People are put off engineering because you actually have to knuckle down and do some work.
It’s not so simple. The biggest problem with engineering is that kids lose interest in the necessary subject areas, before they really find out what they’re for. Intermediate maths at high school is, basically, dull as **** and generally pretty unapplied too. So kids lose interest and both underperform, and choose not to progress, and engineering closes as a (straightforward *) option. It’s a pretty vicious combination, maths is both hard to inspire people with, and yet completely essential for some areas of further study.
Course, it’s possible to return to maths after losing interest, but the UK mostly lays out simple paths to uni and anything that takes kids off that is a harder sell.
This, incidentally, is one of these things where the problem’s really obvious but nobody really knows what the solution is.
(* there’s plenty of ways to get back into it, if you want- but the UK in general puts too much focus on the simple school-uni progression, and routes outside that are both poorly understood, and often stigmatised. “What are you doing at uni” “Actually I’m doing a HND…” “Couldn’t get into uni, dur”)