And 1 in 4 end up in low-skilled jobs

ONE in four graduates in England are in lowskilled jobs as many lack basic maths and English skills, a report has found.

The data is from an OECD survey of adult skills which asked 16 to 65-year-olds in 29 major economies to take basic tests.

They included information processing and quantitative reasoning but the level of difficulty was ‘school-level’ – GCSE or below.

Many graduates in England working in non-skilled jobs scored poorly. England’s share of graduates in non-skilled jobs was second highest at 28 per cent – behind only Japan, where it was 29 per cent, the 2012 study found. Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD, said there needed to be a ‘more stringent’ approach to quality assurance in English universities. He added: ‘In France or Germany you go through this and you have bad luck, but you haven’t lost a lot of money. But [in the UK], you also have paid for a degree which has proved to be not of value.’

Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, has made tackling poor value-for-money degrees a priority this year.

In June, he said that too many universities were getting ‘bums on seats’ for worthless courses which do not lead to decent jobs.