Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Too many going to uni, not enough learning a trade’
Head questions value of ‘second-rate’ degree
Too many school leavers are going to university and not enough are taking vocational qualifications, says the head of a Canterbury grammar.
Ken Moffat, of the Boys’ Langton, believes too great a proportion of sixth formers are becoming students at second-grade universities which do not supply them with decent qualifications.
He appeared in a five-minute film made by Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle, who visited the school last Thursday to speak to staff and meet pupils receiving their A-level results.
Mr Moffat said: “We have a twotier system of higher education. There’s a set of universities it’s worth going to in order to get a degree, and there’s a set of universities where it’s not.
“When I started at university in 1983, just 10% of the population went to university. It was a tiny amount, but that was pretty much what the country needed.
“Now with 50% going, it’s not workable or realistic.”
Mr Moffat believes not enough emphasis is placed on apprenticeships or vocational courses.
“We put too much hype on A-levels,” he told Liddle.
“I think there’s something that fits with finishing your education at 18. But in terms of the steps students take after that, there are aspects of the 1944 Education Act which we should have followed through more successfully – particularly tertiary education and the training of tradesmen in apprenticeships.
“I don’t think vocational education in this country has taken off in the way it should have done.”
The Langton’s A-level results this year broadly matched those of the previous two years, but there was an increase in the number of A* grades achieved.
In his piece for the Sunday Times, Mr Liddle warned that there existed a “cruel delusion” that teenagers going to a second rate university got the same benefits as those who went to the best universities.
“The more people go to university, the more egalitarian and equal our society will be – so runs the delusional mantra,” he wrote.
“And the promotional material will advance the interesting thesis to these kids that all universities and all courses are equal: physics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, or youth studies at London Met — no real difference.
“Everybody else, especially the employers, knows that this is an absurdity, a cruel delusion.”
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