Re: They're using a flawed metric
"The list of Brit students taking STEM beyond a level is woefully bad. Despite maths being one of the more common a-levels to pick."
Well, where are the well paid, highly respected jobs that would encourage UK students to choose STEM degrees? Where's the role models for STEM? Dyson, perhaps, but the list of current, living, famous British scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians is not a long one. Meanwhile, the morons of the media sector are busy offering "Love Island" as role models, and social media busy promoting gobshite "influencers" as career models.
Then there's the jobs themselves. For maths, there's some well paid roles in banking and actuarial work (leeches!), but where's the industry or tech sector to use the rest of STEM? Working for the scumbag accountancy or consultancy shysters is well paid, but creates no wealth for the economy.
We could do a massive change in tuition fees, so that the dossers degrees* are far more costly to study than quality subjects, and the dosser's student loan repayments start at lower salaries. That would hopefully discourage the Mickey Mouse degrees, but wouldn't necessarily mean more students taking up quality subjects.
* management studies, sports science, journalism, history, marketing, media studies, criminology, politics, philosophy (and PPE), arts, farts, theatre, "design" etc etc. And arguably psychology, and computer science.