Britain should not write off university as its best route into skilled work – Column

The Prime Minister told school leavers that the hard hat deserves as much respect as the graduation cap.

This is a principle I share, and I welcome a government prepared to act on it.

This isn’t a new argument, successive governments have placed an emphasis on alternative ways into the workplace, but I am wary of where this is heading.

At a time where we need a more unified society, a divisive version of this debate threatens to treat two different ways into employment as though they sit on opposite sides of a line, and that backing one means retreating from the other.

The danger is that we start pretending university isn’t itself a technical route into skilled employment.

If policy starts dividing young people into those who go to university and those who learn practical skills, it misunderstands what many modern universities, such as Southampton Solent, already do.

It also risks leaving the country under-skilled at a time when new materials, techniques, and technologies require higher and better skills from its workforce.

I have long been a champion of the idea that the most effective higher education is industry focused.

Indeed, cost makes this more than an argument about the value of academic education.

In most OECD countries, the state covers around 70 per cent of the cost of higher education and the individual around 30 per cent.

In England, that ratio is reversed, and the burden has grown just as the cost of living has hit hardest for students and their families.

Universities owe students a return on that investment in the form of skills and connections that lead directly into employment, not a general qualification with no clear destination.

That is the return Solent delivers.

Building the specific, specialised technical skills that industries need, giving students a route from education into employment with no dead ends, no matter the industry.

Nowhere is that clearer than in maritime.

The Solent region is one of Britain’s most important maritime economies, so producing highly skilled graduates isn’t simply about education.

It’s about sustaining an industry worth billions.

Solent’s maritime cluster now generates £14.4 billion in aggregate GVA and supports 158,300 jobs, with productivity per worker running at £116,300, growth that continues to outpace the wider economy year on year.

That is the output of a training pipeline that runs from further education college through to postgraduate research.

Our own Warsash Maritime School trains just under 10,000 maritime students a year across more than 150 accredited courses and was awarded triple gold ratings in the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework.

That institution-wide standard is reflected at course level too.

Our BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering is ranked 6th in the UK for teaching quality, and our HND Marine Engineering achieved a 94 per cent positivity score for academic support in this year’s National Student Survey.

This offer extends well beyond our East Park Terrace campus.

The Solent region includes three universities, several further education colleges, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Lloyd’s Register and the National Oceanography Centre, alongside Royal Navy training establishments such as HMS Collingwood and HMS Sultan, forming one of the most complete maritime training ecosystems in the world.

Our graduates do not leave with a vague hope of finding relevant work.

They leave with the specialist skills employers have helped shape, moving into organisations including Shell, Maersk, BP Shipping, Carnival UK and the International Maritime Organisation.

That is what a university designed around industry looks like, and it is precisely what the Prime Minister says he wants more of.

Our new SMART Centre is a concrete example of this in practice.

Opened earlier this year and home to the South Coast Institute of Technology, first launched in November 2022 and backed by more than £13 million from the Department for Education, it exists to do precisely what the government’s announcement asks of the sector.

This offers students a single, continuous pathway.

They begin in further education, complete hands-on training in welding, marine engineering and composites workshops, then progress into degree level study before entering the maritime workforce.

At no stage are the academic and the practical treated as alternatives, they are delivered together.

This builds on established partnerships with regional colleges including Brockenhurst College and South Hampshire College Group, giving students across the region a clear, structured route from school into a maritime career.

That return on cost is what ultimately matters.

Social mobility, professional networks, and a direct route into skilled employment are benefits a degree still delivers, and ones that alternative routes alone cannot always replicate at the same scale or with the same reach into industry across the country.

This is the kind of route into employment students deserve.

It is not university versus the hard hat, but university that puts you into one.

So yes, let us value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.

At Solent, I have never seen much difference between the two.