The march of the middle-class apprentices

Tony Blair used to joke that he could announce the start of a war during a speech on skills policy and no one would notice. Like all the best jokes, it contained more than a grain of truth. Britain — or rather educated Britain — has never been interested in the parts of our education and training system that don’t involve doing A-levels and going to university.

Blair did a great deal to entrench the social and cultural dominance of university with his aspiration that half of all school leavers should go into higher education. That was, on aggregate, the right policy for the country and its economy: the expansion of a great higher education sector has done much good for the UK.

But aggregates and averages are made up of individuals, and even while the country as a whole gained from that national focus on university, the ‘other 50 per cent’ didn’t do so well.