The government’s plans to move the focus away from university towards more people choosing vocational routes could be “the essence of levelling down” instead of levelling up, a former education secretary has said.
Referring to Gavin Williamson’s recent speech on the future of further education, in which he said the target of 50 per cent of young people going to university should be abandoned and suggested many might be better off choosing vocational routes, Justine Greening wrote in Times Higher Education today that a mantra that too many people are going to university who didn’t have good enough grades “seems to have been taken up by the Department for Education”.
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Structural inequality
The former education secretary said it was “an indictment of 21st-century Britain that connections still come before competence and it is utterly perverse that instead of fixing this structural inequality, an argument is now being constructed within government and its supporting commentariat that turns their disadvantage against young people who aspire to do better - and against those higher education institutions that help them the most”.
She said levelling up was about enabling more young people to have high aspirations and realise their potential, and it was “wrong to set up higher and further education in opposition to one another”.
“The reality is that the UK’s higher education institutions are already reaching further into their local communities than ever before. Universities including York, Liverpool John Moores and UWE Bristol are among those collaborating with nearby further education institutions, as well as local businesses, to spread opportunities more widely,” said Ms Greening.
She said the UK faced “simple but profound choices”. “A move to reintroduce student caps longer-term, shift away from contextualised admissions and penalise less well-connected young people for being less able to reap the financial rewards from their degree would be the essence of levelling down.”
The former education secretary added: “More progress can and must be made. But if urgent reform is needed anywhere, it is within government thinking itself. Unless policymakers take a long, hard look in the mirror, the danger is that short-term, myopic and dysfunctional Treasury thinking will further entrench privilege, prevent levelling up and harm the UK’s talent pipeline - just as it is attempting to forge a post-Brexit economy and emerge from the economic ravages of the coronavirus.”
