England’s political tertiary consensus

It is lovely when everyone agrees.

Apparently we – as a nation, or a bunch of policy nerds, or whatever – have been paying too much attention to higher education and not enough to other skills routes.

No more an education system dominated by the university route, but an education system that offers a path for everybody, academic and technical, in equal balance.

Andy Burnham, June 2026

While you will never hear me denigrate the aspiration to go to university, I don’t think the way we currently measure success in education – that ambition to get 50% of kids to uni – is right for our times. Because if you are a kid, or a parent of a kid, who chooses an apprenticeship what does it say to you? Do we genuinely – as a country – afford them the same respect? Because we should.

Keir Starmer, September 2025

We will shut down these rip-off university courses and use the money to double the apprenticeship budget. Giving thousands of young people the chance of a proper start in life.

Kemi Badenoch, October 2025

The truth is that too many of our young people have been sold a lie about university, wasting three years of their lives on Mickey Mouse courses. All while we have a chronic shortage of nurses, builders, and care workers. The system is broken. So, I tell you what we need. Instead of Tony Blair’s 50 per cent of young people going to university, this is what we need. We need Nigel Farage’s 50 per cent of young people going into the trades

Suella Braverman, February 2026

Education and skills, generally speaking, is what pollsters call a “low salience” topic. While members of the public will express an opinion on it, if pushed (particularly around schools and culture war stuff) it can usually be found towards the bottom of the table when you ask voters what is important to them.

You might think that to win political power you would focus on the top concerns, but the trouble with that is that our electorate increasingly has radically differing opinions on the more salient things like immigration, health, and the economy. Rather than opening up another point of differentiation and division, a low salience policy that tests well with the public is an important part of being considered a grown-up political party. Even Reform – which is, if we are honest, pretty much a single issue party (that issue being, of course. enriching Nigel Farage) can look thoughtful by saying something about skills.

That it has become a default is rather unfortunate. It may well be the case that people instinctively feel that we need more apprenticeships and less degrees, but this false binary (remember degree apprenticeships!) obscured the kind of nuance that makes a really good policy, and inhibits the radicalism needed to make the increasingly necessary (and increasingly technical) changes that tertiary education is crying out for. The best we can hope for is a retelling of the same idea in a given party’s house style: leaning more or less on attack lines.

One of the most startling things about Labour’s decision to raise tuition fees with inflation is the lack of cut through. I’m old enough to have marched against the 2012 fee rises – hell, I’m old enough to have marched against the 2004 fee rises, and the 1998 imposition of tuition fees for the first time since 1962. There were no 2024 protests.

Likewise, popular anger about the financial pressure universities is negligible, and while there is some concern about course and department closures it is at best sporadic. Not the kind of popular outrage or consensus that wins general elections, or even by-elections. The extreme positions – that higher education is largely useless, or that we need to push participation as high as possible – are easily contradicted with personal or familial experience.

On these metrics the broad consensus that vocational education is important is an easy win. It lacks specificity – a huge chunk of what universities offer is vocational education, and with the growing complexity of even formerly elementary jobs there is very little out there in terms of employment for school leavers.

If you are a person with an interest in higher education policy, this phenomenon is a big part of why you might feel that there is very little of it about.