Welcome to my journal.
Get an insight into my day-to-day work and my perspective on key issues.
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.
Reading Ahead: A new podcast looking into the skills needed to thrive in the century ahead
I have a new podcast just launched with the University of Reading. I'm calling it Reading Ahead — a small pun on the University's name, and an honest description of what we're trying to do. Each episode, I sit down with people who are conducting research on, and finding solutions to, the challenges of the century ahead: how AI reshapes not just jobs but judgement, how we educate for a climate that won't behave like the one we grew up with, how work, wellbeing and community hold together when so much of the old scaffolding is being dismantled.
