James Kirkup James Kirkup

Gavin Williamson is right to call out educational snobbery

The educational dividing line is under-discussed

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, Picture credit: Getty

Politicians give speeches all the time, but with differing levels of significance. Can you think of a genuinely important political speech given by a minister this week?

Maybe your answer is Rishi Sunak’s fiscal statement, and I’m not going to suggest that speech isn’t a big deal. It is.

But I am going to make the case for a speech given today by Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary. The speech was to the Social Market Foundation, the think-tank I run, so I obviously have an interest here.

Nonetheless, I think Williamson’s speech deserves to be seen as a big deal. While Sunak had important things to say on important issues which are talked about a lot, Williamson’s speech is about people that don’t get mentioned enough in politics: those who use further education and technical training.

As he points out, these people – who make up more than 50 per cent of the population ­– are too often forgotten in a national conversation dominated by those who went to university, whose kids will go to university and who assume that going to university is the ‘normal’ thing to do.

An old Westminster joke says that a minister could announce the start of World War III in a speech about further education and skills policy, and no-one would pay any attention – but this one had some newsworthy content. For instance, he had some fairly blunt words about recruitment when I discussed the speech with him, telling both public and private sector employers that the days of hiring only graduates must come to an end:

‘Not just within companies, not just within the private sector but right across the public sector as well, far too often we’re barring people from going for those jobs because it’s graduates only.’

Westminster will always talk about university instead of the other areas of the education system

Still, if Williamson gets headlines for the speech, it may well be for his words moving the Government ever further away from the (largely symbolic) target of 50 per cent of school-leavers going to university.

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