Starmer announces new educational target to include apprenticeships

The prime minister has abandoned a Blair-era ambition to get 50% of young people to university and committed to a target that is more inclusive of vocational careers.

In his speech at this year’s Labour party conference in Liverpool, Keir Starmer compared his experience of going to a university from a working-class background with his father’s experience as a toolmaker.

“He always felt disrespected, my dad, undervalued by the nation because he worked with his hands,” Starmer told attendees.

“What I want is a Britain where people are treated with the dignity that they deserve for making different choices.”

The prime minister said that, while he would never “denigrate the aspiration to go to university”, the ambition that half of children should go down this route, introduced by the New Labour government of the 2000s, was not “right for our times”.

Instead, he said that the 50% target would be replaced “with a new ambition that two-thirds of our children should go either to university or take a gold-standard apprenticeship”.

Much of the rest of the prime minister’s speech was concerned with a criticism of Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage, describing him as a “snake oil merchant” and outlining a “defining choice” between national renewal or decline.

Starmer also used his speech to “thank every business in our country”, confessing that the government had “asked a lot at the last Budget”, which contained significant tax rises on national insurance.

“I do think, in the long run, that fixing our public finances, investing in new infrastructure, helping our public services off their knees, that will be better for growth,” he said.