university, stating: “I don’t think that’s right for our times.”
Announcing a new ambition for two-thirds of young people to go to university or start a “gold standard apprenticeship” in his speech at the Labour Party conference, the prime minister explained that the symbolic target of having 50 per cent of young people attend university should be revisited.
“While you will never hear me denigrate the aspiration to go to university, I don’t think the way we currently measure success in education – that ambition to get 50 per cent of kids to uni – I don’t think that’s right for our times,” Starmer told the event in Liverpool on 30 September.
“Because if you are a kid or a parent of a kid who chooses an apprenticeship, what does it say to you? Do we genuinely, as a country – afford them the same respect?” he added.
“Today, I can announce, we will scrap that target and we will replace it with a new ambition that two thirds of our children should go either to university or take on a gold standard apprenticeship,” continued Starmer.
The criticism from Starmer, who holds an undergraduate law degree from the University of Leeds and a postgraduate degree from the University of Oxford, refers to the famous 1999 conference speech by Tony Blair, two years after coming into office, when the Labour Party prime minister set the target.
By some measures, that target was achieved in 2019 when Department for Education (DfE) figures for 2017-18 showed that??before the age of 30. ?Some experts believe that figure is misleading because only 32 per cent of UK 18-year-olds (439,180 in total, a record high) were accepted onto higher education courses this summer, according to?.
The DfE’s figure reflects those students who enter higher education of some kind – not necessarily on an undergraduate degree course – before the age of 30, including courses run by private providers, higher education courses taught by further education colleges and part-time courses. It also reflects enrolments onto higher education courses rather than degree completions, while some experts believe the DfE methodology??for 30-year-olds.
According to a House of Commons library report??in March, the higher education entry rate among UK 18-year-olds increased from 24.7 per cent in 2006 to 30.7 per cent in 2015 and peaked at 38.2 per cent in 2021.
Nonetheless, Starmer’s speech represents a break from Labour’s consensus view on higher education, with Blair’s 1999 speech sometimes seen as a landmark moment in the expansion of UK higher education.
Under what the Labour government has described as a programme of national renewal, Starmer announced the creation of 14 new “technical excellence colleges” for 16- to 19-year-olds. Backed by ?800 million in investment from the existing Spending Review settlement, funding will support an additional 20,000?students, the prime minister said.
Starmer also set out plans for a single funding model for all level 4 to 6 courses, with further education and higher education courses brought under the regulation of the Office for Students.
Speaking at the conference shortly after the prime minister’s announcement, skills minister Jacqui Smith said the new target will be an important part of the upcoming White Paper on skills, with an aim of increasing the proportion of young people educated to level 4 and above – and “move people up an escalator of skills”.
She said it recognises the significance of level 4 and 5 apprenticeships – the “missing middle” – which the UK has fallen well behind other countries in delivering.
“The only way that we will achieve that is by a new way in which we think about the coordination of our tertiary system, the way we think about the collaboration between institutions, the way we think about routes that people might take through education, and of course the contribution that FE and HE can play working together to fill in those gaps.
“I hope it’s a demonstration of the seriousness with which not just me as the skills minister…but the PM, takes this area of work.”
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