Meeting of the Parliament 25 October 2023
I thank Labour for securing the debate for the chamber.
The motion calls for “structural change”, and that has been committed to, I believe. However, I always have some reservations about too much emphasis on structures. Given the cost involved, there are other factors at play.
One factor that we need to take cognisance of is the emphasis that we as a society place on university education. Absolutely, we should enable every person for whom university is the right choice to get there, without fees or other barriers. However, university is not the right route for everyone, as other members have said. We need to get that message across to our young people, their families and wider society. Modern apprenticeships certainly are the right route for many, and that route often opens up a career and a way of earning more money, as well as providing more satisfaction, than university would.
Society needs a mixture of people with a mixture of skills. In my case, I decided to train as an accountant, and I needed to go to university to do that. However, currently, we find that some young people decide to go to university without much idea of what job they will do at the end of the course. That is disappointing for them and for us as a society. I would argue that we need to get the balance right between young people studying a subject that they would like to do and the longer-term career that they are looking to have.
James Withers’s comments on parity of esteem were excellent. As he says, the way we talk about different pathways is
“fundamental to achieving parity of esteem.”