Britain needs a skills revolution.

Firstly, I want to congratulate all those who received their GCSE results last week.

Outwood Academy Kirkby is due to be rebuilt by 2029.

Outwood Academy Kirkby has received particularly excellent results this summer.

When I became Ashfield's MP in 2019, this school, then called Kirkby College, was a complete mess.

It was under special measures for many years, and quite frankly it was failing our young people.

I made it one of my top priorities to help raise standards there.

Since then, I secured funding from the Government to get this school rebuilt into a brand-new, state-of-the-art building, the works for which are progressing well.

Outwood Grange Academies Trust also took over the school in 2022 and has made fantastic progress transforming this school into one we can now be proud to have in Ashfield.

Thank you to all the staff, the students, the parents, the trust, and well done on such a brilliant set of GCSE results.

If you're a student and your results aren’t quite what you wanted, don’t forget that there are other options for you to advance your knowledge outside of university or college.

I wrote in my last column that whilst university has a role to play in the education system, it should not be seen as the default option for school-leavers.

Universities have become over-saturated.

For years, Governments have wasted money on useless degrees and ungrateful universities, with few prospects for young people after graduation.

This is despite those students leaving university with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, the vast majority of which is never repaid to taxpayers.

More than one million young people are now not in employment, education, or training, and 400,000 graduates are on universal credit.

In recent times, apprentices have had the raw end of the deal compared to university students. Successive governments have chosen to import cheap foreign labour at the expense of training up our own young people.

Britain needs a skills revolution.

A Reform UK Government will ban foreign students from accessing a taxpayer-funded loan to pay for their university studies and we will stop taxpayer-funded Mickey Mouse degrees like gender studies and critical race theory.

We will revitalise apprenticeships by offering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) a 30 per cent wage credit on the wages of apprentices they take on aged 16-18.

This reduces the burden of taking on an apprentice, saving the average SME over £4,000 a year per apprentice, and enabling more young people to develop skills that will benefit them and Britain.

We will also introduce the Apprenticeship Retention Bonus.

This bonus of £2,000 per worker will be paid to workers when they’ve completed two additional years of work at the firm they apprenticed with. This will reassure employers that the workers they invest in will stick around.

Our goal is to get to 600,000 apprenticeship starts per year by the end of the Parliament, delivering the skilled workforce that Britain needs.

This is the first in a series of policy announcements which will help a Reform UK Government achieve that goal.