… and here’s what should happen. When then Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that he wanted 50 per cent of school leavers to go to university I held my head in despair. It was argued that as graduates earned so much more money than non-graduates we ought to send more youngsters to university – then…
A quarter of a century after Tony Blair began the process to get half of youngsters into university, the latest Labour government is being lobbied by the education sector to get even more young people into post-school education. Universities UK (UUK) wants 70 per cent of school-leavers to carry on learning after they leave school…
If further evidence were required that the university system is not fit for purpose, then research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) makes it clear. It has found that one in five bar staff are graduates – up from three per cent 30 years ago. Nearly 20 per cent of waiters are…
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, author of the catchphrase ‘education, education, education’, has waded into this debate again as he pauses from his globe-trotting. During his premiership, he made it a policy to have 50 per cent of young people attend university – a wrong-headed ambition in my view. That figure has now been achieved,…
Standards at universities should be high and academic excellence ought to be the aim. However, in order to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum and ensure ‘equity of opportunity’, the theory of ‘inclusive assessment’ has infected our once-great institutions of learning. This phrase is a euphemism for the further erosion of standards – the opposite of what universities…