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Higher Education

I think very highly of the Minister, and I admire his long journey from Tottenham to this place. However, I thought that he was disappointing—understandably, the response that he received in this House was one of surprise, nay shock; and disappointing in the message that he broadcast to all the young people coping with disappointment themselves as a result of the Government's failure to live up to their pledge. The Government are pulling up the ladder of opportunity, and that is not a happy position for this Minister, or others, to be in. The facts behind the Government's failure speak for themselves. Even though the figures have been recalibrated and recalculated, by last year the Government had achieved just 43 per cent. participation in HE. The House will remember all the promises of 50 per cent. participation, but the real rate is only 43 per cent., and participation by young women masks the failure to allow more young men to participate. Participation among men stands at only 38 per cent.—just 1 per cent. higher than a decade ago. That is all the difference that the Government have made, despite all their rhetoric and spin. Under a consistent measure, the proportion of entrants overall has hardly increased over the decade. And even though the Government have spent more than £2 billion a year on programmes to widen participation—and we heard the Minister wax lyrical about them again earlier—the participation rate by working-class students has hardly improved since 1995. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) memorably put it, so much for so little. As though that were not bad enough, the improvement rate for working-class participation has actually declined. In the previous decade, participation by working-class students grew at a faster rate, according to the Government's own figures—[Interruption.] The Minister makes an intervention from a sedentary position with a degree of complacency that I think inappropriate, given the subject that we are debating. However, he will know that the latest statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that the number of undergraduates from lower socioeconomic groups is falling. In all our key competitors, vocational education and training provide an alternative route to higher-level skills, as my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) said. Here, however, the number of people taking level 3—that is, technician-level—apprenticeships has fallen. At the beginning of the decade, 84,600 people started an advanced-level apprenticeship, but last year that number was 81,400.