Starmer's further education plans augur well, but the policy detail will be telling

"Keir Starmer has joined a long line of ministers and prime ministers who have called time on Tony Blair's ambition for half of the nation's young people to go on to higher education. Rishi Sunak, Gavin Williamson and now Starmer have all declared an end to Blair's famous 1999 pledge as a policy priority, and done so on the grounds that the focus on universities has come at the expense of vocational education and training such as apprenticeships."

"Starmer's challenge is to change that, and his announcement at the Labour conference went further than his predecessors. He put a hard number on his version of the pledge: that two-thirds of young people would get higher level skills, either through university, further education or a gold-standard apprenticeship by age 25, seeing Blair's 50% and raising it to 67%. The critics are right that university is not always the best option, as Starmer suggested."

"But successive governments have tried and failed to break its grip on Britian's psyche. Intoning that vocational education should have parity of esteem with academic education, or praising Germany's fantastic apprenticeships or Switzerland's magnificent technical colleges, has not yet done the trick. Instead the reality for England's colleges has been shrinking budgets, with successive governments raising funding for schools educating students up to the age of 16, but doing less for the further education colleges that Starmer described as the Cinderella service."

Keir Starmer joins previous leaders in rejecting Tony Blair's 50% higher-education ambition, arguing that excessive focus on universities has sidelined vocational routes. Starmer proposes that two-thirds of young people attain higher-level skills by age 25 through university, further education, or gold-standard apprenticeships. Critics note that university is not always the best option, and past governments have failed to shift public preference toward vocational training. Further education colleges have faced shrinking budgets while schools received more funding. A forthcoming skills white paper promises a joined-up post-18 system, a unified regulator and funding model, and new awarding powers for colleges.

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