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The goal to have at least half of England’s young people going on to higher education is to be “torn up” by the government, the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has said, ending a policy first pledged by Tony Blair in the 1990s.
The Department for Education said Williamson “will tear up the target to send 50% of young people to university”, in an effort to rebalance post-school education towards further education colleges and apprenticeships for those aged over 18 in England.
In a speech on Thursday, Williamson said: “Our universities have an important role to play in our economy, society and culture but there are limits to what we can achieve by sending ever more people into higher education, which is not always what the individual and nation needs.”
In 1999 Blair made a pledge for 50% of young adults going into higher education “in the next century”. That target was probably reached in 2017 for the UK, when half of 17- 30-year-olds were estimated to have entered higher education for the first time, including those studying for vocational qualifications such as higher diplomas.
While the Conservatives never explicitly adopted Blair’s policy, its efforts in government have been an endorsement of its aim, including the 2015 decision to abolish the cap on the number of students each university in England could enrol.
David Hughes – the chief executive of the Association of Colleges that represents further education and other tertiary institutions – supported the change and said Williamson’s speech was a “rallying call” for a more coherent education system.
“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. The 50% target felt right then and has now been achieved.
“It’s time to move on to a more ambitious target, one which recognises that the world has changed and the needs of the country and of its citizens have changed,” Hughes said.
“Our current system simply does not support the half of adults who don’t get the chance to study at higher levels. In fact it relegates them to second class citizens, without the investment and the opportunities to improve their life chances.”
The DfE noted that 34% of graduates end up in non-graduate jobs, and Williamson said that “too often” graduates did not having the skills they need to find “meaningful” work.
Williamson’s comments come as a record proportion of school-leavers in the UK have applied for university places, with more than 40% of 18-year-olds seeking to start undergraduate courses in September.
Williamson said he wanted to make a personal commitment to the “forgotten 50%” of young people who do not go to university.
“That’s why this autumn I will be publishing a white paper that will set out our plans to build a world-class, German-style further education system in Britain, and level up skills and opportunities.”
Although details of any additional funding will have to wait, Williamson admitted: “For decades, we have failed to give further education the investment it deserves.”
Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union, said further education had been particularly hard-hit under the Conservative government’s austerity programme.
“Further education is in dire need of funding, but that is because the Conservative governments of the last decade have decimated it,” Grady said.
“Promising to scrap the 50% target of young people going to university might secure a headline but the road to our recovery from the current crisis does not involve cutting the proportion of young people accessing education.
“The government should be encouraging people to attend all forms of education, not picking artificial winners in a market it has created, nor denigrating university education at a time when the sector desperately needs support.”
Williamson’s announcement comes at a time of considerable danger for the higher education sector, which faces losing billions on pounds from the coronavirus outbreak and its aftermath.
This week the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that 10 universities in England and three elsewhere in the UK were threatened by severe financial difficulties, with the whole sector to be hit by losses of £3bn to £19bn next year.
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