LIVE: Why aren't Britain's young people working? | with Laura Trott

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0:42Laura Trott: Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Michael Simmons, The Spectator's economics editor, and I'm just back from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. At that conference, I hosted what was a pretty interesting panel discussion on NEETs. NEETs are young people not in education, employment or training. And earlier this year, the number past 1 million for the first time in a few years. It's come down a little bit since then, but it's still a huge problem, both in terms of its economic and human cost. How do we solve the NEATS crisis? What are the Conservatives going to do about it if they get back into power?

1:26Laura Trott: So we thought we'd bring you a recording of that panel today. And on the panel, I was joined by Laura Trott, who's a Conservative MP and most importantly, the Shadow Education Secretary. Megan Bulford, who's the Commercial Director of the Confederation of British Industry. my colleague Lara Bryan, our commissioning editor at The Spectator, and Daniel Herring, who's head of economic and fiscal policy at the Centre for Policy Studies. Have a listen. Laura, since you're the shadow minister, you're going to go first.

1:54Michael Simmons: Wonderful. Thank you so much. We are looking at, at the moment, a crisis for young people. Now, we learned from Matthew Saeed yesterday that we mustn't overuse that word, otherwise it loses all meaning. But I think when you look at the figures, some of which Michael's just outlined, it really does terrify you and it should if you think about youth unemployment it's gone up by a hundred thousand in one year and of those people that are neat most of them aren't even looking for work right they're not even looking for work and of that bunch around half of them say they have mental health conditions this is not okay like this is not okay and what really concerns me is that the approach the government has taken to what is a crisis has been to blame education.

2:44Michael Simmons: So they say, oh, we need to fiddle around in schools at 14. The one bit of the system, by the way, that is actually working really well and that is transforming young people's life chances. So that's what we're going to focus on. We're not going to focus on the fact that we've made it way more expensive to hire young people. we're not going to focus on the fact that actually the pull of welfare is way too strong and leading young people into a choice which is not right for them and not right for the country. So my job is to try, along with Andrew and Helen, try and talk sense into this government because this is something where we need to work together to find solutions because once young people go on to welfare at an early age it's really difficult to get them back off it again.

3:33Michael Simmons: So we have a real window of opportunity now, and I don't want the government to waste it.

3:38Laura Trott: So my question to you, Laura, is, is our current education system set up in the best way for the economy that we actually have?

3:46Michael Simmons: So I would divide the education system into schools and kind of post-school, university, apprenticeships and other. I think our school system is exceptional. And there's always this long running debate about whether you have a skills curriculum or a knowledge curriculum. i.e. do you try and train people specifically for jobs from quite an early age or do you do basic skills like English and maths and science and make sure that people understand those and I think hopefully we have won that argument now we've seen the success of English schools over and above Wales and Scotland where they went down a more skills-based curriculum route because do you know what the best vocational skills are English and maths those are the things that you need to know.

4:34Michael Simmons: That is what you need to understand if you go on to do anything in the economy for later on. However, once we reach the transition point to go to university or do an apprenticeship or into work, I do think that we do need to reset the system that we have. Because for too many people, and we all know them at the moment, they come out of university and they cannot get a job. And that is a large degree at the moment to do with the wider economy and the costs of hiring. But it's also because some of these courses are really not setting individuals up to go into the workforce afterwards. And they haven't done for a very long period of time, even when the economy was in a better shape.

5:14Michael Simmons: So our policy is to shift that away from some of those university courses and invest more in apprenticeships post-school.

5:22Laura Trott: So would you like to see less school leaders going to university?

5:26Michael Simmons: Yes, that is our policy.

5:27Laura Trott: and Lara I want to bring you in on university because you write about our university system quite a lot and you mentioned that one in ten meets are graduates but we have a wider graduate unemployment problem do you think that students are starting to see that maybe university is a bit of a raw bargain?

5:46Megan Bulford: I write a lot about the higher education sector and I write specifically about very very weak degrees at universities where people are just not being set up for life where essentially people are spending an awful lot of money and acquiring a lot of debt to have their time wasted by a sort of academic industrial complex in which a lot of people want to read bits of poetry or do gender studies and they need students to keep filing through and specializing in gender studies or Lego serious play, etc., etc., so that these institutions can exist. And the government obviously is keenly aware of how important universities are to university towns, so has no real interest in intervening here.

6:25Megan Bulford: And I'm always desperate to come across some evidence that students are starting to wake up to this and students are starting to say, hang on, I could go and do a degree apprenticeship, I could end up absolutely no debt and I could have a degree which has been tailor-made for the workforce that I want to exist in. And we're starting to see that and we're seeing degree apprenticeships become very, very oversubscribed, particularly at the top end. What we're not seeing is a movement away from these pointless courses a lot of the time. And I think fundamentally, university is a way to move out of your parents' house.

6:56Megan Bulford: It's a way to have a lot of fun with your friends, get drunk in a new city for three years, have an allowance, hit your bank account for three. And therefore, as long as that process happens, people will keep taking these much, much weaker courses. and then realising in five to ten years and speaking to me for an article and say, you know what, I really regret that. But 18 is not the time people make their sensible decisions that I think student finance needs to reflect the importance of the labour market.

7:22Laura Trott: And Megan, when people finish university or school or college or whatever the point is that they're kind of entering the labour market proper, do CBI members find that they've been given the skills that the workplace needs or is there an area that's obviously missing?

7:38Lara Brown: So I think there's definitely a mismatch between yeah the skills that employers need and the skills that individuals are coming out with and I think that's partly to do with there's there's a disconnect between those two areas and actually I think you know I don't think about it as whether is it apprentices is it university like it's all there should be different routes for different individuals but also it should be all based on outcomes like does it ultimately deliver the right outcomes for that individual and do they ultimately end up in work? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges is with apprenticeships are a big part of the puzzle.

8:13Lara Brown: They're a big part of the equation. I think they are super important, but not just at the lower end. I think also in-work apprenticeships are really important and ensuring that those people can move and progress through their career. So then ultimately those younger people can come in. I think that's also really important to ensure that there are those vacancies and those skills to fill.

8:34Laura Trott: Laura, what do you think about that? And also some of the points that Lara raised, that maybe it's wrong to look at university just as, you know, what does this mean for your employment outcomes? It's so much more than that in terms of, you know, forming a human.

8:46Michael Simmons: Of course it is. But we spend eight billion pounds a year on this. Right. This is taxpayers' money. These are people who are working in Tesco. You know, we've got to make sure it's well spent and that it's setting up the economy for what will work in the longer term. And I do actually think attitudes are changing. Look, many of you here will be parents, right? I'd be delighted if my kids went on to do a degree apprenticeship afterwards. And I run an apprenticeship fair every single year, and I have done since I've been elected. And you know what, in the last couple of years, the private schools have come.

9:21Michael Simmons: And there is a change because people know what is going on in the economy right now. And as Lara rightly said, some of these degree level apprenticeships, you get way more applications for them than you do for oxford and cambridge this is what young people want you've got people applying to ucas now about 40 of them are interested in doing an apprenticeship but actually far fewer options are available to them so i think there is a shift i think it's really important and i think that's a great thing because you know we all all mps we do these lovely apprenticeship um meetings and they are all just so excited and enthused when they're on one and it's a wonderful thing which kind of explains I think why MPs bang on about them the whole time.

10:02Laura Trott: Fair enough and well I want to move on to employment now and we'll start with you and Megan again picking up on something a few of you have raised about how expensive I guess we've made it to employ people and I think Lara's part about the minimum wage is really important you know it's you're going to give someone their first job but it's going to cost the same as someone who's 25 I mean you're going to pick the 25 year old right so what change would need to be made for employers to get back into that attitude of actually we want to have a young workforce and it's a good thing to give somebody their first job.

10:35Lara Brown: Yeah and I think this is a big was a big theme actually in the report that we've just launched in in August that was called Opportunity in Every Postcode and this is all about how do you really make it easier for businesses to be able to hire and give them that confidence. I mean, I said earlier that businesses hiring at the moment is such, you know, they just they're just not they don't have the headroom or the capacity to hire. So one of our key asks of the government at the moment that was included in our report is to reduce the next secondary threshold by what's always to raise it by 1000 pounds.

11:05Lara Brown: And actually, we've done some economic modelling, and that would produce additional 41 ,000 jobs, but also additional GVA of 3.4 billion. So we think that could have a real impact on actually that ability to hire. I also think the regulation is important. And what I said in my opening remarks about that kind of flexibility piece, and this goes back to the Employment Rights Act and whether it's actually creating that flexibility. You know, young people rely quite heavily on seasonal working. You know, kind of that entry level work typically needs that flexibility. and ultimately if we're taking that flexibility away in the labour market, we then aren't able to deliver those jobs.

11:45Lara Brown: So I think those are two of the biggest issues that I see.

11:47Laura Trott: Lara, I think it's fair to say that the government is aware of this crisis. Pat McFadden, I think, genuinely seems to want to do something about it. But do you think they see the connection to their own policies? Do you think they see that raise nicks by£25 billion, there might be some effect on employment?

12:08Megan Bulford: this is one of the great mysteries to me because on one hand the government is aware of this issue they've got alan milburn doing genuinely good work on it there's a desire within the government even if not backbenchers to bring the welfare bill down and try and change the incentives but on the other we have seen a series of decisions made by this government that anyone with any basic economics or even me with an english degree could tell you is obviously going to have a not going to get in jobs. So the Employment Rights Act is huge for this. You are not going to hire someone with going little experience, with no references, who hasn't worked before, if the second that they join on day one, they have labour rights that make it extremely difficult to get rid of them in any way.

12:48Megan Bulford: Zero hours contracts were essential for some people proving themselves, getting a start in employment. I mean, my first job was zero hours. Of course it was. If I was rubbish, they could give me zero hours. That was ideal. Those are gone now. The differential minimum wage, obviously, was going to make a specific sector of people very, very undesirable to hire, which is why we used to have it. And then this NICS increase was employment suicide. And it's meant especially to do the NICS increase at a point in which you've got massive improvements in robotics tech and AI. You are just begging employers to cut down on staff numbers and try and mechanize as many jobs as possible or offshore them if you can't mechanize them.

13:25Megan Bulford: The government must know this. I think there's just a desire to constantly, obviously, it's a self-preservation problem. A lot of these policies were brought in to fund the welfare bill, which is itself, therefore, keeping people out of work. And I think the government is just chasing its tail. That's my only guess.

13:39Laura Trott: Daniel, can you pick up on that point about AI and automation? Because, you know, clearly we're all agreed that regulation and tax in the labour market is a problem. But it's not uncommon that you hear graduates saying that, you know, AI is taking those entry-level jobs as well. That makes sense. Are we seeing that?

13:55Daniel Herring: From what I've read and seen, it's not coming through a huge amount. Actually, one of the things I don't know about here, but in the US, I think there's been some work done that says remote working has actually had a bigger impact on graduate employment, particularly in the professions, because it's very difficult to train someone remotely. It's much easier to, you know, I think about my first graduate job, which was in civil service. And I came into work every day and it was like drinking from a fire hose in terms of how much I was learning and understanding. And that would have been a terrible experience doing it remotely.

14:29Daniel Herring: So I think that's one thing that is often potentially overlooked. I'm not sure what's happening in the UK with that. That was US data. I think AI probably will have a big impact and it probably will change the way that we do things. it definitely has an impact on the hiring side. We did an intern application at the CPS a few months ago, and it was just so much AI generated. And it became really obvious once you start reading, you know, a hundred of them that, you know, 90 of them had referenced. It's the same thing that obviously all use the same AI generator and things. So it does have an impact.

15:06Daniel Herring: And in some ways it's kind of counterproductive, but I don't think it's yet having an impact on kind of automating work that graduates used to do. I don't think it's having an economy-wide impact. It probably has in sectors, but I don't think the data supports that.

15:20Laura Trott: There's some really interesting data, actually, that you should all look up on this, which is if you look at the actual jobs that have been lost in sort of HMRC, PAUI kind of employment, it's all like retail and hospitality. I haven't seen ChatGPT and TK Maxx yet. So if we accept that this is more an issue of tax and regulation and employment costs, And my question for you, Laura, is what's the Conservative government going to do about it?

15:45Michael Simmons: We've got to make it as easy as possible to hire young people. That just has to be the principle that we go with from now on. Right. Because, I mean, even Ed Balls is saying that the government has got it wrong on its approach to adding costs and hiring young people. When Ed Balls says that, hopefully somebody will finally listen in the Labour Party.

16:05Laura Trott: I want to move on to, to me, is the biggest question and kind of who these needs are themselves. And I went to the launch of Alan Milburn's interim report. And the kind of thing that he was like desperate to really get across is that he doesn't think that any needs actually want to be a need. And I think he had polling that suggested that it was over 80 percent of them. And, you know, what despite what you might read in the spectator, these are all people that are desperate to be getting on. So do you agree with him, Laura, or do you think that there is an element of this is the snowflake generation?

16:42Michael Simmons: I wouldn't call it a snowflake generation, but I do think the pull of welfare has made it too easy to opt out. There is nothing kind about consigning people to welfare at such an early age. And I think that is what the left do. They confuse welfare with kindness. And it's actually the opposite. and I think that if we make it too easy then that is what is going to happen you know any system you just have to look at the incentives within it and that's why we've said that actually we won't allow people to leave school and just get on UC now certain people will disagree with that and I do understand but I think the tough love approach is the one that we should take.

17:27Laura Trott: And Lara you're probably the youngest member of the panel and so I'm gonna ask you that the same question you know do you think that your generation is um you know that they're genuinely just trapped out of the labor market or um or training opportunities or is there an element of this I think there's a

17:46Megan Bulford: self-reinforcing problem here but what we have found is that a number of people do seem to be making a lot of choices that from my perspective would imply an unwinness to work I mean even by Alan Melbourne's own numbers, which I don't really believe, one in five needs are quite happy being needs. And we really need to have being in a highly undesirable thing that fewer than that want. But I suspect what's happened is that people have had limited experience of a genuinely challenging labour market. I think there's no reason to understate that. It is difficult to get a job as a young person. If you have a graduate qualification, specifically want a graduate job rather than just sort of to do what you would have been doing at 18.

18:27Megan Bulford: There's an oversupply of people like you. You might not have the right skills. You hear hiring managers there talking about getting thousands of AI written applications. You are being sifted against those candidates. I think what's happening is people are spending a bit of time swimming against that tide and then they are suddenly seeing this very soft, very nice, very appealing welfare system with hoops that are spectacularly easy to jump through, very few reassessments, a sense that once you finally get into the system you can stay in the system we now have a number of universities i think this is really worth bearing in mind advising people before they graduate to get into the universal credit system and once you're in that system you will remain in it and i do believe those people are making an active choice to stay in the system even if they hadn't started out thinking oh you know what i'll be in need laura do you want to respond to that point i

19:16Laura Trott: hadn't heard that before that seems to me quite shocking that universities are encouraging it's

19:20Michael Simmons: not just that though i was looking up on um ai the other day the rates of some benefits and claude told me how i should best apply for them and it was telling me what i needed to say in order to get it make it more likely to get it and i was like this and what that basically means that this is so widespread now on the internet that when you are using a large language model to look stuff up it automatically returns it because it thinks that that is what most people want That is genuinely terrifying. And of course, universities shouldn't be doing that.

19:51Laura Trott: And Daniel, do you agree that we've got the incentives wrong in our welfare system? And if so, how do we fix it?

19:58Daniel Herring: Incentives are definitely wrong. And the big shift in the welfare system, not just at NEATS level, is kind of away from unemployment to health and disability benefits. And that means that lots of people are then just kind of getting stuck in that system and no one's really going in and helping them. Whereas when you're on the kind of unemployment track, there's a whole load of more kind of tough love measures that you have to kind of go through. I think the first thing is, you know, the PIP assessment is a bit probably inadequate. So it basically asks, what can't you do? Or like, it asks what you can do and then you try not to meet those things.

20:41Daniel Herring: So, you know, can you walk several metres? can you make your own meal can you catch public transport and um cynically it seems quite easy to game and what a lot of people say is we should flip that around and say what what can you do you know you've got anxiety maybe it's real maybe it's not i don't know but how can we give you the support to go into work and to and to um get these things i think a bit of tough love probably is the right approach particularly for young people because the long-term cost is so much greater

21:15Laura Trott: than than anyone else and we're going to return to this anxiety point but and megan i want to ask you about the sofic generation as well because on on the same day that i went to watch alan launch's report and i listened to the today program and nit robinson asked and you know a neat oh um have you looked at jobs in hospitality have you looked at a job in a cafe and this person you could argue reasonably said i've told away at my a levels and and university and i expect what in their view was a higher standard of job and do you think young people are too picky when

21:49Lara Brown: it comes to their first job i i wouldn't say they're too picky i just think again the like when i think about what my first job was it was working in a cost cutter supermarket you know it's i think we need to those those hospitality and retail sectors are key to ensuring that young people get their first jobs and they are the sectors that are being hit the hardest right now they are the ones that the nicks increase last year had the biggest impact on the minimum wage etc etc you know the list goes on high energy costs there's lots of you know lots of costs that are really impacting those and i think that's then reducing the ability for those businesses to be able to hire but i i also think there's a bit of a disconnect as well particularly and a social mobility problem across the country of actually getting exposure to careers advice and exposure to businesses.

22:41Lara Brown: I mean, work placements, for example, if we can give better high quality work experience, I think, again, this would help individuals to understand, oh, what is it like to actually work? You know, just the basic skills of being in a job, which a lot of those individuals just don't have. So I think it's not necessarily just thinking, are these individuals being too picky but actually are they being made aware of that there are certain opportunities out there and are they being connected to employers so I think there's a greater job to do there between that connection piece I want to so copy Megan's example there and

23:14Laura Trott: reveal what our first job was and what Laura what was yours um I was a waitress for an event company

23:20Megan Bulford: okay Laura at Knight's Garden Coffee Shop as a waitress and Daniel um I picked honeydew melons

23:30Laura Trott: that is the winner but before we move to audience Q &A I do want to go to this anxiety point because whether you think there is an element of there being issues with this generation we clearly have this rising mental health problem that's playing into our unemployment issues Laura how much do you think that's down to kind of phones and social media?

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24:28Michael Simmons: I think that it's now proven by a number of pieces of research that actually too much time on screens will cause young people to have ADHD type symptoms. That link is now causal and very clear. And you just have to go into a school and talk to reception teachers about kids that are coming into reception today. right because they will tell you they can't concentrate as much anymore you know they'll get a book sometimes it breaks your heart and they'll try and swipe it it is just extraordinary I mean I don't want to dominate the power with social media stuff but you all know how I feel about this I am passionate about it because I think it's just ruining childhoods and ruining young people's lives I was in a year six class the other day and one of the boys called the girl Bonnie Blue like in year six and then of course all the kids went home and asked the parents what bonnie blue was right so it's just their whole childhood is being just distorted so hugely by social media it's the content it's what they're doing to their mental health is their physical health everything which is why i've tried so hard to get them off it lara do you agree with that i

25:37Laura Trott: mean you you were in the school in the social media um age and you seem well adjusted that's

25:43Megan Bulford: very kind of you to say you've missed what lurks beneath the surface but um i am more skeptical of the blaming of specifically social media and screens for the crisis we're seeing today i'm i think exposed to screens and smartphones at a very very young age is not a good thing i wouldn't give my children smartphones and the fact we've got four-year-olds wiping is bad but i think because we've got this slightly malign thing in every sector now i see a rush to blame social social media for all of the world's ills and doesn't seem to completely track with the evidence, which I think is sort of the big issue, but also, you know, problems in the labor market are much more significant.

26:23Megan Bulford: And finally, I don't think, I sincerely don't believe this, that my generation is more anxious or more depressed than any generations previously. And therefore, I'm not looking for a cause of the anxiety, depression, and AHG. I think it is a problem of diagnosis. it's a problem of self-perpetuation if i felt a bit anxious tomorrow and then stopped going to work i'm sure after a month i'd be a nervous wreck and a system that encourages that solution to problems will make people unhappy but i don't actually think we're more anxious

26:55Michael Simmons: i i about to know what am i respect for lara i think you're brilliant on this we do disagree i think that there is evidence that your generation is more anxious overall uh that is kind of held up by numerous kind of international studies and there has been a lot of debate as to why and where it comes to particularly attention I think there has been very clear research and evidence safer screens campaign have done a huge amount on this and there have been a number of doctor-led reports on what this is doing to young people's attention span and kind of like it makes sense right if your child is on YouTube kids the whole time and all they're seeing is little clip swipe little clip swipe little clip and they're not reading a book like that is going to affect their attention it's going to affect their attention span there's just no getting around that and it is extraordinary I think that the impact that that has had on children's ability to focus at school and also we're seeing at university now which I think is also really interesting when you talk to university professors and we get these reports from some time to time some of them in the spectator about how university professors are worried because students can't come and read a book i mean for god's sake right like we just need to sort this out and whilst i don't think this is the answer to everything i think that there is so much that we need to do to turn this around because it's not just about social media causing anxiety it's also about the interaction of young people with each other and it speaks to the working from home point as well like humans need to talk to each other right that is how we establish ourselves place ourselves in the world it is so important and just taking that away and thinking it can be replaced by screens is just in i think fundamentally wrong and i don't like that in schools now children in secondary school are spending eight hours a day on a screen right we've got the the instances of myopia or musculoskeletal problems or just a physical impact of these things is huge never mind the mental health impact so yeah i think we need to roll things back and i do think it's having an impact but i would love to have a longer conversation that i'll do later and daniel you

29:07Daniel Herring: want to come in and then i've got a final question yes this is an i i agree with a lot of what laura said i just think it's important to also realize when you're talking about needs that lots of countries have similar levels of anxiety and mental health but um don't necessarily have as higher proportion meets so those two things don't necessarily correlate internationally and

29:29Laura Trott: and Megan final question for you before we go to the audience whatever the cause of anxiety and mental health do you think it's a reasonable ask of us as a country to ask of employers to kind of do more actually on pastoral care being more and accepting of mental health with young employees

29:46Lara Brown: yeah and I think there's a lot employees can do actually just in terms of preventing those employees from falling out of work I mean we we saw with the keep britain working review charlie mayfield review that actually it's better for people to be in work and busy instead of go to your point sat at home and not doing anything at all like that is just going to you know overburden and become even make it even worse for the mental health challenges so I think there's a there's a issue in obviously I think businesses have a job in first recognizing where there are issues you know because sometimes those individuals don't necessarily come forward but I think also in then trying to support them but also preventing them from actually leaving the workforce and I think this is a big issue with the neat population where obviously they're not even coming into work their first port of call is being off sick and off you know on mental health um so I think that is a big challenge in terms of bringing those into the workforce I think also just to pick up on on a point that was made before about kind of the screen time I think also the skills that businesses are going to need and that we're hearing from businesses more often is you need those soft skills you need those human skills those relationship building skills they are going to be more and much more important in an AI world.

31:00Laura Trott: Okay I'm going to open to the floor now on the off chance there is a neat in the audience you get the first question but I suspect not so Lino, do you want to pick someone? And I always beg, please, a question, not a speech.

31:14Daniel Herring: Hello, thanks for such an engaging discussion. My name is Ben Ben-Wilard. I run an employment program in Sheffield that helps young adults at risk of long-term unemployment into work. And I do wonder if there is a bit of an AI blind spot here. And I haven't spoken to an employer that hasn't reduced employment because of AI. And to your retail point, that's, over the last two years, has become the most heavily automated industry. So our capital is currently eroding entry-level jobs. So my question is, if we're in 10 years' time and there's half the level of entry-level jobs there are now, then what do we do?

31:53Lara Brown: Yeah, so I think there's a few different things going on at play, and I agree there's some entry-level jobs are being eroded, but I also think there's an element of a bit of a wait and see that a lot of businesses that we speak to are kind of in this mode of, I'm not sure exactly how AI is going to impact my workforce. You know, I'm still embedding it in my processes, in my customer engagement, et cetera. And so there is an element of, I don't really want to rehire and fill vacancies because I'm not sure if my future workforce with AI, what that looks like. So I do think there's an element of, we are in, and that's obviously having a bigger impact on the neat population is this kind of wait and see period.

32:34Lara Brown: It's just unswashed. Employers are just grappling with how is AI actually going to transform what their workforce looks like and what are the entry level jobs that they actually require? Because I think they still require those entry level jobs, but they just look quite different to what they did before AI.

32:50Daniel Herring: Thank you very much. My name's Johnny Rich. I'm the director of Research Plus, which is a group of universities. So you'll be unsurprised to hear my question is around universities and students. And according to the IFS, when you adjust for age, graduates are less than half as likely to be meets. And the Melbourne report says something similar, but doesn't do quite the same calculation. Also, we were talking about degree apprenticeships. And of course, degree apprenticeships are taught in universities. That's what the degree part of the name means. So HE is part of higher education, it's part of the solution, it's what works when tackling needs.

33:33So how exactly does reducing the number of students,

33:37Daniel Herring: reducing opportunity, help to reduce needs when we know that's the one thing we've got that's effective?

33:48Michael Simmons: there are some absolutely brilliant uh university courses out there johnny and we have a fantastic university sector but too many of these courses are failing young people right they go on them they're no more likely to get a job and they come out of it with so much debt and also that costs a lot of money for the taxpayer and i think the university sector as a whole should engage with this right as a proposition because you cannot tell me that every single university course out there is doing the right thing by young people because I don't think that's true whereas there are some which are amazing and are going to do like mean that it's really worth the investment for the young people it's really worth the investment by taxpayer but we have to make alterations and I think this is an area where we do need to see a shift because you talk about the employment prospects from a university degree they're much better with apprenticeships right they are much better so whilst I completely back universities I think that it is an incredible part of our economy and our society we do need to shift for some courses that are not delivering value for young people and for the wider country.

35:07Daniel Herring: Thanks hi Dan Gilbert and actually picking up directly on Richard's point, there's a very long-standing binary debate in this country about further versus higher education, about technical and vocational versus academic. But as we've heard, there's also lots of ways in which the higher education sector is delivering on skills, delivering on employment opportunities, spin out some engineering departments, training social workers and so on. Does the panel think that actually we need a more nuanced debate in this country and being a bit less binary about university versus college?

35:38Laura Trott: Lara, do you want to take that one?

35:40Megan Bulford: I would say first briefly on higher education generally, the bar for a university's success cannot be did it make people slightly less likely to become needs. We need to look at whether people are better off having gone to university than they would have been before. And the research is very clear on this. At least 20 % of people who go to university are materially worse off because of that decision. And therefore, they probably shouldn't have gone to university. That's not to say there's not lots of excellent courses, but that's what the research seems to be showing us. But yes, I agree. I think sitting here and talking about higher education is too broad to come to a useful conclusion.

36:15Megan Bulford: There are thousands of useful university courses across the country that do really good work embedding career advice that are designed for a labour market as it currently exists. But I think what the Conservatives have spoken about and my consensus as a journalist is that there's a lot of easily discernible rot. If you look at specific employment outcomes for certain courses at certain universities, you're seeing people who are making 14 ,000 to 18 ,000 pounds a year 21 months after graduating. and those courses are failing people and the information of the students approaching 18 allowing them to discern between a technical degree which is working closely with the labour market around it which is sort of embedded good career practices and is going to be a great start in life and a degree where people have far far worse outcomes the information you have at 18 is not good enough to help you make that decision and know which one the debt is worth it for and which one is isn't.

37:08Daniel Herring: Is that sort of leading to higher education? The government's proposing lots of changes around vocational education at a younger age and talking about the pathways that people might follow there. I'm interested to hear what the panel think on whether that's the right

37:21Laura Trott: move or not. Daniel, do you want to start and then we'll come to Laura on that as well.

37:24Daniel Herring: Yeah, probably. I mean, I think other countries that do it better have a higher rate of vocational training education. I'd also say just to go to the previous point, there's an amazing data set. I I actually can't quite remember what it's called, but it basically shows you for every course and every university what the salary outcomes are. You feel the most important to choose to. That's right. And if you have a child thinking of going to university, you are negligent if you don't show them that data set now that you know, because it will tell you, like, will you be better off or not in probability terms.

37:58Daniel Herring: So a lot of this data exists. And basically, I think every course should just kind of show that before you start it so that people can make slightly more informed decisions.

38:06Michael Simmons: Thank you. I am furious about what the government is doing because it goes back to the point that I made at the beginning about how they are ascribing blame for what is going on with NEATS and what they think their solution is. So they are saying that actually the courses that young people take at 14 are why we have a NEATS crisis. I think that is mad. I think that is mad for three reasons. Firstly, our school system is really, really good, right? English children are in the top 10 for reading, for maths and science in the whole world, right? And yet, this is the system that they are now fiddling around with.

38:45Michael Simmons: It is completely mad to me. Secondly, when you are thinking about vocational qualifications, as I said earlier, you've got to get the basics right first, right? There is no point in putting someone on an electrician course at 14 if they can't do English and maths and science is a huge part of what they go on to do later so by all means specialise at 16 but do not do it at 14 this is going to be such a huge upheaval in the education system and what they need to be doing is focusing on tax and welfare and I am going to be making that point to them again and again and again.

39:23Laura Trott: Well on that note thank you very much everyone for coming and could you join me in thanking our panel of Laura and Megan, Mara and Daniel.

39:35Laura Trott: Thank you to the panel and thank you for listening to this special edition of Coffeehouse Shots.

40:07Thank you.

40:24Megan Bulford: skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins. Just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.