Steph McGovern

It was all about you have got to come out with all this knowledge-based curriculum.

And you were a failure if you didn't come out with that.

So therefore, you've got this cohort of young people who feel like they don't have any skills because no one's valued any vocational training they've done.

There's this obsession with getting your GCSE in English and maths.

And obviously we need literacy and numeracy, but does it have to be this rigorous knowledge-based curriculum that gets them there?

And that's why we've got all these young people who are just disengaged because they've been told they're not smart.

And yet they probably are.

They can probably analyse risk better than any of us because they've had to survive that way.

Or they've probably had to talk themselves out of situations because their lives are tough.

And yet we don't ever tell them they're skilled.

Is that what the workplace needs, though?

Because AI is going to be able to do all that for us.

We need to be able to communicate with each other when...

They are essential skills for everyone, though.

It's not 50% need practical skills and 50% need academic.

Everyone needs these skills because you're also getting loads of people coming out of uni that aren't work ready.

So it's not one group is this and one group is that.

It's everyone needs them.

And the curriculum isn't doing that at the moment.

On that point, though, because you said this right at the start about, you know, all the different geopolitics and pandemics and everything else we had in that, you know, last 10, 20 years.