Sir James Dyson has called for “a new wave of technical universities” to be opened in the UK in order to boost young people’s skills.
Dyson has endorsed a report by Policy Exchange demanding the opening of new engineering and construction qualifications in order to reduce the number of young people not in employment, education and training, known as ‘Neets’.
The report by the right-leaning think tank said several towns and cities lacked a university of their own, which could be ripe for the opening of new academic centres providing skills to young people.
The report aims to increase the number of graduates who have studied engineering or related subjects, with the proportion currently standing at less than 10 per cent. It argued that a new institution in Hereford, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) which opened in 2021, could lay the foundations for more universities to be built at a low cost.
Dyson said: “Britain doesn’t produce enough engineers.
“Without them, we can’t make things, invent new products and technologies – or compete against the rest of the world. Britain needs many more places like these. This report shows how to build them.”
Dyson’s new intervention
Lord David Blunkett, the Blair-era education secretary, also backed research calling for “employer-focused” education, saying that upskilling young people would be essential for small businesses and large infrastructure projects over the next 10 years.
“[The report] argues convincingly that a new wave of NMITE-type institutions could contribute to the government’s goal of ensuring we ‘value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap’, providing valuable opportunities to talented young people in cold-spot communities, for whom the system is not delivering.”
Dyson has previously weighed in on the youth unemployment crisis, with official data showing that there are nearly 1m Neets.
The inventor and billionaire has been a staunch critic of the Labour government, hitting out at the farming tax and saying the party had engaged in “revenge economics” by targeting wealthy people.
In a column for The Sun in June last year, Dyson said entrepreneurs were choosing not to set up businesses in the UK .
His latest intervention on technical education marks his ambition to influence the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, on public policy.
The report said that the strongest cases for new technical universities came in areas such as Hartlepool, Barnsley and Grimsby.
Authors at Policy Exchange propose a shorter and cheaper degree that involved students taking on less debt while employers such as Microsoft and BAE Systems could take more active roles in education, as at NMITE.