Universities will be key to levelling up Britain

I was the first person in my family to have the chance to go to university and it transformed my life.

I remember the moment many years ago when, as an 18 year old, I found out I’d got the A level grades I needed to go to study Economics at the University of Southampton. I was in Devon on holiday with my family and had to use a pay telephone box (I’m that old) to ring through to a friend who’d picked up my results for me from the local sixth form college I went to, Thomas Rotherham College. When I realised I’d get to do the degree I’d dreamed of I screamed with delight so loudly, my parents could hear me right down the street. It was because I knew how precious getting that opportunity was going to be for having the sort of future ahead of me that I wanted.

Going to university was more than just getting a degree for me. I met a wider range of people than I’d ever done before, including those rarest of characters, that I’d only ever heard of before - young people that had been to private school. I was to meet even more of them once I got into politics. But beyond that, going to university not only helped me grow up, but also gave me a real confidence that I could really make something of my life ahead.

At a time when opportunities on the ground for our young people are going to be at their scarcest for many years, the role that Higher Education can play has never been more important. I left university in 1991, another time when graduate opportunities were thin on the ground. It’s important that Ministers work directly with employers to protect as many of the graduate opportunities as is possible, alongside work on apprenticeships.

More broadly, a levelled up Britain will need levelled up universities and this must be the overriding objective and lens through which the Government looks at all its higher education policy.

Quite simply the question must be what is the role that each university plays in levelling up Britain, and is that role as ambitious as it could be? It means a real focus on learning from the work of those institutions that are the anchor universities in their local regions - universities such as Staffordshire, Lincoln and Middlesex, who are working with us on the Social Mobility Pledge, and who are acting as catalysts for bringing higher education and opportunity onto the doorstep. These are the universities that are the difference between young people - and mature students - being able to take their learning to the next level or not. Without them, young people risk being left less educated and less skilled and as a consequence achieving less of their potential. Britain cannot afford to waste this talent. If we’re to use it, it means investing in its development, but that can’t happen without the work of these institutions in allowing that possibility in the first place.

A Government lens on levelling up universities means properly recognising the significant value created by those higher education institutions that most effectively reach out beyond the more usual talent pool of students who are ready and able to take a degree. It means enabling those who might have all the potential but find it harder, to nevertheless have the chance to accomplish a degree that can be a stepping stone to a better future, as it was for me. I was lucky that I had parents who supported my dream to go to university, but not every young person is so fortunate and they have to be able to find the support from other places.