Labouring under a misapprehension

Something is not quite right at Labour's 2026 conference. It's a subtle wrongness, like the feeling you get when you step on to a stopped escalator. Something in reality is not quite in the right place. It takes me a while to work it out, but eventually I hit it: universities have ceased to exist.

At first, I think it is merely that every single education fringe event is about NEETs or apprenticeships, or NEETs and apprenticeships, or NEETs but with a lengthy comment-not-a-question about apprenticeships. But I slowly realise it is more than that: political power-brokers and senior policy mavens – from the Labour Party, the trade union movement, local government and more – on these panels talk about "anchor institutions" and "educators", "schools and colleges and training providers", but the word "universities" never passes their lips.

The Minister for Skills (who is very explicitly not the minister for universities, or even for higher education) does not say the word, or refer to them more than very obliquely. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gives a rousing speech on youth unemployment and industrialisation without talking about any education at all. The Secretary of State for Education's published speech has one mention, but she clearly thinks she got away with it (perhaps, like the name of some terrible Lovecraftian god, the word can be written but not spoken aloud?)

(In fairness, I should note that there are people who are talking about universities – it's just that they mostly all work for universities, and what they're talking about is how little anyone else seems to want to talk about universities.)

Meanwhile, the NEET issue absolutely dominates conference: every other room is talking about it, and anywhere Alan Milburn – author of the currently-available interim review of the topic, as well as its hotly-anticipated sequel, the actual report – goes, crowds follow him, like a lounge-suited messiah. When Milburn speaks, you could power a city off the kinetic energy released by all the nods in the room.

Of course, it is good that the current party of government has clocked that Britain is sleepwalking into an intergenerational catastrophe where the economic woes of the nation are being visited on age groups entirely disproportionately. But it is extremely odd to be in the business of complaining about lack of access to post-compulsory education and to not feel that universities should be a central plank of that discussion.

In fact, it is even odder than that. Panel speakers (rightly) bewail the disastrous consequences of un-stewarded deindustrialisation for large swathes of the country, including generational economic inactivity and growing support for the Far Right, without considering what might happen if universities, frequently the largest employers in their localities, continue to experience demonstrable financial precarity which their desperate downsizing attempts will not solve. Or (again, rightly) protest the profound consequences of loss of community cultural and social assets without noting how many of these are or have been universities'.

To raise a cri de cœur about young people going without education, employment or training, and never once look to the largest providers of education and training in the country, feels distinctly odd. The instinct to intervene earlier to avert young adult joblessness is strong, and possibly worthy – the Tory ending of Sure Start is (once more, entirely rightly) denounced by everyone here – but for those currently N, some EET must exist to receive young people, and jobs for young people with poor prior experience of education are expensive to provide (and let us remember that apprenticeships are, fundamentally, jobs with training attached).

Assertions that there is a swathe of young people who do not want or need "academic" education raise questions that I will return to another time, but even if we assume it is true, there are dozens of universities in England with unimpeachable track records on delivering vocationally focused education with strong work outcomes. Even the most ivory of towers are large local employers, often with a thriving spin-out culture. HE is the fifth largest export industry in the country. Its specialist provision provides training to our professions and world-renowned creative sector. Even if you think universities are not perfect – and having regulated them, I've a list as long as King Kong's arm of things I think they get wrong or could do better – they surely deserve a place in the thinking and rhetoric of our political masters? Alan Milburn might like to ask the Chancellor of Lancaster University about the issue – one Alan Milburn.

As to why universities are being sent to Coventry, it is hard to be sure. It may be the polling – there is evidence of growing scepticism, especially from less privileged communities, of the value of higher education. It may be the culture wars – a strand within Labour has reified what they think working people want into a hostility to several key pillars of social democracy, including welfare provision, openness to immigration, and yes, higher education. But the most likely answer is, frankly, that it all feels too difficult to deal with – forty years of centring the English HE system on student choice facilitated by government-backed loans has created a structurally baffling system in which everyone feels disempowered and financially precarious. Looking to apprenticeships or other vocational qualifications – whose standards are set by government agencies and whose costs are determined by a government department – clearly feels more manageable.

I can see the appeal, but having sat through multiple panels talking about it, I have to tell policymakers that the consensus on apprenticeships, and indeed other forms of vocational education, is based on very shaky ground, because everyone praising them has a different take on what they should do and how. Apprenticeships have achieved great popularity, including with the public, in large part because they have little settled definition – like the biggest icons of modern pop cultural stardom, they thrive because people can project their own desires on to them. This is not to say that apprenticeships aren't good and shouldn't be part of the future of education, but their ambiguity is, like the fact that they're free and you get paid for doing them, not incidental to their popularity.

Government needs to realise that memory-holing the university sector and its issues may reduce awkward questions right now, but no strategy for NEETs, let alone broader prosperity in every postcode, is happening without it.