As a south Yorkshire MP, I grudgingly welcome my hon. Friend’s freeport, but I am afraid I do not agree that education is the answer to everything. It is incredibly valuable, and it is frustrating that the education budget has stalled while the health budget has exploded over recent years. That is an issue. However, I do not think education is the answer to everything.
Great education for everybody is clearly a target, but there are more important foundational issues, such as family life. Some of the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), who is no longer in her place, has shown that those first two years of life are crucial in determining the outcomes of the rest of someone’s life. Academic education plays very little role in those first two years, although development does.
We should recognise the importance of education, but we certainly should not expect our schools to solve every social issue in our country, especially the mental health crisis. We must be realistic about what education spending alone can achieve and not expect Ministers, the Department or schools to be able to solve those deep, structural social issues, which we must address, but which are not the subject of this debate.
We must also look at our overall education budget and how it is weighted across different stages of a child’s life. According to the House of Commons Library, our higher education spend is £11.6 billion a year, but our early years spend is £1.6 billion a year. To me, that seems back to front. When is the best time to invest in a child’s life? It is at the beginning, in the early years, when those foundations are being laid. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow has said, 40% of the attainment gap that develops between the best-off and worst-off children develops by the age of two. I am not suggesting that we invert those two budgets, but we should certainly think about whether we should front-load our educational spend in the early years, when it could potentially have more impact.
We must also ask whether the higher education budget of £11.6 billion is money well spent. Some 50% of our young people now go to university, but five years after graduation 30% to 50% of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and 77% never earn enough to repay their student loans. I welcome the recent reforms to make higher education spending fairer to the taxpayer and to students, but we need to go further. The cost to the taxpayer is £11.6 billion—I think it is more when we add in the local authority contributions—but only half our young people see the benefit of that enormous taxpayer spending.
We should ask whether we should more fairly distribute that £11.6 billion or more. I welcome the move to spend more on technical and vocational education, but that is not a fraction of the expenditure on higher education. Imagine if the schools budget was spent on only half the population: it would be a deep inequality, but that is what is happening in our higher education budget.
Many of our universities are phenomenal, world-leading assets to this country, but we must ask whether the massive expansion we have seen in the sector in recent years is helpful to either individuals or society. I certainly cannot find any evidence of increased social mobility as a result of the massive increase in higher education spending. I welcome the direction the Government are moving in by raising the priority, the status and the budget of vocational and technical education, because that is important, but we must go further. If we are really going to level up education and the education budget, we must look at distributing the post-18 education spending far more fairly and equitably between academic, technical and vocational routes.