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Higher Education

I certainly agree with my noble friend that as much form-filling and box-ticking as we can persuade others to reduce is welcome, but perhaps I may emphasise one of my noble friend’s other points. Universities are not factories for producing workers; they are educational institutions that exist not only to generate, transfer and inculcate knowledge but also to enable those who benefit from higher education to use that knowledge. When I talk of skills, I refer to a range of attributes of a graduate that together make up an individual’s employability. As employers constantly stress to me, they look as much for generic and soft skills as for specific and hard skills, if I can use those expressions.