303. Why making schools truly comprehensive is vital for our economy

So I'm here at Tegel Machinery. The new Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the hard hat is just as important as the graduation cap. This is music to our ears for too long people who do vocational training have not had parity of esteem with traditional academic qualifications. He wants to change that, but what are his chances and why is it so important? Support for this episode comes from Octopus Energy and the founder and CEO Greg Jackson with us now and I want to ask about oil prices. Obviously they're very high at the moment. What's your advice for a company worried about them? First of all, if you're used a lot of electricity, it may be possible to get electricity tariffs where you get charged less at certain times a day and a lot of businesses have been able to benefit by shifting their electricity consumption. They still use those much energy. They just pay less for it. Of course, things like heating space can be very expensive and finding ways to do that more efficiently by heating to maybe 18 degrees rather than 21 can make a very big difference. But of course, the real solution is that Britain needs to escape from this dependency on the global fossil fuel price and that means more electrification, disconnects our electricity price from the gas price and ultimately get more of our electricity from British resources. Nice one Greg. Thanks for explaining that. Right, we're going to go to the episode. Hello and welcome to the rest of the money with me Robert Preston. And with me, Steph McGuffin. So Andy Burnham has said that vocational and technical education should have equal status with the university route, the pure academic route, rather than being treated as the second best option. He wants to give pupils access to technical education from 14 and he wants to combine that classroom, learning with work experience, employ your projects and links to local jobs. Now, this is something Robert, you and I have been banging on for a long time about. I mean, we've had a lot of lip service paid to this over the years, but yet every year it's always the year-level results and the GCSE results in the news. Everyone's always talking about degrees and never really about things like BTECs or T-levels or NVQs or Cambridge technicals or all the other city and guilds, all the other different types of qualifications that you can get and yet there's millions of people who are doing them. They go on to do really important jobs for the economy and yet they have for a long time, Robert, never really had that status, that parity of esteem, have they? Yeah, I haven't and obviously it comes again against this backdrop of a crisis of employment for young people, more than a million people under young people under 24, not in education, employment or training. There's a real fear that if this government doesn't take really effective action to help these young people, that a generation will be lost. It's why we've got the Alan Milburn review, it's why there's a review of the curriculum, it is indeed why the Prime Minister has made one of his first pledges to significantly reform the education system to make it less focused on academic qualifications and to give people who have other kinds of skills, more of a chance to acquire those skills before they enter the workplace formally or before they're written off. And we're going to talk about whether or not what the Prime Minister is proposing is practical or indeed whether it's more than a few headlines at this stage. And we'll talk about that after we hear the absolutely fascinating interviews that you've been recording stuff. Yeah, so one of my big beasts I've been going on about this for years is the fact that we don't have any kind of day or moment to celebrate those people who do vocational training. And you know, we're talking about people in all the sectors that matter to us in engineering, construction, healthcare, AI, tech jobs, you know, just everything we need in life, health and social care. And so last week I was part of setting up this day to celebrate that vocational celebration day, it was an event we live streamed on YouTube with a charity I worked with called NG Skills Charity. So I went to Cornwall to do this and it was amazing because we were talking like there were hundreds of people there, I interview people all over the country, so many amazing young people doing really important stuff. And so what I want to do before we have a chat about whether, you know, why this is so important because it is it, this is about economics as much as it is about anything else. I just want you to have a listen to some of the people I met there and what they told me about what the issue is and why it matters so much. So here's what I found out from my trip to an advanced manufacturing business in Truro. So I'm here at TIGLE Machinery. It's a family run business and they make it for the agricultural industry so things like bill processes and they sell their stuff all around the world about half of their business is exports. One of the big customers is America, so one of the things I've got to deal with here is of course the trade tariffs. So there's so much going on for a business like this. One of the big issues and we've talked about this before on the podcast is skills and getting the right people through the door to be able to do all the jobs here, whether it's, you know, welding anything to do with the engineering side of things. There's so many different jobs here and it has been a problem for them here in Cornwall. So they have been really focused on apprentices over the last few years. They employ about 150 people here and now 20% of the workforce are apprentices and even on a Friday they'd let them run the factory so they've really invested a lot in them and obviously think they're brilliant too and I've got a few people I want to chat with about all of this including the manufacturing director Richard Berman who's alongside Nikki Story who's from the charity, the skills charity, ingenuity and then up in Coventry we've got Olivia who is an apprentice at Amazon. We're going to talk to her in a minute but Richard to tell me about what your kind of skills challenge has been here because this is a successful business isn't it? It is yeah very successful and currently we've got the biggest order but that we've ever had but with that comes the challenges of employing skill people in Cornwall. So as you just mentioned we've got sort of abundance of welders and CNC machinists but massively struggle to find skills machinists and welders in Cornwall. I mean several years ago data came out on just the welders that by 2027 40% of the UK's welders are due to retiree which is frightening especially for us. So to the five years ago we made a massive effort to look at apprentices I was an apprentice so extremely keen to get apprentices into the company and we put a huge amount of effort into getting apprentices into the business. And what was that like because you know we talked to a lot of different business leaders and people have different experiences of actually getting apprentices through the dark because there's so many parts to this aren't there it's yeah yeah finding the people who want to do it and then it's the funding the training everything else. What's it been like for you? So it's not being sort of an easy ride and I won't deny that so we sort of started off thinking that we would get apprentices come to us. Wasn't the case we've had to especially in the last 12-18 months we're doing a lot more with local schools, local colleges, China gets information out there that there are these fantastic jobs in engineering some really great and careers and they're out there just trying to make sure that just children in schools, even junior schools know what jobs are available in engineering. So where you've yeah huge amount of effort has gone into materials themselves, myself, apprentices of HR manager going around to schools colleges to join up interest in engineering. And it's obviously worked in terms of where you're out now and letting them run the police on a Friday. What's that tell how did that come about then? So we work a four day week on the production side so they're bulk production staff and do 39 hours in four days. So but the apprentices don't they can't they're not allowed to so they they do a five day week and Friday is either for them to do college work or to do career and with production work so in part to the factory like the CNC machine shop they we let them run it we just let them go for it they're fantastic we're so lucky to have such a group of fantastic apprentices that we've got and they do a great job doing it. So there is a real issue we've you know we've heard Andy Burnham talk about the valuing the hard hat as much as the graduation cap and everything else. What do you need from the government to help you? Like has the apprenticeship levy been part of you know you're planning and is that helped in anywhere? For me personally it's it's getting like I said a second ago it's it's getting that information out to junior schools secondary schools that there are these amazing opportunities and engineering and apprenticeships around the country. and you don't have to go to university to get fantastic jobs. As I said, I was an apprentice. I'm now sort of manufacturing director. So there's amazing jobs out there, but they just don't know. When I go to schools and colleges, they just don't understand what jobs are available. - I want to come back to some of that with Nikki, but first of all, I want to bring in an actual apprentice at this point, who's Olivia, Olivia Lynn, who is in Coventry, works for Amazon. Olivia, tell us a bit about what you're doing your apprenticeship in. - Well, I'm doing my apprenticeship in mechatronics. It's a level three advanced apprenticeship. That kind of looks like on a day-to-day basis for me, reactive maintenance, preventative maintenance, kind of thinking ahead about when things will break and trying to either put things in place to prevent that happening or engineering solutions, all that sort of thing. - Yeah, I'm not. - I'm not there. - And I can see the joy in your face as you're talking, Olivia, so tell me, for people who don't know then, like what that means in terms of how it connects to their Amazon delivery, which better you doing, are you in, one of these logistics centres, one of the big warehouses making sure all the parcels are moving around and everything else. - I'm in a customer fulfillment centre, and we mainly deal with the prime deliveries of slightly bigger items. So it's more like your TVs, your baby gates, the bigger bulkier items, and we're basically in charge of minimising the downtime of the conveyance systems by conducting preventative maintenance, 'cause all throughout the warehouse, these packages are going on conveyance, and there's many different automation systems that get the packages from on the rack in, where it's just the raw item that then gets picked, and then it weaves its way through the warehouse and goes up to the customer next day. - But Olivia, tell me about your background and your story of getting an apprenticeship, because it wasn't easy, was it in terms of, how you were perceived particularly by your teachers at school? - Yeah, exactly. Weirdly engineering was spoken about in school, and it did kind of sit there in the very back of my mind. I did, my dad was an engineer, my grandmother was an engineer, so I sort of saw that in real life, but dad was an engineer in a brewery, and specifically in the canning department, so he used to come home with stinking of beer and looking dirty, so that was not for me. My friends were set on medicine, I absolutely loved Grae's anatomy. That was the career that I wanted for myself. I wanted to be a surgeon in scrubs, and yeah, that was my dream, and all of my academic decisions were geared towards medicine. It was the biology, the chemistry, psychology, mainly because engineering interested me when it was kind of spoken about in school, but it wasn't really branded to be-- - No, it was one dimensional. It sounds like you were just given the one part of engineering and not the whole thing, yeah. So what changed? - So when my career in medicine kind of was halted at the crossroads between finishing my A levels and being accepted into med school, I'd done my A levels in COVID, and they were all based on predicted and summative assessments and stuff, and I'd missed out on my chemistry grade, so that automatically made me halt, made me have to rethink my steps, my route into either medicine or not, and I decided to take a gap here and go to Amazon, to earn some money to basically help me with whatever route I picked, and it was there that I got to speak with, real life people, I actually got to see what production looks like, what the real world of our industry looks like, and my favorite days became when the machinery would break down, even though it was irrelevant to me, I know. Even though it was irrelevant to me, I just loved how operations panic because where are the boxes going, how are they getting out the door? But then the engineers, they were cool, calm, collected, they kind of rushed to the scene, and they knew how to fix whatever problem it was, they were so relaxed, and then afterwards they could explain everything as to the symptoms, the treatment of it, and then put that in place, and then everything was up and running again, as if nothing had occurred. And I was like, "Oh, do you know what?" That actually kind of really resonates with me. It's almost like being a machine doctor, rather than a human doctor, maybe that could fill me in the same way, so then I found out about the Amazon apprenticeship, and that's how I am here now. - Yeah, so this is fascinating. So you got that insight, you saw the real world application of engineering and in a way that excited you. So then you decided to do an apprenticeship at Amazon, and then tell us what happened when you then saw your old teachers back at school. - So it was my brother's year 11 from, he's three years younger than me, and I was speaking with my teachers, my head teacher being the main person in the conversation, and they all asked me where I was, what I was doing, and I was explaining to them that I was at Amazon, and looking at doing an apprenticeship. I hadn't, I had secured it, but not 100% officially, so it was very up in the air, but I was explaining that these were my options and everything that I was looking at. And he pointed blank, his face dropped anyway, when I said I wasn't at university, when I said I was working at Amazon, his face dropped already, and then the first thing he said to me was, "Don't get stuck." And then the other thing that he said to me was, "Don't waste your academic talent." And I just can't believe that a head teacher has the audacity to say something like that for a start, but the drastic misconception is to what the people have meant for me as well, and how, a great career move that it was, and how drastically wrong it could have gone had I've really taken on board what he said. - Yeah, it's so shocking. It absolutely boils my blood when I, hey, stories like that, because everyone learns in different ways, there are so many different ways to have an amazing career, and that should be celebrated just as much as anyone who's gone to uni, because let's face it, you're working for one of the most valuable companies in the world. We always talk about it all the time and this podcast is being one of the magnifism seven. That's for reason. What do you want to say, change on that front Olivia, because we're having now, Andy Burnham's talking about, we need to give more value, there should be more push to vocational education from 14. Do you think that's the right thing? Is that enough? What do you want to see happen? - I was going to be a student that went to a Russell Group University. I also had on the table at the same time a nursing degree at King's College in London, so I could have gone down the university, bro. I could have been the Russell Group University student, and I think because the narrative has been ingrained for so long, it's not just parents and teachers that we kind of need to celebrate vocational roots with it's also the students themselves. - Amazing, Richard and Nikki, to hear Olivia talking there, but I could see your faces as she was saying, Nikki, the head teacher, Nikki's from the Charity and Charity Engineering, it's kind of your job to help support the supply chain, the whole sector, small businesses, big businesses, when it comes to key engineering jobs, isn't it? And how do you feel when you hear that? - It's just really disappointing that we're still coming across this when it comes to academics. We've been talking about this for years about why vocations are so important and why vocational qualifications are so important. They are part of what drives our economy, 90% of the UK companies are SMEs, and those skills that they learn through T-levels or apprenticeships and working directly within organizations, are key skills that we need as an economy in the UK. - When I started out in engineering 20 years ago, it was back then, it was, we need to get more women into it, engineering, we need to do all of these things, they're really key part of the economy. And here we are, I feel like there's been lots of verbal enthusiasm for however long, but no actual proper funding for FA colleges. And that whole point about the education systems not geared towards encouraging people into vocational training, but Nikki, you've done some research on the perception of it as well in society, about people who do the pure academic versus the vocational. What have you found? - So yeah, so we've done a vocational attitude survey and what's come out is parents and learners are really, really interested in vocational qualifications. You know, we know that over 90% in both of those areas, you know, really want to know more about it. So they've got three reasons. One of them is around earning while learning and not, you know, going into debt at university. One of them is around jobs in the local area and being able to go into jobs in the local area. The other ones around those specific skills because you'll learn some of those specific skills whilst you're in an apprenticeship in an SME rather than going to university and learning general skills. So what we find is that although they are really enthusiastic about it, it's then how do we then create those pathways through to the apprenticeships and the availability of what's there for them because they're not, it's not clear, it's fragmented, it's complex, it's not easy for SMEs to understand we're in it all the time and we don't, you know, understand all of it. So it's really important that we do that. What's really interesting being here in Cornwall is how they are trying to solve the needs problem. I should add by the way if you're listening to this wondering what the noises are in the background, we are in a live factory so this is people making stuff which they're selling all over the world so it's case stuff going on here and Richard smiling at me now because he's the manufacturing director here. But you know there is this kind of issue isn't there around people being competitive about skills and companies in competition with each other trying to get the best people and often that means supply chain or left behind because they're not the big brand businesses and what's interesting about Cornwall is the way that they've been trying to solve it with this kind of collaborative approach to skills and Richard I'd love you to tell me more about this because the number of needs in the region has been reducing because of this is there you know this is focus on actually let's get more young people into the jobs that are needed in this area and partnership with each other. Yeah yeah so Teales were part of the CMG Cornwall manufacturing group it's been fantastic so the CMG put on sort of events for sort of school levers or sort of even junior school level to get them in to look in and see what's available. There's no we're obviously teal some sales we're against people that are doing similar similar sort of procedures than we are well-denged CNC it doesn't matter we just want people to come in want we want apprentices yeah no one's precious where we're not sort of fighting each other we just want to get information out there to these these youngsters that there's some incredible opportunities out there. Yeah because it's like opening the boxes that probably these kids I'm sure there's people have driven past this business hundreds of times and not really know what's gone on and it's that open in the doors isn't it? It is yeah people and today with the event that we've had and you listen to people they say that crikey I didn't I didn't realise this place was here. Yeah it's gone on the day like I said where sort of people knew all your local businesses that's gone we we need to as a business we need to get out there we need to get our name and get the information out there. And I just want to ask as well Nikki about you know the skills is sore fragmented we've now got skills England we've got Alan Milburn who's just done this big report about needs we've had Andy Burnham's here when it pushed more people into vocational training we've got a skills minister in in Jackie Smith working across the DWP and in education and is it is it getting less fragmented and where does the apprenticeship levee sit in all of this because that's the other thing businesses more than it may about is it's so complicated it's not working where where are we at with things at the minute. So I think there's been that much come out from a reformers perspective that it's more complex at the minute than probably it was a while ago we've got a report that we're doing in the autumn where we're trying to get under the skin of the levee what it means to SMEs why they're finding it so difficult what we can do to help them because it's really important SMEs really want this to work they want the apprentices you know they they know the importance of getting the right people in so it's really it's going to be a key time for us as you say it's all over the place there's loads of people talking about it at the moment so it's going to be really key for us to understand the detail of that levee and what we can do to really help SMEs. So as things stand out it's still dead complicated. Yeah which when you're talking to a small business and they're trying to run the business day to day that is just makes it impossible so what do we need to see change on that front do you think? So I think you're right when we talk about you know talking to people younger so that there is more understanding of how they can get through to vocational qualifications and vocational roots we need to help SMEs understand how how it all works how the the systems and the frameworks work but we also need to listen to them so we do a snapshot survey every quarter where we ask SMEs how we can help them and we use that to lobby government so talk to you know all all of the right people in government to help us make the the difference for us in me. I think they are starting to listen so there is some other language. That's frustrating how many years anyway? We are many years in. Yeah it's like turning a juggernaut isn't it? So we've been talking about this years, us together have been talking about this for years but I feel like some of the language that they're starting to use now when you listen to them is the language that we've been talking for the last couple of years it's still not there we still need a lot of help with it but we are using the voices of SMEs to really make that difference. Richard I can see you roll your eyes there go on. I mean just for more experience we we brought everything back in house we we didn't use the colleges we did like I said when we first started on this journey a few years ago it just wasn't working like we just spoke about this the struggles out there there's not knowing how to do these things so we're fortunate enough to be big enough that we can do that we've got a HR department we've got people that can do that so we bought it all back in house smaller businesses don't have that. Yeah. Don't have those sort of sort of options to use so yeah I don't know I just I don't know if it is changing or not. Yeah I know that's the hard thing because we have a problem in this country without productivity and you know with growth you're talking about your order book being bigger than ever but you need the skills behind that to make it happen. Yeah and so I mean we're here you know part of the reason I'm here is we're doing this vocational celebration day you know one way to try and just show people that it isn't just all about a pure academic route you know we've talked a bit as well about getting more young people to know about the jobs out there but do you think I want to know if either of you agree with me do you think we need a bit of a revolution in schools do you think we need to start 100% ID personally. I agree and I think we've done the same if you always do what you always have done you always get what you've always got we need to really think about what's going to make a difference and it's not just from 14 it needs to start. Yeah yeah so Andy Burnham saying 14 push for vocational it starts much earlier than that also 14s are really where you're doing because it's you know you've going through all the hormone stuff you're only just picking your options if you're doing you know GC say all of this time it's the wrong time to suddenly be taken out of the school setting you're in and moved to another one isn't it needs to be much earlier than that I think in terms of presenting these options because you're decided quite early on whether you're academic or not aren't you yeah which I think it's wrong like we shouldn't to be silent when people like that but that is currently what happens and so I guess for for a note of optimism to end things on loving that you're out of books really healthy thank you so much yeah I bet you are but what what gives you hope Richard again me personally the apprentices that we've got I mean they're fantastic they I can't sort of speak how enough of them saw them early you've met them they're just an amazing group of apprentices and the Friday thing it works they run it and that just shows how good they really are so and we as a business and we just got to keep pushing that we've got to keep pushing yeah the fact that they're all these opportunities out there and what was that what was that alarm for then that's lunchtime is it well very others a good point to end this so there you go that gives you a flavor of everything I found out from my trip to Cornwall after the break Robert and I are just going to talk about what Andy Burnham actually wants to do here whether it's achievable and why it matters so much so we'll do that in a couple of minutes this episode is brought to you by Ascension now when you're advertising operations fall out of sync campaigns slow down insights get buried and opportunities get missed that's why Spotify and Ascension are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business the result less time spent on operations more time connecting brands with the Mormons and fandoms that matter most to learn more check out Ascension.com/Spotify-UK Welcome back to the rest is money with me Robert Piston and me Steph McGovan so Steph what did you decide having listened both to young people and you know adults teachers specialist in this space what did you decide the priorities for Burnham ought to be my biggest take home from talking to so many young people who have chosen the vocational route is that a lot of them started with the words I wasn't very good at school or I failed my GCSEs or you know I just you know didn't get on at school none of them were like oh school was great and this is the path I'd chosen so for me I feel like there's a cool core heart of people who were totally let down with the education system in terms of it not recognizing their skills and instead just telling them what they're not Grarad yn torref yn ddeft yn newydd yn greaeth mewn usem tasty Pey Forbyg a se St Xom plötzlich na pobl naog, gallw Mu tongueu hynben es wedi fehrau 43 o haforiau diolch yn shiftch wedi giledafio edraeth wrth y 실�ach neu inומio en ranog, sy'n troau wediethff'm a chiAS ffnodai cyn yn tr draws o, ym ffordd fel, Methynos amser yn y� Droret мир yw'r mynd ofgor myll; Llywch i'n dd UW di ond o lefy logai sydd ddat 43 Penti o gwstcaethau Ch moving yícios ni yn mynahor, nicanol bethogo, a'r gyd yn ffordd fel, a'r gyd yn ffordd fel, a'r gyd yn ffordd fel, a'r gyd yn ffordd fel, a'r gyd yn ffordd fel, selves off because so many young people don't know all the jobs out there. I learnt laws from these apprentices about all the different jobs they didn't know exist that they now do in dear to science, you know, like Olivia, you heard who works for Amazon. She never had any clue about the engineering jobs in Amazon. Why would she? So why would you sign all yourself off at such a young age? Wouldn't it be better to go, right, you're overarching subject is health and social care? That's what you've taken an interest in. But we're also going to make sure you know about AI and you know about communication and you know about, I don't know, dealing with tricky situations, all of these things. But yeah, as soon as you say that, loads of people start coming out going, you're watering down the education system, like it's really annoyed me that I've heard that because is doing vocational training, water down skills? I'm sorry, but I would much rather have an electrician who's done an apprenticeship than I would have someone who read about it in a book and managed to do a memory test on it. So that and that's the difficulty you're dealing with is society's view that pure academics is the only way to recognise skills and people get siloed so easily when they're young, who has a clue? I don't even know what our next career might be, Robert, we don't know it. AI might completely change what we do next. Who knows? So the but the key is we've got transferable skills? For me, the priorities are that you have to be resilient and you have to be adaptable. And there are some absolutely foundational skills that everybody needs. Some of them are the traditional ones, you know, literacy and numeracy are going to be as important, you know, in 50 years time as they are now. The ability to reason, the ability to work with teams, both of those are going to become way more important in an AI world. And so for me, what I would like to see, and there is a curriculum review going on, is what the focus should be on the foundational stuff. Some of it academic, but some of it actually just about social skills in many ways. As I say, team working, the ability to plan, the ability to actually think about in an economy that is changing faster than we've ever known, how to adapt your own skills to a new kind of world. And I'm not confident at the moment that the government, this review, is thinking as radically as that. But there's a second question there that I want to put to you, because this is something you do think about a lot. One of the things that Andy Burnham has said, and this actually does make me anxious, so I want to know what you think. He has said that he wants schools to have the ability, in fact, he's encouraging this, to adapt what they teach their own kids on the basis of the employment opportunities available locally. And that, I'm honest with you, that worries me, okay? That doesn't really happen to me. Well, okay, I'm just going to give you why it worries me. If you are a kid at a state schooling Kings Cross, you are currently faced on your doorstep, the highest paying, most exciting businesses on some measures that there are in the whole world at the moment, because this is where all the tech businesses are, not quite all of them, but many of them are basically located. Now, why is it, therefore, that Kings Cross schools should basically be tailoring their courses to give amazing opportunities to their young people, to earn vast sums of money in AI, in tech, in all the other linked businesses. And if you happen to be in Middlesbrough, where there are very few such businesses on your doorstep, the school will not be focusing on that. I just think you're right, I just think you are doing the kids of Middlesbrough a massive disservice on that one, right? Okay, so let me give you my alternative view on this. I think, for a start, I don't think it's binary, so there are, so I think I'm an example of this, so I grew up in Middlesbrough, the only industry was heavy industry, it was ICI, British Steel, they're like, because our school was focused on the local employers, I was in businesses a lot, I learned about how manufacturing works, I learned about the kind of discipline of work, about there was a lot of high advanced manufacturing there, a lot of, you know, all the different departments like purchasing and product design and all of this. And actually that mid life really tangible in terms of, oh, that's how things are made, that's how things work. And then that is transferable to other other jobs, so it doesn't mean you're only going to work in engineering as I have proven with Macarena, like I've done about a million different jobs and that is because I was given that really interesting start at 11, 12, 13, where going into businesses and, you know, learning about what the local economy needed taught me so much more about the wider world as well, so I know what you're saying, it's like people will then go, and this is about making sure there is enough investment across the country to make sure that there, you know, enough jobs in these different places because Middlesbrough is really struggling, like I get upset when I go back through the town centre at the moment, like if the university wasn't there, I do not know what that town would look like because it's just crumbling, like literally crumbling and watching buildings that I used to go into just falling apart with, and there's not the money there, but if you give kids, if you open those boxes around them, the businesses that are there and let them in to see what they might do, it'll inspire them into other areas as well because we've got the football club in Middlesbrough, that is a business, that has got a ton of different departments, they use AI, they use a lot of different things, so you've got this way more and I just think we're so binary when we think about, right, well, if you're going to an engineering firm, you're only getting an engineering job, no you won't, you'll look but you'll learn about work and that's why I like the idea of local businesses being involved in helping shape the education of young people because it will teach them about what real life is like rather than sitting with a textbook and just learning about everything from what's been written down and not what they actually experience about the workplace dynamics because what I know from, like these apprentices, again, every time I meet apprentices, they are so much more confident than lots of young people, they're always, because they're about to be, they're about to quickly adapt from 16 or 18 and they know they have great relationships with the older members of staff as well, you can see that respect there and that learning and that teaches you way more than just being in an academic setting and for some people it works, you know, they just want to be purely academic and that's totally fine as well because they could be the people who do all the research we need for things but yeah I just don't worry about that sense of devolving the education to areas because I think that doesn't narrow your choice, I think it opens your mind to real work. You and I completely agree that we want to get more young people getting experience of the workplace at an early age, I mean, you know, as you know, because you know, you really participated in this, I know I set up a charity, you know, more than 15 years ago, used to be called Speakers for Schools, it's now called Futures for All and we do two things, we get eminent people like you to go and give free talks in state schools but the other really big thing we do is we link employers with young people, you know, from sort of, we mostly they're sort of 14 to 17-year-olds and we give them really high, you know, we arrange really high quality work experience, we get kids from state schools, particularly under bridge kids and we place them, you know, inside businesses where they are set projects, where they learn about the business, all the stuff that you've just been talking about and you know, I think one of the things that I was encouraged by in this government's manifesto in 2024 is it contained a line which said every young person should have the right to work experience and then if I'm, you know, going to be afraid frank about it, they've done almost bugger all to actually deliver that. I mean, in fact, you know, we as a charity went to see the Department of Education 15 months ago said we have, which is true, an amazing, you know, digital platform to match young people with employers, you know, we would just like, we don't want any money from you but, you know, if you just do a help us with a bit of promotion with employers and schools. I mean, we're doing, you know, thousands and thousands of work experience days for students at the moment and, I mean, tens of thousands plus hundreds of thousands when it comes to the talks as well. So we are the leader in this space, but there are hundreds of thousands still of young people who are not getting the work experience that they deserve. And we want to work in partnership both with Mayors and with the government to roll this out. And it is so difficult. It has been so difficult to get the, you know, officials and the leaders to engage on something that they claim to want to achieve. So if anybody is listening out there, get in touch with me, get in touch with the futures for all, we are offering you a gift horse. But you and I totally agree on the applause. My only point I was trying to make is this. Again, I'm going to express it in stark terms. Right? You know, 60, 70 years ago, right? If you were at a certain kind of school in the Northeast, you were basically all of the view that the only job available to you was going down the mines. Right? And all I'm saying is I don't want this vision of Andy Burnham that basically schools should tailor education to employment opportunities locally, okay? To limit the life opportunity of people in areas where there are fewer, you know, there are fewer businesses offering the opportunity to basically make, you know, enormous sums of money. I'm just saying, oh, that's all I'll have a different kind of working life. Children don't decide where they're born or brought up, right? And you know, you and I want all kids to have the opportunities that we had. So as things stand, kids are not taught anything about the world of work. They have no idea what is even in their local area. So this has got to be better. They're not knowing anything about what jobs are out there. And also, these days, 60 or 70 years ago, we didn't have the internet. We didn't have everyone watching stuff on YouTube. So kids are not deaf. They know that. And also, these companies in these areas, a lot of them are global, a lot of them are exporting. And I just think some experience of, and some knowledge of the jobs around you is we're better than nothing. But I really hope you're right. We agree on the fundamental thing, which was we want much more links between school students and employers. So long as it doesn't mean that young people limit what they think is possible, that would be great. So what I am finding the hardest at the moment, I think there's great organisations like your charity providing work experience. There's lots of businesses who want to open their doors. There's also lots of schools and teachers who off their own back really want to show kids what, you know, what's out there. The biggest issue outside of, I would say outside of London where the transport system is the best, getting kids to places. I am trying to organise for a lot of girls that I work within in middle spread, you know, young kids who are, you know, living in really tough areas, trying to get them to visit the treasury and visit the university. It costs a grand for a coach to take these kids anywhere and you could say, well, that can't you just take them on the public transport. It isn't there. It doesn't exist from their school to, you know, there isn't, we don't have a tube service and things like that. Like a grand for kids to go and visit a business. Things like that, which are the real barriers, I could get all of these middle's brichids to visit into loads of different places and I'm always up against the cost of a coach. Like how notice that in this era that it's the cost of a coach that's stopping these things happening? So it's like, it's little things like that that if you, if you connect businesses in local areas, they might be able to part fund it or that, you know, maybe there could be local tax incentives if you help organize things with kids or local coach company is given some type of, I don't know, incentive to help that isn't just, or do it's the right thing to do, but like actually because a lot of these are businesses that need to make money. Like, I just think that's what we could get from more devolution is just that more local thinking about what are the issues here and how can we solve them locally between us? Again, obviously, I totally agree that, you know, not just in terms of, you know, essentially integrating schools into the working environment in their areas is important, devolution in many of these important educational decisions, which burden promises is important. But, and this is sort of implied by, you know, your problem in terms of just getting a coach to get kids over to the Treasury and Darlington, money is an issue, right? If you are going to provide high quality vocational education, let's say, in digital, let's say in digital, which is one of the areas or engineering, right? Lots of schools do not have the kit, they just don't have it, right? One of the things that was slightly worrying that, well, one of the things that was missing from what Burnham has said was any talk of how this is going to be funded, Lucy Powell, the education secretary, when pushed on it said, well, we haven't announced anything yet that absolutely requires money. Well, they may not have, that's because there isn't enough detail, but truthfully, if they want to be as, you know, true to the kind of ambitions they've talked about, then our schools will have to be equipped differently, and that is expensive. Equally, our teachers will almost certainly have to be trained differently, and that is expensive. So, you know, there is an enormous amount of really practical stuff we're yet to hear, and there is going to have to be a proper increased budget, at least for a few years, to fund this transition. And just to add to that, again, from like visiting the UTC colleges, and also like the further education colleges, which have been warfully underfunded for a long time now, it is way more expensive to, you know, to put on a practical vote cost versus an academic cost. And what they've done, the ones that do well are the ones who, again, have partnered with local businesses to like borrow kit or kit is sponsored. And, you know, there's teaching, there's people who are involved in training, people in companies who will be incentivised to their company to go in and do some teaching in the FE college. So I think there's ways around it, but you're right. It needs to, the pressure can't just go on, or the teachers currently working in schools, because that is just going to be yet another pressure on them when they're already at their limit. It's about thinking differently again about how you use business in the education setting as well. And I just want to think, say one thing, because I've sounded like I'm totally positive about what everything Andy Burnham's doing, the thing that has really, really annoyed me this week, I asked the Prime Minister's office for a little video from Andy Burnham to just say well done to all the people doing vocational training. Just a little clip, you know, he's doing all this stuff and all of his other things, he's done the hard hat, grad cap, all that. Did I get a video for all the millions of people across the country to play to them on vocational celebration day? Did I shite? Like, I know he's got other things going on, but that would have been an easy win. It's like, how can I not get a 30 second video off the Prime Minister to say well done? Jackie Smith did it, the skills minister, great love Jackie's, do another great stuff, but why didn't the Prime Minister just do a quick selfie video on his phone for all these people? And that's where I just think we get so much verbal enthusiasm and then it doesn't follow through with actual true commitment. So Andy, if you're listening, if any of you team listening and raging with you about that, it was an easy win, love. Anyway, I'm done with Ranting, but we will of course, once we get more detail on the policy around all this, analyse it for you in the meantime. Lots more exciting episodes coming up for you. We've got Gus, so don't come in on, have a way. Tell us what he's going to be talking about. Well, so I want to talk to him both about the challenge and the opportunities of artificial intelligence for government and indeed the, an issue that we've talked about on this podcast, how do you reform the civil service to make it more productive? And we're going to have an absolutely fascinating chat about his new book with the Nobel Prize for the Economist Aaron Akamoglu. So unmissable, rest his money podcast coming up and fear not, I don't believe Steph is done with Ranting. See you soon. That's it for us for now. Bye bye.