There were only 22,060 degree apprentice starts in 2022/23 (of 560,000 students accepted through UCAS overall) – but if the 2023 Conservative Party Conference was your first foray into higher education, you wouldn’t know it. This was #CPC23, my first Tory Conference and a wonderfully hectic tour in search of the governing party’s higher education priorities.
As an indication of the mood on the ground, the word ‘skills’ appeared 93 times in the Conference Agenda, compared to just 37 for ‘university’ and a measly 6 for ‘higher education’. If I didn’t know at the beginning that Gillian Keegan, Secretary of State for Education, was Parliament’s first ever degree apprentice, I did by the end.
The headline was 80 seconds of Rishi Sunak’s headline speech, in which he called Labour’s target of 50% university attendance a ‘false dream’, claimed thousands were being ‘ripped-off’ by their degrees, and again extolled the virtues of apprenticeships. He was only a little more conciliatory than the Education Secretary had been the previous day, when she announced minimum service levels for universities in response to ongoing strikes. They might have started with minimum service levels for ministers, who were rumoured to be avoiding media interviews for fear of being asked about the future of HS2.
