Speech by: David Lammy MP
Venue: Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, London

Good afternoon everyone.

It may sound odd for someone like me, whose degree is in Law and who went on to become a barrister, to say this, but I strongly believe that university education has to be about far more than simply preparing people for a given job.

It must be about preparing people for life and for work, which forms such a big part of most people’s adult lives. That means, among other things, giving them the tools they’ll need not just to make the most of the job they’ll get at 21 or 22, but tools that they can carry with them and develop as they get older and gain more experience. Tools which, in our modern world in which a job for life is a thing of the past, should serve them well in a whole variety of settings and help them to get on in each.

Of course, the recession has underlined more strongly than ever that universities are economically essential in a whole range of ways. And perhaps the most important way in which they matter to most employers is by producing the steady stream of skilled people they send into the workforce.

It’s equally obvious that employability skills should matter to graduates as well as employers. What graduates have learnt at university is often a large part of what they have to offer prospective employers when looking for that first job.

The CBI/UUK report Future Fit asked employers what universities should prioritise in relation to their students. More than three-quarters of them said the top priority should be to “improve their employability skills”.

And I want to make clear straight away that I fully recognise the importance of that function.

Nevertheless, it’s common to talk about “employability skills” with only a vague sense of what we mean. It’s too easy to interpret the phrase as an argument for a narrowing of the range of learning and experience that universities should offer down to the purely vocational.
But I would argue that it’s precisely the opposite.

For example, I know that some people think that the whole case for public funding of higher education is based on its ability to supply business with – in that patronising, too widely-used and altogether too depressing phrase – “oven-ready graduates”.

For my part, I think a good case could be made for revoking the charter of any university that saw itself as being just a production-line for clones in business suits.

In fact, I don’t think most young people these days – if my generation was Generation X, then I suppose they’re Generation Y – would stand for that. They’ve grown up to view expressing their individuality as a normal part of life, for example, through Facebook and Twitter, Flickr and Bebo. And, perhaps more than any other generation since the 1960s, they’ve grown up with a healthy distrust of the establishment that has got the world into crises of ecology, finance, politics and much else besides.

And in any case, even if it were possible, seeking to produce identikit employees does no one any favours.

Certainly not students, who risk finding themselves pigeonholed from the word go. And, in the long run, it doesn’t benefit businesses either. It may be tempting for bosses to demand of universities, as I know many do, graduates to slot straight into whichever jobs they have vacant and whichever corporate culture happens to prevail. And that may indeed help to make a business profitable today.

But what that approach won’t do is keep it profitable tomorrow. For example, it won’t encourage creative thinking and new ideas. It will stifle innovation and challenge. And it will fail to build the sense of entrepreneurship and ambition that could lead the current crop of recruits to go on to establish new businesses and create new jobs on their own account.

That’s why the more forward-looking graduate recruiters look not for job-ready skills, but for potential that can be developed through coaching and other forms of in-company training.

For their part, I think more and more universities are coming to realise the sheer breadth of the skills-set that their students may need to carry into the world of work if they are to achieve their full potential. To take just one example, the other week I had the great pleasure of visiting Aston University’s new Careers and Employability Centre, and was greatly encouraged by the variety of growth experiences that are being offered to students there. That already includes placements in industry for almost all.

I admit that I used to be sceptical when business leaders moaned about new graduates lacking soft skills. It seemed to me that it was asking a lot for a degree in biomechanics also to be a qualification in social interaction or individual initiative. But I’m a convert these days.

I’m not just talking about the need for generic, transferrable skills to be learned alongside subject- or job-specific ones – important though that is, but about the active rather than passive attitudes that universities should foster in their students. Like refusal to just accept that the way things have always been done is necessarily the best way to do them now. Like eagerness to question received wisdom rather than just take everything on trust. Like openness to a wide range of different points of view and a forensic approach to assessing them. Like an ability to see the wood as well as the trees.

Of course, the relevance of what students learn at university to their future lives and careers isn’t only of interest to their employers. Since the introduction of variable fees in 2005 especially, students have gradually become much less passive consumers of what their universities dish out. When I go around the country talking to them, I get the firm impression that they’re much more concerned than ever before about what the return on the education they’re helping to pay for will be.

That’s one reason why we have asked all higher education institutions to produce a statement on how they promote employability and how they plan to make access to information about employability outcomes to prospective students.

But there are still some difficult issues to address.

As a result of the extra money that this Government has put in since 1997, there are more people in higher education today than ever before. And not only that, there is a wider and more representative range people at university, too. More students from lower-income families and State schools. More from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. And more who are holding down a job while studying.

We make no apology for that. But as a result, graduates are not as rare as they were only a few years ago. It’s true that the number of high-skill jobs in our economy is growing, but at the same time, it’s becoming less true that a degree is necessarily a passport to a good job on its own.
The range of skills and attributes that make graduates sought-after by employers is wide and complex, as our Higher Ambitions strategy recognised last year.

And that isn’t just the result of the effects of the recession on the graduate job market.

I don’t want to minimise how tough times have been for some graduates. Although unemployment among young people is now thankfully falling and although the Association of Graduate Recruiters’ worst fears about the effect of the recession on graduate vacancies were not realised, we know that, towards the end of last year, graduate unemployment reached its highest level since 1996.

But if we look at a country like China, with its booming economy and the rapidly-growing graduate workforce that its two and a half thousand universities are producing, we still find a country in which one in five graduates is unemployed.

The lesson I take from that is that graduates who aspire to fulfil the promise of a better life that university is supposed to hold out need all the help they can get to make themselves more employable.

I expect that everyone here today knows that the Government’s response to the particular problems graduates have faced during the recession was to offer support that helps build employability skills and boost their CVs.

The creation of the Graduate Talent Pool and of no fewer than 24,000 graduate internships have been an important part of that. Plenty of people sneered at the idea when I first mentioned it a year ago, but it’s turned out to be one of the achievements in my current post of which I’m most proud.

The scheme that we have launched with Raleigh International to provide placements overseas, is equally exciting in terms of what it can do for graduates’ prospects, although on a much smaller scale.

The latest figures from the Association of Graduate Recruiters and elsewhere suggest things now beginning to look up in graduate labour market and those graduates that have taken advantage of opportunities to gain work experience will be well placed to compete.
But we must look to the future as well. Because the need to enrich graduate employability, and the benefits of doing so successfully for individuals, for employers and for our economy generally are not going to go away.

That’s why we are aiming to increase links that universities and graduates have with the sectors and the types of businesses with greatest potential for growth. We recently announced 8,500 internships with small businesses – in partnership with the Federation of Small Businesses – and in priority sectors where we know there will be strong demand in the future for people with graduate-level skills, like digital, low carbon, advanced manufacturing.

All young people deserve a chance to make the best of their individual talents and aptitudes, the more so if they’ve worked hard to gain a degree and contributed towards its cost themselves through tuition fees. To do that, they will need the sorts of skills that programmes like those I’ve just described can help foster. It used to be claimed, with some justification, that it was precisely those sorts of skills and the confidence to use them that a public school education and the Oxbridge tutorial system helped to develop in young people.

But in the 21st century that’s just not enough. And that’s why the Government, with its partners in the university and business sectors, is working to deliver on its commitment to offer a brighter, fairer future to our young people than previous generations could ever have expected. A future in which many more of them will have not only have the specialist knowledge that employers value, but also the skills necessary to make best use of that knowledge, for themselves, for their employers and ultimately for all of us.

I want to conclude with one final thought. I’ve argued today in favour of offering a truly liberal higher education backed up with other measures as a preparation for success in working life. But offering students new experiences and broader perspectives as well as new skills isn’t just necessary for a healthy business environment.

We desperately need the openness and engagement that these things encourage to maintain a healthy democracy, too, and to counteract the growing sense of democratic deficit that we see around us.

Because, if life as well as at work, the antidote to alienation and disinterest is willingness to get involved and to work for real change.

Thank you.