Boris is right, it's time to reform adult learning

Forget gender, race, or whether you will or won’t wear a mask in polite company. The biggest dividing line in the UK is education. The new focus on non-university routes could be the healing balm we need.

Picking over the pieces after the 2016 referendum, pollsters discovered the single most dramatic split between Leave and Remain voters was education. Britain splintered into two societies: graduates who, by and large, voted Remain and those who tended not to have been to university, who did not. Nancy Mitford’s division of U and non-U language was finally slain by the big U of university.

Of course, any splintering involves rough edges rather than perfect splits. But the patronising labels placed on Leavers — from ‘left behind’ to ‘uneducated’ — demonstrate the potency of education in the Brexit divide.