How to save Grimsby (among other towns)

Grimsby, where I grew up, is a town built on fishing, food manufacturing, and offshore engineering. Roughly one in six work in industry, twice the national rate. Yet fewer than three in ten adults hold a qualification above A level, and there is nowhere in the town to earn one. The same is true of Hartlepool, Barnsley, Scunthorpe, Blackpool, and Burnley.

Across England, 57 towns and cities of more than 60,000 people have no higher-level provision of their own. They are home to 5.5 million people, one in ten of the country, and the industry that needs skilled technicians is already there. The route to becoming one is not.

That is the starting point of “Engineered for Success” — a Policy Exchange report I have co-authored, published today with the backing of Sir James Dyson and Lord Blunkett. The answer is not to drop another conventional university into each of these towns. We have spent two decades expanding exactly that model.

Close to a million 16 to 24 year olds are not in education, employment, or training, and 13 per cent of them hold a higher education qualification. Employers report more than 250,000 vacancies they cannot fill for want of skills. Just 9 per cent of British graduates study engineering, manufacturing, or construction, against 25 per cent in Germany and 33 per cent in China. Alan Milburn’s interim report put it well: the system “produces qualifications but does not guarantee transitions”. Fee caps have too often rewarded cheaper, high-volume, lecture-based courses over expensive, employer-facing technical ones, and institutions have responded rationally.

What England lacks is the distinct higher technical tier that other countries treasure. Technical institutions account for 57 per cent of higher education students in the Netherlands, 51 per cent in Finland, and 40 per cent in Germany. In England the nearest equivalent, Levels 4 and 5, accounts for around 7 per cent, and enrolments fell by 63 per cent between 2009 and 2017. The 2017 Higher Education and Research Act promised a wave of innovative new providers. What arrived was barely a trickle.

So we went to the one place where the trickle happened. The New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering in Hereford opened in 2021 in a county where barely one in eight pupils on free school meals progresses beyond school. NMITE is not a university in the familiar sense. It teaches engineering through a nine-to-five working week, block-taught modules, and assessment by real projects rather than exam halls. Its bachelor’s degree takes two years and its integrated master’s three, so a graduate leaves with around £12,000 less debt than a conventional MEng student and starts earning a year earlier. The curriculum was co-designed with more than 80 employers, including BAE Systems and Balfour Beatty, and over half of graduates with a recorded destination were hired by firms that helped write their modules.

Fifty-eight per cent of NMITE students arrived without an A level in maths, yet seven of eight statistical tests found no significant difference in their results.

Getting there was neither quick nor cheap. NMITE absorbed £23 million and the best part of a decade before enrolling a single student, in a system with no framework for new entrants. Our report proposes a £50 million seed fund to back up to ten NMITE-type institutions in cold spots, matched by Mayors, college groups, or private consortia, with Mayors given the powers to co-invest and underwrite early cohorts. We also propose an expedited Office for Students route with a clear path to degree-awarding powers, and higher funding for subjects that are expensive to teach.

Engineering attracts £1,737 per student, a seventh of what clinical medicine receives.

Two further changes matter as much as any new building. First, the apprenticeship provider register should be fully reopened and the “gap in provision” test scrapped. Requiring a new provider to prove that nobody else could possibly do the job is a recipe for incumbency, not quality.

A government that talks of valuing the hard hat as much as the graduation cap should build the places where the hard hats are trained

Second, do not forget the colleges. Further education colleges deliver around half of all Level 4 and 5 provision in England and are the pipeline on which institutions like NMITE depend. Yet unlike schools and academies they cannot reclaim VAT, an anomaly the Association of Colleges puts at around £210 million a year. The Government has so far declined a Select Committee recommendation to fix it. With a Budget weeks away, it should think again. It is the cheapest and fastest lever available to put technical capacity where the NEET crisis actually is.

None of this is radical; the Netherlands and Germany do it already. A government that talks of valuing the hard hat as much as the graduation cap should build the places where the hard hats are trained. Grimsby is waiting.