Rishi Sunak has pledged to phase out university degrees that do not improve students’ “earning potential”, create a Russell Group of world-class technical institutes and introduce a British Baccalaureate that would prevent 16-year-olds from leaving mathematics and English.
The Tory leadership hopeful said his plans to reform post-16 education marked “a significant step towards parity of esteem between vocational and academic education”.
If he becomes the next prime minister, Sunak would strengthen networks of technical institutions and their links with industry, as well as give them powers to award degrees, his campaign said.
The former chancellor would rate university degrees through their dropout rates, the number of post-graduate jobs and salary thresholds, with the exceptions of nursing and other courses of high social value.
In an apparent bid to appeal to the right, Sunak’s campaign said it would also fast-track the Higher Education (Freedom of Expression) Bill, which is in the House of Lords.
The government has argued the bill is needed to tackle growing intolerance at universities, but opponents have said it aims to address a problem that doesn’t exist and could protect hate speech.
Sunak also promised to improve professional development for teachers, commit to plans to open 75 new free schools announced by the government in June and give schools a two-year “responsibility holiday” after accepting schools low performance
It would also work to expand the use of artificial intelligence and digital technology in classrooms and to reduce the workload of teachers.
Sunak said: “A good education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet when it comes to improving people’s lives.
“These proposals represent an important step towards parity of esteem between professional and academic training. And they will take a tougher approach to college degrees that will put students in debt, without improving their earning potential.
“I will also take bold, practical steps to build on the successful Conservative education reforms of the past decade, harnessing technology and improving the quality of teaching in low-performing areas.
“Every child deserves a world-class education and if I become prime minister I will make it my mission from day one to make sure that’s what they get.”
The former chancellor would also create a new British high school that would require pupils to continue studying core subjects such as maths and English until they leave school at 18.
In an interview with the Times, he criticized the “too narrow specialisation” of the current curriculum, which he said fails to prepare young people for the “economy of tomorrow”.
“We are almost unique in the Western world, for an advanced economy and all high-performing education systems, in allowing people to drop out of maths and stop studying their mother tongue at 16,” he told the paper.
“In Germany, France, Asia, young people are studying maths until they’re 18, and the way a modern economy works, I think it’s going to hold us back if our young people don’t have those skills.”
After private school at Winchester College, where he was headmaster, and degrees in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, Sunak did an MBA at Stanford University in California.
Her Tory leadership rival, Liz Truss, has unveiled herself as “first education minister” with a plan to replace failing academies with new free schools, and the promise that pupils with the best A-level grades would get an automatic invitation to an interview at Oxford or Cambridge, which has raised questions about whether the academic year calendar should be changed.