Too many youngsters are going to university, Education Secretary says as he rips up 50 per cent target

Too many youngsters are going to university, the Education Secretary has said, as he rips up the 50 per cent target.

Gavin Williamson said that there are "limits" to what we can achieve by sending increasing numbers of school leavers into higher education, adding that it is "not always what the individual and nation needs".

In a virtual speech, hosted by the Social Market Foundation, he warned that we should not try to drive half of young people down a path which they are not all suited to. School leavers should instead be encouraged to enroll in technical and further education colleges or apprenticeships.

“For too long, we’ve been training people for jobs that don’t exist. We need to train them for the jobs that do exist and will exist in the future,” Mr Williamson said.

“We have to end the focus on qualifications for qualifications sake. We need fundamental reform: a wholesale rebalancing towards further and technical education.”

The ambition for 50 per cent of school leavers to go to university was first introduced by Tony Blair in 1999, and has become de facto Government policy ever since.

But Mr Williamson criticised the target, calling it an “absurd mantra” as he called for further education to be given parity of esteem with university degrees.

“From now on, our mantra must be further education, further education, further education,” he said.

The proportion of young adults in England entering higher education rose above 50 per cent for the first time in 2017/18.

Figures published this week by Ucas, the university admissions service, show that the number of British school leavers applying to start degrees this autumn has surged to a record high despite uncertainty amid the pandemic.

Officials at the Department for Education highlighted figures that show a third (34 per cent) of graduates end up in non-graduate jobs.

A report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that almost eight in ten graduates will never pay back their full student loan under the new tuition fees system.

The number of graduates who fail to clear their debt before it is written off has almost doubled since 2011, when the Government axed the old maintenance grants in favour of a loan system.

Under the new system, 77.4 per cent of graduates will never fully repay their debts, compared to 41.5 per cent of graduates under the previous system.

Mr Williamson told The Telegraph that university is not the “silver bullet” for everyone, as he criticised people’s “snobbish” attitudes about further education.

“If you are a youngster and you are doing a two year decent quality app you are going to be earning more than a graduate,” he said.

“We need to make sure we guide them to the right place to be able to add their skills so they can get a job.

Sometimes that is going to be a degree but a lot of the time that is going to be through different routes.”

The Government will publish a White Paper this autumn which will outline plans to build a  “German-style” further education system which will “level up skills and opportunities” across the country.

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said that school leavers who do not go to university are treated like “second class citizens”.

He agreed that it is time to “move on” from the 50 per cent target, which has now been achieved, adding: "Our current system simply does not support the half of adults who don't get the chance to study at higher levels.

"For too long, we've been fixated on a target set in a different era, by a different leader, when the needs of the country were vastly different.”