Steph McGovern

And that's where I went to school and saw a lot of, you know, young people who, you know, didn't have the structure at home to be able to do well at school academically.

But what...

What did help and, you know, I talk about this a lot because it's key to why I've done well.

You know, I've gone defied the odds to do as well as I have.

And it's because it's not it's not because I'm special.

It's because the school really recognised that we did have skills.

They might not be.

purely academic but they are skills that are useful in the workplace like people who don't have structure at home often are quite good at talking themselves out of situations so that's a really good communication skill or for example really good at assessing risk because they have to deal with it in a you know a

challenging way every day and again being able to assess risk is a great skill but and it was different for me because we were told what skills were and what were useful or employers and we did have that link with with industry really early on because we were sponsored by industry and we had all that but the worry now is it it's not like that in middlesbrough anymore you know

Ours was a bit of a special school, but also now when I'm back there and work with lots of the young people there, they don't see themselves as having any skills.

And that point you make about that disengagement, they just think, oh, it's not for me.

If you say to them, well, what are you good at?

They're like, oh, I'm not good at maths.

I'm not good at geography.

I'm not good at... And you're like, no, no, no, but what...

But they're not jobs.

You've got all these other things.

And as you point out with education, it assesses them pretty much based on the academics.

And that's where you lose that engagement because then people feel worthless.

And then you can understand why it leads to a public health crisis.