You're nothing without a degree? I disagree.

The school system these days is mono-focused purely on academic excellence. Go to school, get good grades, go to college, go to Uni, get a degree. That is the only option presented.

It is not an option that suits everyone though, and there is a huge area of the populace who have been left high and dry, treated like a lower class of being, because their skills do not tend towards the academic.

I'm one of the last people to tell you that a good, rounded education is a bad thing. A well-rounded education is essential if we're ever going to stop the knee-jerk reactionism of bigotry, which is supported by the twin pillars of hatred and ignorance. When you have been exposed to a good, well-rounded education, the supporting pillars of bigotry are less able to form - many hate what they do not understand, with better understanding there is less hate.

So, given that, why am I on this rant against the almighty degree? Well, I'm not, actually. What I'm saying is there should be other avenues open for people who are wanting something different. It's difficult in the extreme to find a place that will offer training in the trades. Not everyone is an academic, but there is virtually no support in schools for those who are the hands-on types - the electricians, the plumbers, the mechanics, the chippies and brickies, the craftspeople and the artisans, the machinists and the chefs, among many others.

These people may not be the best ones to write you a dissertation on how the fall of the Roman Empire affected the development of the modern world, but they are absolutely essential to your everyday life. Without them, there would be no new houses, the cars would fail, services would become impossible to maintain.

And yet, they are second class citizens in todays society. The blue collar worker is seen as something so much less than the white collar worker. We bitch and moan at the huge cost of fixing our cars, yet accept that a lawyer can earn more in one sitting than that mechanic did all week. We look down on the trades, despite the fact that most of the workforce are not white collar workers.

In schools this is never more evident than at exam time. Children are pushed and pushed to get ever better results in topics that are of little to no value in the workforce, while skills are begrudgingly provided at a minimal level. Why can a child who has an aptitude for mechanics not have an education that furthers this? Academic topics are important, to be sure, and we all need a good grounding in them, but forcing someone with no aptitude to compete against other children in a field they have no interest in does nothing for them.

I believe it is time for a new type of high school. Time for us to recognise that not every child is going to be helped by getting a degree in a topic they will most likely never use and which simply gives them a debt to carry. Time to recognise that skills are just as important to our children as exams. Give them experience in fields that will have direct impact on the careers they choose. Alongside the English teacher and the Maths teacher, let there be the trades teachers - the electricians, the plumbers, the mechanics. Let the children know that this is just as valid a choice for them as a degree and that the qualifications they can achieve are ones that will help them get real jobs in a marketplace overrun with graduates waving degrees that can't even get them work flipping burgers.

The trades are essential to our economy, it's about time we treated them like it.