WE’VE had record A Level results again and those who say we’re dumbing down have been ritually lambasted by proud parents and the teaching profession.

Like many parents, I am this week on tenterhooks awaiting GCSE results, hoping my child’s sixth form aspirations will be fulfilled.

Complaints about standards and exam difficulty rather miss the point. The priority for schools and colleges must be to re-focus on what employers need and expect in the workplace and make plain its relevance to students.

The education establishment tends to be sniffy about a skills-based approach, but the emerging economies snapping at our heels understand it very well.

The English Baccalaureate holds much promise in focusing on core disciplines which employers say are too often missing when, supposedly educated, youngsters leave school.

Call me a heretic but it would be a foolish employer who assumed a degree was the culmination of three years of hard slog and academic rigour, or that the possessor was any more skilled or bright than a contemporary who left school with the same grades.

In general, if you have to pay for something you value it, make the most of it and make your choices very carefully. So there should be little difficulty with asking students to pay for higher education. Especially so since, if they choose their course carefully, they are likely to earn more over their lifetimes than the school leaver who went straight into paid employment.

To what extent then should we be expecting non-graduates to subsidise graduates?

I am confident universities will emerge as better resourced institutions with an imaginative new range of offerings shaped around the needs of students and their future employers.

Skilling up our workforce is key to the growth vital to deliver benefits such as advanced healthcare which we all anticipate but, at the moment will, as a nation, struggle to afford.