INNER-CITY children in Manchester should be encouraged to aim for a university degree from the age of eight, according to a leading academic.

Prof Sir Martin Harris, a former chancellor at Manchester University, said aspirations should be raised in pupils while they are still at primary school.

In a major speech, Sir Martin said not enough children who went to school in Manchester were going on to university.

It meant companies in the city had to recruit people from elsewhere for the best-paid jobs.

Sir Martin is chairman of Knowledge Capital, a body which seeks to increase investment in the city and help residents to access the opportunities created by a booming city with an increasing demand for skills.

He was speaking at a town hall lecture organised by Manchester Council for Community Relations, which has worked for a better deal for the city's ethnic minorities for 40 years.

Sir Martin, who described the universities as part of an "arc of opportunity", said many new jobs in areas from the BBC to the airport would be created over the next decade.

It was vital to the Knowledge Capital project's success that universities reached out to black, Asian and poor white youngsters aged eight to 14, through projects like summer schools.

"South Manchester is the only place outside London and the south east where there are more graduates coming in than produced locally," he said.

"It is also very disturbing that in the same conurbations are communities, some very close to the arc of opportunity, wholly excluded from opportunities the knowledge economy is building.

"A key objective is to raise aspirations in primary schools so the re-created prosperity is good for all. It's about making young people feel university or college is a road they can go down, particularly if no-one in their family has had that experience."

Sir Martin said the root cause of lower university entrance for minorities was they were more likely to live in areas with "multiple deprivation".

It was essential that further education colleges like Mancat, where access courses had helped many minority students get to university, were well-funded, and that communities were helped through outreach projects and entrepreneurship support.