A timely report – from Ed Balls, no less – suggests that a lack of graduates is not the reason for our productivity deficit. Rather, our productivity deficit explains the lack of graduate-level jobs.
The Education Department treats universities like poorly performing secondary schools, and now intervenes in them so much that the ONHS may well propose bringing them into the public sector.
Such a move would damage the levelling-up agenda, dampen economic growth locally and nationally, and weaken the UK’s soft power abroad.
Foreign labour is an alternative to ministers facing up to how successive governments have gummed up domestic training and recruitment of medical staff.
The public sector has just swallowed another semi-autonomous set of institutions with little protest or controversy.
Risk and income sharing agreements allow institutions and students to become partners and shift losses on poor-value courses away from taxpayers.
Our exam-focused system serves neither pupils nor employers properly. We urgently need a broader and more flexible curriculum.
Austerity and the cost of living are doubtless going to dominate the Government agenda, but the summer gave us a glimpse of what ‘Sunakism’ would look like.
George Osborne managed to deliver employment and productivity even whilst cutting spending. The Chancellor can do the same.
Modularised courses could help to prepare learners for work in growth sectors whilst reversing decline in strategic industries.
She is pushing through reforms which are of tremendous significance, but as yet unnoticed by the wider public.
We need to stop the obsession about whether more or fewer people are going to university.
New reforms will mean academic institutions change their focus to getting on rather than just getting in.
The electoral punishment of getting policy wrong now could be long-lasting.