Reading Ahead: Episode 2: Future Skills
Children today spend around half as much time playing as they did in the 1970s. That loss isn't just a loss of fun. It's a loss of exactly the skills our economy and society will most need in the century ahead. For the last two years, alongside my work as Chancellor of the University of Reading, I have chaired the Raising the Nation Play Commission, which has made recommendations to Government advising on a National Play Strategy for England. The Commission found that much of a child's later capacity to learn, adapt and thrive is down to one simple thing: unstructured, self-directed play.
And it turns out that play could be the best way to prepare for the century ahead. In our latest episode of our podcast Reading Ahead, out this week, I am joined by two titans in understanding the skills needed to thrive in work in the future: Dr Naeema Pasha, founder of the World of Work Institute and Martin Allen morales, polymath entrepreneur, chef, music and tech executive and CEO of the charity Institute of Imagination.
Naeema’s research has found that people who best navigated disruption and uncertainty displayed three key qualities. The first was openness to experience — treating a setback as a redirection rather than a dead end. The second was resilience built specifically through continued learning, undertaken for its own sake rather than for the CV. And the third, surprisingly, was the discipline to stop: the people in her data who paused deliberately to reflect, consistently outperformed those who simply kept pushing forward. Underpinning all three was self-efficacy, a settled confidence in one's own identity and capability, which her research found to be one of the strongest predictors of career success of any measure she tested.
Martin's put a career's worth of lived pattern-recognition behind that data. He described his core skill as learning how to learn — the capacity to keep acquiring new capability every time the ground shifts. It's a skill nobody formally examines, yet it was the one Martin credited most directly for his own improbable career arc across music, hospitality and the charity sector.
That's the thread I keep pulling on. If self-efficacy, openness and the capacity for reflective pause are the qualities that predict resilience across a full career — and Naeema's research says they are — then the places where children first practise those qualities matter enormously, long before anyone sits a professional development course. Free play is, on the evidence, one of the earliest and cheapest interventions we have for building exactly the workforce the future needs.
I'd put that as a genuine question to researchers and policymakers working in this space, not just as a rhetorical flourish. If we accept the growing evidence base — from Naeema's work on career resilience, from the Play Commission's findings on childhood development, and from practitioners like Martin who've founded institutions on these qualities — then the skills agenda and the play agenda are not two separate policy conversations. They're the same one, viewed at different points in a person's life. I'd like to see that connection made more explicitly in how we fund research, design curricula, and shape workplace and education policy for the century ahead.
You can listen to Reading Ahead on your favourite podcast platform or watch the full conversation on YouTube