Does it make me sound really old if I say that I met a very impressive young man last week? Rather unusually he freely volunteers his age: but I suppose it is a good deal easier if you are just 19 and have been rated one of the country’s most promising future entrepreneurs.

His name is Tom Mursell and he runs a company called NotGoingToUni.co.uk. Doing his bit one evening to help out a friend who felt pressured into going to university, he started researching alternatives and realised that help is pretty hard to find if you’re making a conscious decision that university isn’t right for you. So, in classic entrepreneurial style, he turned his frustration into a business: www.NotGoingToUni.co.uk

Tom is at great pains to stress that he’s not ‘anti-uni’. He simply wants to provide a service to people for whom university isn’t right and, increasingly, a service for their parents too. As he freely acknowledges, although they’re proud of his success now, his parents, both graduates, took some convincing that ‘not going to uni’ was the right answer for their son.

And, of course, he provides a service for businesses too by promoting non-graduate routes. Tom knows that for all the attention which universities get, many businesses make a point of recruiting talented people who aren’t graduates, as apprentices for example, for many other roles.

When I heard Tom presenting, it was to a group of a dozen or so professionals who were interested in promoting enterprising attitudes within colleges of further education. I should think we were all graduates; two of us work for a university and a third used to. Yet we were all keen on Tom’s message and eager to encourage his efforts. Not because we are any more ‘anti-uni’ than he is, but because we recognise that a successful economy – and a successful society – knows that it must nurture variety. We can’t all be forced into the same mould.

So for me, it’s all part of my enthusiasm to support VQ Day, which I’ve commented on here before. And it’s another way of nudging us towards the fabled ‘parity of esteem’ by ensuring that we truly value the non-academically-trained side of our national life as much as we already value what graduates do.