Responding to the launch of the Conservative Party’s ‘draft manifesto for schools’ today, Professor Steve Smith, President of Universities UK said: “We support the aspiration to encourage the brightest graduates to join the teaching profession. High quality teaching in schools can have a profound effect on whether a young person develops the skills and motivation to pursue science, maths and technology subjects at university. 

“However, we have grave concerns about the implications of any limitation of support to students from ‘good universities’.  We support high quality graduates going into teaching and those graduates will come from a wide range of universities. There are potentially serious knock-on effects from any such classification of universities and the Conservative Party must clarify the details of this part of David Cameron’s speech.”