Graduate Jobs

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

First, I pay tribute to the work that the noble Lord has done in this important area of technical education, working with employers and looking at how we teach our young people. I am grateful to him, and I am sure the whole House is, for his track record in that area. Secondly, he does not need to persuade us, which is the good news. The Prime Minister has recently made a new ambition for two-thirds of young people not just to go to university but to go to university or to take up one of these gold-standard apprenticeships. That includes targeting at least 10% of young people to go into level 4 or level 5 study. We know that getting people into the right areas with the right skills means they are much more likely to get jobs. Most graduates get jobs, but so do people who come through good apprenticeships and significant numbers end up staying on with the employers who hired them—the noble Lord knows all of this, but I am telling the House. Our job as government is to recognise that there are challenges coming down the track. We need to be the country which sees the opportunities, skills up our young people to take them up, encourages and supports employers to train them correctly, works with those who are doing the teaching and gets growth in the areas that drive jobs. We are going after all of those.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, the brutal truth is that the number of graduates in the UK has almost doubled over the last 20 years, far outstripping the supply of graduate jobs, and that was before the decline in the last five years. This gross mismatch in supply and demand has resulted in a mountain of student debt—£270 billion at the last count—much of which will never be repaid. Does the Minister accept that this is a raw deal not just for students but also for taxpayers, and that our universities need fundamental reform, particularly in the area of funding, to face up to economic reality?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, one thing I want to say to any students or graduates out there is that the evidence shows that graduates are more likely to be in work, to be in higher-skilled work and to earn more. Graduates continue to experience higher lifetime earnings, and they are nearly three times as likely to be in high-skilled employment than non-graduates. Having said that, the most important thing is that young people get appropriate advice to choose the forms of study that suit them. This is not a message to say that people should leave school and go straight into work. We are increasingly going into an era when employers will need skills, especially in a world where AI could automate some activities but it could also augment others. We need people to have the skills, so I am with him about the need to get the right people going into the right kind of education and training. On the question of HE funding, the HE sector clearly needs a secure financial footing to face into the challenges coming down the track. We have therefore acted to increase tuition-fee caps for all HE providers in line with forecast inflation, but future fee uplifts will be conditional on those providers achieving a higher-quality threshold through the Office for Students.