We don’t need every teenager to get a degree

Too many forced down academic route, says social mobility expert

BRITAIN does not need to be a nation of Oxbridge graduates, a social mobility expert told MPs yesterday.

Dame Martina Milburn said many young people are being ‘forced down an academic route that doesn’t suit them’.

A shake-up of the vocational education system would ‘make a real difference’ to social mobility, ensuring everyone gets the same opportunities in life regardless of background, she added.

Dame Martina was announced in May as the Government’s preferred candidate to become the next chairman of the social mobility commission. The position became vacant after the entire board, led by chairman Alan Milburn, quit in December in protest against a lack of progress towards a ‘fairer Britain’.

At a pre-appointment hearing at the Commons education committee yesterday, Dame Martina was asked what she ‘expects to challenge the Government on first’.

She replied: ‘I would like to really look at vocational education. That, for me, is a huge key to making a real difference in social mobility.’

Dame Martina, who is chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, added: ‘I think there are a lot of kids at the moment being forced down an academic route that doesn’t suit them and actually doesn’t play to their strengths. I actually don’t think, as a country – and this is my very personal opinion – [that] we kind of need everyone to have a degree from Oxford. I don’t get it.

‘If I’m using a carpenter to build me a new cupboard, I want someone who loves wood and loves what they do and can do it. I don’t really care whether they’ve got a degree or not.’

Dame Martina said: ‘In my own family, with my eldest and youngest sons and their struggles with dyslexia, they’ve both gone through a creative route and I think it would have been great, with hindsight, to have sat down and had a different conversation with them at 16.’

She added that her view was personal and it will be for the commission as a whole to make decisions about priorities.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, welcomed Dame Martina’s comments, saying that ‘academically able, gifted youngsters’ should be encouraged to go to university.

‘But far too many young people are going to university to do degrees that lead them to incur £50,000 worth of debt and then to be under-employed or unemployed and often bitterly disappointed,’ he said.

‘We have a shortage of skilled workers – bricklayers, plumbers and electricians. We need to build houses, for example, and we have to rely more and more on immigrant labour.’

He added: ‘ Government should not need to be told the blatantly obvious that we are robbing many children of their life chances by sending them to universities rather than enhancing their life chances.’