Million Plus

‘Too many graduates’, the populist press cry.

‘Too few people qualified in higher technical areas’, the policy wonks insist.

The tenor of the current policy debate on post-18 education and the Augar Review is the binary world of ‘Either/Or’. The conventional wisdom for some is to switch prospective higher education students from Level 6 degrees to technical qualification at Level 4 and 5. Surely this would be ‘better value’?

Well, not so fast. A greater long-term problem for our country is that not enough people are gaining successful outcomes at the gateway Level 3 qualifications (extended Diplomas or A-Levels) by age 25, rather than an ‘overproduction’ of graduates at Level 6. It is this part of the education and skills supply chain that is fundamentally holding us back economically and socially. Fixing it will give us the greatest opportunity to boost our labour productivity as we face the challenge of automation and escalating global competition in a post-Brexit environment.

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