Spoon-fed teenagers are trapped in a maze of qualifications and should be given £13,000 to spend on the education of their choice, a think tank says today.

Reform lambasts the Government for the complex panoply of quangos and unnecessary bureaucracy in education, and its “bogus” attempts to create equality between qualifications of varying worth.

Its report, The Mobile Economy, says: “If Britain’s productivity was dictated by its number of skills bodies, it would be the world leader.

“There are at least four Government departments involved [in education] together with 29 quangos and numerous initiatives and plans. The result is an unwieldly education maze.

“If individuals bore more of the cost of training, they would take greater care over the content of their courses.”

Reform claims that Britain’s students are often poorly advised, and fewer study courses leading to well-paid jobs than those in other Western countries. Students, colleges and employers have become used to being spoon-fed rather than self-motivated, it claims.

As a solution it suggests a “radical acceleration” of the market-led system that is already emerging, with the cap lifted on tuition fees charged by universities. More qualifications accredited by employers, such as the “McDegree”, should be introduced.

This would result, the report says, in Britain providing world-leading professional qualifications and exporting a higher level of education globally.

Money and responsibility would be placed in the hands of students, who would be given an education budget to spend on the apprenticeship or course of their choice.

This reflects moves in social care to give personal budgets to people, to commission their own services.

The report adds: “Individuals would enjoy the same level of information about education and training as restaurant goers or car purchasers.

“Most importantly, the best education and training opportunities would no longer be monopolised by people from advantaged backgrounds.”

Students often make the wrong educational choices, the report’s authors say. “In vocational education, many people study low-level qualifications that have little or no wage return.

“Students from the lowest socio-economic group are less well equipped to make good decisions about their education.”

The report says the Government should abandon the “arbitrary target” of getting 50 per cent of young people into higher education.

It should also scrap its “large and complex web of agencies,” which result in the constant creation of new initiatives.

Such programmes include Train To Gain, which acts as a broker between companies and colleges to organise education for employees.

“Failure to acknowledge the prominent role of firms in delivering skills training has resulted in government paying for training that would have taken place anyway,” the report says.

It criticises the limit on student numbers imposed on universities, saying it “places institutions in a comfort zone in which they don’t have to think entrepreneurially” and “provides an artifical boost for popular and sometimes more expensive courses”.

And it claims that successive governments have tried to create a “parity of esteem” for vocational qualifications which has been counterproductive and led to lower status, rather than allowing them to find their own value in the employment market.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union said: “Allowing a market to drive the cost of post-16 education would create a huge gulf between the have and have-nots where the wealthy pick and choose their courses and leave everyone else to scramble around for what they can afford.”

And Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “Against the current economic backdrop, it would be extremely foolish to trust the provision of any major public service entirely to the market.

“Taken together, these proposals would put in jeopardy the long-term security of thousands of vital courses serving our most deprived communities.”

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