THE working class will lose opportunities under Tory plans to scrap university courses to fund apprenticeships, University and College Union (UCU) general secretary Jo Grady has warned.
The Conservatives said today they would introduce a new law allowing the Office for Students (OfS) to completely close university courses with the worst dropout rates, job progression and future earnings potential, to help fund 100,000 apprenticeships per year if they win the July election.
“Higher education provides a ladder of opportunity to working-class communities, so it is no wonder the Conservative Party continues to attack it,” Dr Grady said.
“The Tories have had 14 years to improve further education and provide more apprenticeships, but they have repeatedly missed their own apprenticeship recruitment targets while making brutal cuts, which have left colleges on their knees.
“We need an end to Tory MPs playing politics with further and higher education, and sustainable funding for the whole sector.”
Chloe Field, from the National Union of Students, warned using earnings to measure the value of degrees was “a poor metric, because things like race, class, gender and disability have a much more significant impact on people’s wages.”
Recruitment and Employment Confederation chief Neil Carberry said the Tory attack on so-called “rip-off” courses was “using apprenticeships to denigrate university courses, when we need both to flourish if we’re going to grow.”
He said the apprenticeship levy, which sees mostly large firms access the cash to spend exclusively on training apprentices, has made apprenticeships more expensive to deliver.
So while higher-level apprenticeships were replacing degrees for some people, they did not help people who would not have gone to university and needed a different route to skilled work, Mr Carberry said.
The Tories estimated the government would save £910 million by 2030 if it scrapped courses that taught 13 per cent of students, claiming the taxpayer “offsets” student loans when graduates do not earn enough money to pay them back.
Labour shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, however, said the announcement was “laughable” as the Tories had “presided over a halving of apprenticeships for young people.”
In England total new apprentices fell from 509,400 in 2015-16 to 321,400 in 2020-21, rising slightly since the pandemic, to 337,100 in 2022-23.
Ms Phillipson said Labour would introduce technical excellence colleges aimed at training workers for local industries and reform the apprenticeship levy.
