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Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that the government has taken action to help universities, but that there is more to do, reports the PA news agency.

Asked about universities’ financial struggles, Phillipson told Times Radio:

I’ve made it a priority to put our universities on a more sustainable footing.

The action that we’ve taken in turning around the regulator, the Office for Students, [has] much more of a focus on universities’ financial health, but also the difficult but necessary decision that we took quite early on as a government to increase tuition fees to make sure that universities have a more stable funding stream into the future.

It is also fair to say that some institutions, their business model has allowed them to become too dependent on international students, and therefore too open to any fluctuations that may happen around that.

I’ll just start by saying that this is a really exciting day for young people. They’ve worked really hard. They’ve had brilliant support from their teachers and parents. It’s a day for celebration for our young people and there are lots of great routes out there.

University is one of them, but for young people who are considering other routes there are apprenticeships and plenty of other opportunities available too, and lots of advice available if you haven’t quite got what you needed, through Ucas and clearing, and also through the National Career Service.

I think it’s a matter of personal choice.

I do think it’s a good thing that more young people are studying subjects like maths. There are often great roots into careers. The same is, of course, true of subjects like languages, and that was my personal passion.