At the end of this month it will be a year since I launched this Substack and I want to thank all of you who have read and subscribed to it. I have been overwhelmed by the response and grateful too to all those who have given me feedback and commented on posts.

I set out to write as a practitioner, not just a commentator. Having been a strategist in Number 10, I always have the question, front of mind: what would I be doing in this situation? Having been a teacher and a headteacher, I always picture the young people I supported and think about how to give them the best start in life. In both cases the consistent theme of my career is how to make change - from an approach, a system, a narrative - that isn’t working, to one that is.

That is why the Substack is called, Changing the Story. Andy Burnham’s first urgent task is to change the story about this Labour government. From one of disappointment, dire poll ratings, and pessimism, to one of hope, and renewed possibility. He then needs to change the story about Britain.

He’s made a good start.

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Many prime ministers reach the top without ever having a view on a whole range of topics. But the great advantage for Andy Burnham is that the job of Mayor forces you to cover all issues (or almost all) because your patch is a microcosm of the wider country. (The downside of course is that what worked or was true in Manchester might not work for the nation.)

He has only been Prime Minister for just over a month and the biggest difference he has made is not the one most commented on - his skilful communication - but his ability to ignite real debate around big arguments.

Five stand out.

1. Britain is too centralised and needs massive devolution because power should be in the hands of people and places.

2. Life’s essentials need to be under public control because that’s the way of ensuring prices are kept low.

3. Forty years of neo-liberalism have caused Britain’s problems because too little attention was paid to the casualties of globalisation.

4. Parity between academic and technical education is essential because every young person needs a high-quality pathway to a well-paid job.

5. Britain’s success depends on growth in every postcode because only inclusive growth will solve Britain’s deep inequalities.

Let’s be clear, if he wins these arguments he really will have changed the direction of British politics. These are big arguments, and in some cases will require the defeat of huge vested interests and entrenched ways of working.

Burnham is schooled in the Blair/Brown era where winning big arguments was the point of politics. Blair and Brown saw it as both an intellectual exercise and a campaigning one. Blair always wanted to return to first principles to ensure any argument was grounded in logic and was robust enough under fire. Brown wanted to continually refine the dividing lines with opponents so he was on firm ground and able to paint them into an unpopular corner.

But we know too that the Left historically has a problem winning arguments. It too often lacks confidence and staying power. Or the opposite, its judgemental moralising puts people off. Too often it would rather fight another faction on its own side, than its real opponents, the Right. Too often it starts an argument and then loses interest, allowing opponents to fight back and win. Digital ID being the perfect example: launched, not defended, opponents mobilise, proposal is watered down, new prime minister kills it off.

To win an argument you need to be up for the fight and be relentless at marshalling your troops to win it. You need to set up a war room - a place where you gather the best comms, policy, writing, marketing, campaigns, and stakeholder experts and plot your strategy, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. For the Left, the task is always harder than it should be, as it is up against a right-wing press, skewed social media eg X, and a range of interests, including parts of business, who are hostile. A single prime ministerial speech, intervention or headline should always be the start not the end of a process.

Burnham needs to see the goal of the next year as winning the arguments he’s set in train. If he does so he will be in a very strong place.

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The chance of winning each of the five arguments

In a year’s time, which arguments will Burnham be on the verge of winning? Which will he still be in the trenches fighting for? And which will have been abandoned or defeated through lack of sustained fight? We should remember that arguments can be lost at both a conceptual level (it doesn’t stack up) and an implementation level (it falls apart on contact with the real world).

Here is my assessment of the state of play today on his five big arguments.

1. Britain is too centralised and needs massive devolution

On track to win the argument: 7/10

There is a huge appetite for a fightback against an overcentralised, out of touch and ineffective state. The reason Reform have been doing so well is a belief that the mainstream parties can’t get anything done. So any argument that is about disrupting the status quo will have traction. The key is not to overstate it, not to imply devolution will solve everything. Winning the argument also depends on having a clearly articulated plan for the reform of Whitehall that gives people confidence it can be more responsive and deliver on the big national bets - like building new homes.

2. Life’s essentials need to be under public control

On track to win the argument: 6/10

Again there is an open door here. Do people want help with the cost of living? Do they want cheaper households bills? Is public control of the buses in Manchester a successful example? Yes to all of this. But does this feel like an ideological battle or a practical one? What are the fiscal constraints? And how much better off will people really be? The argument will be won if people feel a tangible difference. More than that, cost of living must be linked to a bigger argument, the argument that matters most, about how people can once more feel they are on the upward escalator, with the tools to improve their own lives.

3. Forty years of neo-liberalism have caused Britain’s problems

On track to win the argument: 5/10

Burnham’s argument is that globalisation has too many losers. That it did not support the places left behind by deindustrialisation. That wealth creation and good jobs are more important than benefit hand-outs to compensate for poor jobs or no jobs. That the state needs to be more active in supporting people through change and working with the private sector to reshape the economy. What he needs to be careful about, is being too sweeping in these assertions. Was Gordon Brown really a neo-liberal? Was the minimum wage, the halving of child poverty or full employment part of a neo-liberal consensus? And is the aim to return to pre-Thatcher days or to carve out a modern form of re-industrialisation where Britain is at the cutting edge of new industries? The calibration of this argument is crucial to winning it.

4. Parity between academic and technical education is essential

On track to win the argument: 6/10

This is an argument where the government is on strong ground. As the pollster Luke Tryl reminded me the other day, apprenticeships are incredibly popular and always have been. People want more and better technical education. Gove dismissing it as ‘bring back stupid’ is a big error. The public does not think technical education is lowering standards. The Neet crisis provides a new imperative to finding different high-quality routes into work for young people. There will still be some who fight back with arguments that need dealing with - the danger of funnelling working-class kids into vocational pathways, whatever their abilities, or the logistical difficulties of schools offering technical education. Overall this is an argument that needs a lot of work but really ought to be won.

5. Britain’s success depends on growth in every postcode

On track to win the argument: 4/10

This is the argument that will take the most winning for a number of reasons. Growth is hard. None of the six prime ministers since Brexit have achieved growth at the levels of the previous Labour government. The Treasury has little clue how to get growth, let alone inclusive growth. There is a danger that the current Cabinet is more comfortable pointing out the failings of business than championing the kind of support for businesses that will give them the confidence to invest, grow and create new jobs. Devising a credible growth plan and a convincing argument around it, that combines active national government with real local initiative, is essential if this argument is to be won.

None of these arguments must be left to chance or wishful thinking. Winning them is painstaking and relentless work. Our current mad media environment privileges the short term and the superficial. It is so easy to be distracted, but for Burnham the prize is big - nothing less than changing Britain’s story.

“I never sleep, my mind doesn’t sleep.”

“If it’s a weekend, I don’t go to bed. I’m either out or on my play station.”

“I’m more of a night person.”

“When you’ve lived a life with not a lot of opportunities and abuse, it affects the human whether that’s bad sleep schedules or traumatic responses and stuff.”

“For me, it is very difficult to exist sometimes, let alone get out of bed.”

“For the last three weeks, I’ve gone to sleep about four o’clock?”

“My sleeping pattern is not very great, so it will vary from anywhere between four in the morning to like eight in the morning.”

Just some of the responses from the workshops we held with young Neets across the UK.

But what genuinely shocked us was that the real late nighters were not just the 18, 20 or 24-year-olds who were out partying or no longer living at home, it was the 12 and 13 year olds we met in schools. “Well after midnight” was the consensus among one group of 12 year-olds in Clacton about their usual bedtime.

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Clear evidence of growing sleep loss

The generation of teenagers who are emerging now are getting less sleep than any before them. There is a growing amount of data to back this up.

A study by Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) (the longest running international study that focuses on the health behaviour and social context of young people) found that 3 in 10 adolescents reported not having enough sleep to feel awake and concentrate on schoolwork during the day (34% in 2022, up from 23% in 2014). As a result they were more likely to report: low mental health, more schoolwork pressure, lower liking of school, lower school belonging and lower school safety. Four in 10 reported getting less than 8.5 hours sleep on school nights (42%, down from 71% in 2014). More than half reported difficulty sleeping at least once a week in the last six months (55%, up from 34% in 2014).

In one experiment, 50 healthy 14–17-year-olds experienced five nights with only 6.5 hours in bed, and another period with 10 hours in bed. When sleep-restricted, the teenagers reported significantly more “anger and hostility, anxiety and tension, confusion and fatigue, alongside poorer emotional regulation and greater irritability/oppositional behaviour.”

Another study provided the first evidence that shortened sleep duration is a causal contributor to the mood disturbances frequently experienced by adolescents with ADHD, particularly as observed by parents.

A study published in the leading medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, found that among 657 adolescents, more than half used their phones between midnight and 4am. Of all the pieces of data this one strikes me as the most dramatic.

The phone cries out to you: gaming, messaging friends, waiting to see whether someone replies, checking likes, scrolling emotionally compelling material, switching constantly between apps. The call of the screen. The endless scrolling at night - what some have called ‘bed rotting’. And none of the young people we spoke to said their parents confiscated the phones at night or restricted their usage.

For this generation, growing up with social media and multiple screens in the bedroom, there is no off switch; they are always on. The smartphone has abolished the end of the day. Your friends follow you into the bedroom. Sleep is a snack between online activities, not an extended period of rest.

For a bedroom generation, spending hours, days, weeks, months, in some cases years in their bedroom, lying on their bed, bedtime ceases to have any meaning at all.

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This is a reminder of the amount of sleep we should be having, according to the experts:

The authors of Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren’t Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them, Heather Turgeon & Julie Wright, describe it, in the context of the United States, like this:

A “perfect storm” of shifting biology, academic pressure, early high school start times, and a misconception that sleep is dispensable rather than essential has been steadily chipping away at teen sleep. But while that storm has been brewing for decades, the explosion of technology has taken this storm to Category 5 hurricane levels. The smartphone is getting harder and harder to put down. Technology is ever more brilliant at keeping teens engaged and connected (teen sleep took a notable dip after 2011 as the smartphone gained popularity). Meanwhile, the academic load on students continues to increase and kids are being prepped for college applications when they’ve barely stopped playing tag on the playground. Like never before, teens’ sleep is being stolen from all sides.

It is this combination of increasingly early starts at school, the adolescent body clock making teenagers ‘night owls’ and the allure of the smartphone, that means a young person is constantly alert and unable to relax.

The harm to teenagers

Turgeon and Wright describe the harm to adolescents.

To make matters worse, adolescence is a stage of life when proper sleep is vital and game changing, to a degree that few of us fully appreciate. But the truth is, a teenager’s brain is going through an equally important stage of growth (with potentially more life-altering and consequential outcomes). Adolescence is an awe-inspiring and pivotal developmental phase, when the brain undergoes massive reorganisation and growth, and much of that vital work happens during sleep. Missing sleep raises the risk of mental health issues, heightens teen stress at a neurochemical level, makes athletes more accident prone, and causes the brain’s memory storage to malfunction, which short-circuits learning and academic success. When sleep is missing, the ripple effects on mental and physical health are tremendous and exponential

Sleep supports attention, processing speed, executive functioning and emotional regulation - the kind of cognitive functions teenagers need in classrooms. Crucially, it also helps you remember what you have been taught in school. The irony of this is that diligent students who stay up late to revise, are also damaging the ability to remember the very content they are cramming.

The death of bedtime

When they are under 10 parents often have a clear routine for children: bath, reading a story, bedtime, lights out. Though, of course, many who are working night shifts, have several children to juggle, or are under a lot of pressure, understandably find this difficult.

But as they become teenagers, some parents give more autonomy to their children. By the age of 13 or 14, bedtime is more of a negotiation. But now, with smartphones, that calculation has become very different. We give teenagers autonomy over sleep at precisely the point when they are biologically least equipped to manage an attention machine sitting beside their bed.

Putting it more dramatically, parents wouldn’t let a 14-year-old decide for themselves whether to go to school, drink alcohol every night or eat nothing but sweets. Yet millions of us have effectively decided that whether they sleep or not is their own business. And that’s because for many, taking away screens from your child too often causes the kind of fight you can do without at the end of a long day. The on-going battle with screen time has become one of the most miserable parts of parenting.

And this is not just a teenage thing. Lack of sleep affects school and it also has a huge impact on work as well. How can a young Neet be ‘work ready’ if they haven’t had any sleep?

My childhood bedtime

There was of course no golden age of beautifully rested young people. Children have always stayed up later than they should. I know this from my own childhood. Thinking back to when I was about 11 or 12, my bedtime was around 8pm and I would snuggle down with my most important possession: a tiny, portable Philips radio. This provided all the entertainment anyone could possibly want - and also kept me awake. I could listen to two things that I loved. The football commentary and the LBC phone in. The football was the adrenaline-filled, edge-of-your-duvet, mid-week fixture with the expert commentator painting a magical picture of the on-field antics. That finished at about 9.45pm. And then, if I could keep myself awake, at 10pm there was the thrill of the LBC late-night phone in. The charismatic, argumentative presenter and the slightly mad, slightly drunk, slightly weird callers angling for a fight. It was the cut and thrust of those radio debates that gave me my first glimpse of the world of politics and current affairs.

So late nights have always been common. But now, the innocent pocket radio has been replaced by the siren calls of the shiny, interactive screen and the pressure not to leave your friends hanging when they message you after midnight.

As a headteacher, I talked about sleep to students a bit, but was reluctant to get too involved in a child’s home life or to question the choices made by hard-pressed parents.

But it’s now reached a stage when things have to change.

The concept of bedtime, of all screens being out of the bedroom, of a period of genuine rest and recovery must be restored if we are to improve the mental health of young people. Many of us have tried as adults and know how hard it is. The ban on social media might help for under 16s.

For the sake of the next generation, a generation with growing mental health concerns, more neurodiversity, more exam pressure, and a Neet crisis, a good night’s sleep must no longer be an occasional luxury, but something taken seriously by every child - and parent.

As context for our report Inside the Mind of a Young Neet, Shuab Gamote and I went to the Netherlands to find out why they were doing so much better than us in the UK. They have 4% 16 to 24 year olds not in education, employment or training. We have 13%.

We met groups of young people in schools and charities in the Hague and Amsterdam.

It’s worth noting from the outset that many of them told us their system was far from perfect. Particularly contentious, is the high stakes exam Dutch children taken when they are twelve which determines whether they are on a university-bound academic track, a technical college track or somewhere in between. Many of the young people we spoke to felt this was too young to be making those decisions. Most of us in the UK probably agree.

But what we found was a system characterised by better prevention, clear accountability, joined-up working, trusted relationships and support for young people at vital transitions. More than that, paid work is valued from a young age.

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The Dutch lesson in prevention

In the Netherlands, young people are more likely to be seen, tracked, contacted, given practical routes and surrounded by adults whose job it is to keep them moving.

The Dutch system appears to have a stronger civic instinct around transition. Young people are not left to drift as easily. Schools, municipalities, employers and youth services are expected to form a bridge between adolescence and adult life. There are named organisations who are accountable and take responsibility.

As one youth worker in The Hague put it, their work is about:

“Preventing disengagement and supporting sustainable transition from education to work. Our target group is really growing, mostly between the ages of 16 and 27: early school leavers, young people without education or work, young people with complex, multi-domain challenges, young people from practical and special education and young people receiving social benefits.”

Being Neet is not treated as a single “employability” issue. It is a transition issue, a poverty issue, a confidence issue, a mental health issue, a housing issue, and often a family issue.

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Finding young people before they get lost

Prevention and early intervention is baked into the Dutch system. They use data in a smart way, but they know that data only matters if it leads to human contact. The Dutch tracking approach helps municipalities identify young people who are out of education or work. The UK has no similar tracking system. But the real strength is not just the dataset, but how they use it.

They learned quickly that bureaucratic invitations do not work - so they used the data to track young people, and then the personal touch to make the connection.

“A few years ago, we sent a letter to young people everywhere in the The Hague: come to us, we want to talk to you - and nobody came. The next step we took was to get in the neighbourhood, get closer to the people, because we knew they wouldn’t come to us.”

The UK needs this same shift - utilising trusted adults at key moments of transition to help young people navigate the next steps.

A youth worker described a move from passive tracking to active outreach:

“So we gathered the information from the data from the system, said, ‘Oh, these people don’t have education, don’t work, so we’re going to visit them.’ And now we literally ring the doorbell to get in contact with these young people. And say: ‘how are you doing?’ That’s the first question. Not, ‘Oh, I see you’re not working.’ No. ‘How are you doing? Can we help you? What’s the problem? Can we help you get back to work, get off your couch or out of your bed?’”

One Place: A local Neet reduction service run by the municipalities

We visited Jongerenpunt070. It’s an organisation that is neither a state organisation, nor a charity, nor a private company. It is an arms-length one-stop-shop given responsibility by the municipality - in this case, The Hague - to provide joined-up services for young people. They have youth workers, the resources, the data and the powers to offer tailor-made provision to get young people into education or employment.

It is as if there was a local organisation in the UK that was an arms-length mayor-funded youth hub combining some of the old Connexions role, the local authority’s school-leaver tracking duties, college-based dropout prevention and Jobcentre-style employment support for the under-27s. (It is interesting that a new law has made 27 the cut off point for intensive support in the Netherlands not 24 - showing a renewed and deeper commitment to young people.)

In the Netherlands a young person can therefore go to one place to get the services they need.

That place then supports them every step of the way:

(i) Step one: Finds the young person

(ii) Step two: Meets them where they are

(iii) Step three: Provides one consistent adult - A coach or case manager becomes the young person’s principal contact and remains even when specialists become involved.

(iv) Step four: Assesses the whole context - assess the whole young person not one element.

(v) Step five: Agrees a personal pathway - back into education, into supported work, into a full time job.

(vi) Step six: Stays alongside the young person even once they have found a job or education place, because they often drop out in the first six months.

One person: Relationship first, system second

Perhaps the most powerful phrase we heard was: “relationship goes first, system goes second.” Jongerenpunt070 explicitly rejects an overly bureaucratic model:

“We organise around the young person. What do they need? How can we fill in their needs? We are always human-centred and context-driven. Relationship goes first, system goes second. If the computer says no, we’re going to work around it. We’ve always got to find a way to make it happen.”

This is what many UK young people describe as missing: one adult who sticks with them and understands the whole story, and can bend the system around the young person, rather than bending the young person around the system.

Jongerenpunt070 also stresses continuity:

“Most likely, you will get a case manager who will support you through the whole process until you are back to school or having another job, so we have the time and interest to build a relationship.

The Dutch evidence is refreshingly practical. Young people are not moralised for lacking money, transport, shoes, a laptop or childcare. Those barriers are treated as problems to solve and they are solved at pace.

Jongerenpunt070 described flexible local budgets that allow them to act quickly:

“It’s a way to get out of the system, because if we use the system, it will take days or weeks before we get some money. If we have our own money, we can say, well, we’re going to do this for you, and we manage it today. So you can have your computer or you can have your shoes for your work.”

Transport is treated in the same way:

“If transportation is a problem, we will get you a bike or a ticket to get the tram or train to get you to work. Not forever, but just to get started. I’ve got 14 bikes gifted to us by the fire department. We fix those bikes, and we can help them get to work.”

One plan: A detailed evidence-based conversation and Action Plan

Jongerenpunt070 have a sophisticated nine-point score card to assess every young person. It covers what they see as the key barriers to being work ready and include: qualifications, hosuing, money, social networks and mental health. On the slide below, ADL is translated from the Dutch - Activities of Daily Life - meaning cooking, cleaning, shopping, budgeting, taking care of yourself. VOG is the equivalent of a DBS to check if the person has a criminal record. This scorecard provides the backdrop for a powerful conversation with the young person and an action plan to follow. So while the system is relational, the conversation is based on a very practical understanding of the young person’s circumstances.

Vocational routes are visible, respected and understood

The high school students in The Hague were strikingly articulate about the Dutch educational pathways. While there was a lot of stress about the exam at 12, and a desire to be on the university route, there was also a sense in which all the pathways had real status and genuine progression routes. Crucially, there was an ability to move between the pathways.

One student explained:

“It’s not about, oh, you’re in HAVO so you’re better than me. I don’t think it’s like that. It’s just a different kind of level. Yes, it is harder, but it’s not better.”

Another gave the clearest statement of the Dutch vocational ethic:

“MBO is meant more for people who do practical things, and they teach it as such. HAVO is a mixture between the two, and VWO is more theoretical teaching to become doctors, dentists. People from MBO typically can do electrical work or plumbing, and those jobs are respected because they earn a lot and they’re certified. So it’s not like they’re dumb or anything.”

One student commented:

“The system allows it so you can always progress up to university and there’s never a stop point. There are just pit stops, and those are quite nice to have.”

If someone leaves without a startkwalificatie, (starting qualification) the Doorstroompunt (“progression point” or “transition service”) tracks and offers support to help them return to education or move towards sustainable work.

The central Dutch idea is that completing compulsory schooling is not enough, young people should leave with a qualification that has recognised labour-market value.

Paid work starts young and builds personal qualities

One of the most striking contrasts with the UK is how normal it is for Dutch teenagers to do paid work. Students talked about working in supermarkets, restaurants, bakeries, beach cafés, laundries, babysitting, and helping family businesses. And there was a value placed on work by young people from all the way up the income scale.

“I first started in the supermarket when I was 16, and then at 17 I did restaurant work for quite a while.”

“I started at 15 at a restaurant at the beach. It was just a summer job, worked for two months.”

“I was 15 and I worked in a bakery.”

But the important point is not just that they worked. It is what work taught them:

“Definitely a lot of responsibility for being on time. You have the pressure of doing stuff right and not missing out. I worked with food and customer service, so it was always really stressful. It teaches you to perform well under pressure.”

Another student said work taught:

“Responsibility, independence, and also how to manage your money and how you spend it.”

And one reflected that work changed how they saw adults:

“I started to see other working people not just as background characters, but as real people.”

Work is a key part of teenage life. It provides, they said, money, esteem, confidence, realism, empathy and respect.

Surround the young person

The most powerful Dutch lesson is that no single service can solve the Neet problem. Jongerenpunt070 described the need to form a “circle around the young person”:

“We are from the municipality. Then you have the care, healthcare, physical or mental. And then you have the social workers in certain areas. And we all work together. The trick is to combine all the expertise so you form a circle around the young person, so you can work at the same time at many problems.”

That is the central message. The UK does not need a system that only intervenes when a young person is Neet. It needs one where every young person has a route to a working life that has status and purpose. Where young people get a taste for work early. And where those who struggle at transition points are spotted in time and have an adult who sticks with them and helps them find their feet.

Every country is different, every context is different. But we can surely learn from the success of the Dutch and move towards a system that is joined-up, relationship-led, data-informed, neighbourhood-based, practical, flexible, and multi-agency.

One million young Neets in the UK, and the many coming up behind them, need us to get this right.

It’s the biggest regret of many in the last Labour government that we failed to implement the Tomlinson report into 14-19 education published in October 2004.

In a nutshell it proposed:

Replacing England’s fragmented collection of academic and vocational qualifications with a single, coherent 14–19 Diploma framework combining a common core of English, maths, digital, personal skills and extended project with substantial academic or technical specialist learning. Its aim was to raise participation and standards and create clearer progression for all into university, apprenticeships and work.

If it had been implemented over 10 years, as was planned, (we would now be in the 10^th year of it bedding in) I am certain we would not have more than one million young Neets, a persistent absence rate in secondary schools of a staggering 23%, only one in five pupils saying they were very motivated to learn, nor a total failure to close the achievement gap between the richest and poorest pupils.

Today we need to resurrect that report, modernise it, and implement it with skill so that we do right by the next generation.

The Tomlinson report and a story of political failure

I have tried to piece together what happened in those fateful months in 2004 and 2005. Inevitably, twenty years on, there are different recollections from the key players. That’s why this week I visited Mike Tomlinson at his home in Nuneaton to find out more – and to get his candid view on what we should do now.

Tomlinson is a respected educationalist and former Ofsted chief. He was a chemistry teacher and pioneered partnerships between school and industry. He was asked to review 14-19 education by the Education Secretary Charles Clarke and Schools’ Minister, David Miliband.

He had agreed with both Clarke and Miliband that he should try to build cross-party consensus, and they were happy for him to provide the opposition leader Michael Howard with the final report a couple of days before publication.

Tomlinson told me:

“I delivered the report to the then Conservative leader with the strict instruction that nothing in the report was to be made public before it was laid before Parliament - but it gave them enough time to make an informed comment on it. But Michael Howard couldn’t resist, and therefore literally hours before it was launched, Michael Howard made a speech in which he said basically that the Conservatives would defend A levels to the hilt, and he mentioned Middle England, as he was prone to do.”

His intervention and the scepticism of the CBI, who had been supportive all along but on the day pulled back, spooked Tony Blair. It was post-Iraq and the government was on the back foot. The election was around the corner and he decided the fight was not worth the political capital.

Tomlinson urged the politicians not to respond definitively on the day the report was published but to rise above the politics and let the report land. But that didn’t happen.

We lost the argument that evening. I was at a wonderful party for all of those who’d been involved and consulted, and we’ve got Charles and David standing up saying we’re going to implement this. Within an hour or two, Blair had stood up and defended A levels – he felt he had to counter what the Conservatives had said, and that was when it died.

Charles Clarke believes he could have still won the argument and that over time Blair was persuadable. But very soon afterwards Blunkett resigned as Home Secretary, Blair made Clarke his replacement and Ruth Kelly took over as education secretary. David Miliband in turn moved to the Cabinet Office to write the manifesto. The two main advocates for reform had gone. The white paper that followed in March contained some important elements of the Tomlinson report, but not the single diploma and the architecture that would have brought academic and vocational education together into a holistic system for the first time.

It was not until Rishi Sunak launched his Advanced British Standard before the last election that a political leader, ironically a Tory, had the guts to signal the replacement of A levels with a broader offer, (though this too had little to say about technical education). In the intervening years there have been T levels and now V levels but still no unified system, nor a properly signposted alternative to university. That is why there is a broad consensus for change; a recognition that the Neet crisis is too deep, the waste of talent too great, and the economy in desperate need of skilled employees.

Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, building on his MBACC reforms in Manchester, as well as examples across the world, has made a revolution in technical education one of his top priorities.

So, why is it worth looking at the Tomlinson report again? The simple answer is that it tackled a lot of the questions we are still asking today. Andy Burnham doesn’t need to start from scratch. He can take over where Tomlinson left off.

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The case for change

The Tomlinson report attempted to tackle six imperatives.

1. Raise participation and achievement – by tackling the educational causes of disengagement and underachievement and low post-16 participation.

2. Get the basics right – ensuring that young people achieve specified levels in functional mathematics, literacy and communication and ICT, and are equipped with the knowledge, skills and attributes needed to succeed in adult life.

3. Strengthen vocational routes – improving the quality and status of vocational programmes delivered by schools, colleges and training providers.

4. Provide greater stretch and challenge – ensuring opportunities for greater breadth and depth of learning. This will help employers and universities to differentiate more effectively between top performers. Stretch and challenge at all levels will encourage young people to think for themselves and be innovative and creative about their learning. Far from dumbing down standards, Tomlinson aimed to stretch the most able academically by allowing them to go way beyond the constraints of exam requirements and for example, take modules of university work while at school.

5. Reduce the assessment burden for learners, teachers, institutions and the system as a whole by reducing the number of times learners are examined

6. Make the system more transparent and easier to understand by rationalising 14-19 curriculum and qualifications within a diploma framework, where progression routes and the value of qualifications are clear.

As you can see, Tomlinson had high expectations of all pupils and rigour in demanding the basics for all and real stretch and challenge. It’s hard to argue against these six points still being just as relevant for reform today. And it’s depressing to think that we have made so little progress on them in the intervening 20 years. Today, however, with the AI juggernaut hurtling towards us, there is an additional requirement: to future-proof the curriculum for the changing world of work.

The one regret Tomlinson had was in not starting from a compelling opening statement of what education is for in his report. In his view, this would have helped to win the argument. He told me:

We should have started with what it is that we want. What should schools be doing to produce the sort of young person that will be moving to adulthood? It’s a simple question, but it needs answering because at the moment we haven’t got an answer for what our education system should be about. It’s not an inclusive system and that doesn’t mean that the excluded are always the least able. I think it would have been wiser if we had started from the end rather than from what we wanted to change in the present system.

As soon as you start to draw up a picture of the 18-year-old you want to emerge from 14 years of education, you realise quite how far away our current model is. That’s why it’s the vital first stage of any reform.

My favourite definition of the purpose of school comes from a group of teachers in 1959. (From The Education of the Average Child written by Albert Rowe) In one way it is dated (not least the use of he throughout), in another, it still has the breadth of ambition that feels a million miles away from today’s transactional, exam-obsessed system.

Where is such a statement of intent today? It certainly wasn’t included in the recent curriculum and assessment review. Without it, we are having sterile arguments about false binaries: knowledge versus skills, academic versus vocational. We need to shape and education system that truly prepares young people to flourish in life and work.

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The Tomlinson reforms

Tomlinson’s humanity comes across in his reforms and was immediately on show when I talked to him.

Why do we have so many kids who hate school? Why do we have so many kids who, at 14, bunk the system?

The whole point of the reforms was that we were recognising that the development of a young person could not be achieved solely through qualifications.

Tomlinson spoke movingly to me about one group of fifteen 16-to 24-year-olds (the Neet age group) who he met as part of the review, not one of whom had any form of formal qualification to their name:

It was the most challenging session I ever had because the crux of what they were saying was a unanimous view that never, ever in their school life, had anyone said you’ve done something right. They said it was just a barrage of criticism. Nobody’s ever told us that we could do something well or had done something well. You know, you were almost brought to tears by them, and I was really affected by that group. I still am. I would fight tooth and nail for them.

A common core

The Tomlinson report proposed a common core – the compulsory foundations for a good education for every child.

These are his six headings with my comments on how they could be taken forward today.

(i) The importance of functional mathematics, functional literacy & communication

Tomlinson told me:

“We had evidence that GCSE mathematics and GCSE English did not make young people numerate and literate.”

This is still the case.

“It is not the proportion that get English and maths at grade four or above, that matters most, but the proportion of young people who satisfy the functional literacy and functional numeracy demands. The easiest way to resolve it, and I hold still to this today, was that young people could sit the functional mathematics and the functional literacy at any point in their educational career.”

We need urgent action on this to ensure every young person is able to pass a basic literacy and numeracy exam before they leave school so they are not trapped in an endless cycle of resits.

Tomlinson was ahead of the game on oracy (communication) too, believing it was crucial to a young person’s development and should be included in the core.

(ii) Functional ICT (we would now include AI)

This is obviously even more important today than 20 years ago. Everyone needs to be competent and confident in understanding and using technology, particularly AI. They should have time and space to experiment, to wrestle with the ethical dilemmas and to understand how it both helps and hinders learning and creativity. The ICT curriculum has been woeful for decades and it was another weakness in the recent curriculum review that the march of AI was not properly addressed.

(iii) An extended project

“A major feature of our proposals is the inclusion of an extended project as part of core learning. Selected by the young person to pursue her/his interests and extend her/his learning in creative and innovative ways, it may take a variety of forms from an essay to a performance or artefact. Its completion will enable learners to develop and demonstrate a range of generic skills, such as problem solving, research and managing their own learning.”

The extended project qualification (EPQ) was a legacy of the Tomlinson report. It is a highly respected qualification - that young people of all abilities can take - and has three levels. 35,000 young people take it each year. The top level is worth half an A level and many universities think it adds an important dimension when selecting candidates. I have had the pleasure of mentoring students who loved the autonomy the project offered them. It is incredibly rewarding for the students, giving them the chance to really follow a passion and create something they are truly proud of – something that too rarely happens in school.

One of the added benefits is that the project would be marked on the thoughtfulness of the process not just the end product, with an oral presentation and questioning marking its completion.

It is now time to make an extended project compulsory for all young people.

(iv) Common knowledge, skills and attributes (CKSA) and personal review, planning and guidance

The Tomlinson report wanted learners to experience “a range of common knowledge, skills and attributes (CKSA) which should be integrated into all 14-19 programmes but with no requirement that they are separately taught or assessed. In addition, learners should be supported in reviewing their learning, with guidance to help them make choices about further learning and careers.”

Today employers are looking for critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, collaboration and great communication and oracy skills. These should be woven throughout the curriculum and embedded in subjects.

Careers guidance and a genuine range of pathways should be signposted for pupils earlier. I found in my conversations with young Neets across the country that technical options are often ignored and at 16 a pupil is too often told to show up at the local college without any guidance at all.

(v) An entitlement to wider activities and experiences

Again, this has even more salience today. Tomlinson says that all young people should have access to a wide range of sporting and cultural experiences and crucially also, to work experience. Young people need opportunities to be off their mobiles and enjoying real world activities. Schools and the wider community have an obligation to provide a richer set of opportunities for every child in every postcode. The government’s upcoming enrichment strategy will be important in taking this forward.

Tomlinson wanted young people to get recognition for all these elements of the core curriculum.

Main learning

He proposed that diplomas would exist at four levels: Entry, Foundation, Intermediate, Advanced.

“Programmes shouldn’t be tightly age-banded: learners should enter at the right level, progress at their own pace and could leave and re-enter with credits.”

This is recognition that having one high-stakes moment at 16 that determines your future makes no sense when so many teenagers mature and develop their learning at different paces.

There would be three pathways:

(i) Academic

(ii) Technical (in schools and colleges)

(iii) Apprenticeships (in workplaces)

There would be proper progression routes for each pathway. As Tomlinson told me:

The problem with so much of our vocational education is that there is no continuity, no progression possible. You come to a bloody great end at level two, and there’s no level three to continue on. I’d want to ensure that within the technical route there are opportunities for progression to level three and beyond. It is unfair to set a kid on a pathway at 14, knowing that there’s nothing they can do at 16 that is continuity. I think that is morally indefensible.

Crucially, all the pathways in his plan would be flexible and there would be the option of moving between pathways. There would also be the chance to combine academic and technical in a blended pathway. Indeed, there is a case for saying this should be for the majority.

This is vital for countering the argument that some young people, particularly those from working class backgrounds, might be pushed into a vocational pathway despite being capable of getting to university - and be stuck there. Similar to Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, Tomlinson wanted a pupil to be able to have the choice to got to university whatever pathway they had started out on.

Detailed Learner Transcript

Tomlinson proposed a learner transcript to capture the full range of every child’s achievements. This is something I have made the case for, with others, over the last few years (and I will write more about it in a separate Substack). I must confess I had not realised Tomlinson had recommended it more than 20 years ago. The idea is simple. Instead of leaving school with merely a set of letters and numbers (in the case of a third of pupils, not very good ones), young people need a record of all their strengths and achievements.

Tomlinson proposed a detailed transcript that would include:

• all components, credits and grades,

• wider activities and skills developed,

• additional achievements beyond the classroom

• with all linked to a rich portfolio containing work samples, projects etc.

This is now being piloted in schools across the UK, extensively in Scotland, as well as across the world, for example Australia. Some will remember a paper version of this called Record of Achievement. Today, with digital technology, the whole process is a lot easier and this is a reform whose time has come.

Assessment reform

Tomlinson proposed that assessment should be conducted “through a range of different styles including time-limited tests and examinations, set assignments, and practical and written tests and observations, some of which should be externally assessed, both to reinforce teachers’ own assessments and to aid national monitoring of standards.”

He believed young people are over-examined – and they are. He believed too, that they should be able to accumulate credits between 14 to 19, often when ready, and not all in one go at 16 when you are forced to sit 30 to 40 exams in a month

That credit system was also crucial in allowing young people who stop a course halfway or move to another school to bank the credits and not have to start from scratch as is still the case today.

Today GCSEs are marked with a system called comparative outcomes which standardises each year’s results against previous years with the result that roughly 30% of pupils are branded a failure year after year. The last three years’ results are proof of this. This is the percentage who have passed:

2023 70.3%

2024 70.4%

2025. 70.5%

Even the architects of this system admit this has disproportionately hurt working class pupils.

Tomlinson admits that the future of GCSEs was left unresolved in his report. But the implication was that in the long-term they should be abolished. It’s clear that in a 14-19 system you don’t need a high stakes school leaving age exam at 16. Over time the government should consider having a far lighter check at 16 – that includes functional literacy and numeracy. In reality if GCSEs still exist in their current form in 10 years time, we will have failed to make the far-reaching reforms the country needs.

And one change that will make it easier to reform GCSEs, is to move to post qualifications admissions (PQA) which means you apply for university after you’ve got your A level grades or equivalent technical qualifications. That way, GCSEs stop becoming essential to university entry.

What people get wrong about ‘parity of esteem’

We need to be honest about the ‘parity of esteem’ argument that has plagued the education debate for decades. Many politicians, indeed, many parents, believe that there is a clear division between the ‘clever’ who go to university and the rest who make do with something vocational to occupy them.

While government can’t mandate what has esteem and what doesn’t – a view shared by Tomlinson – it can and should produce technical pathways that are such high-quality and high status and lead to well-paid careers - that young people from all backgrounds want to take them.

At the moment, one of the reasons for the condescension towards vocational education is that the comparison is often between a high-status academic education and low level vocational or technical education. But as one FE leader said to me the other day, it becomes a different story if you are comparing a regular graduate on the one hand and Gordon Ramsay on the other.

We need to be careful with the ‘graduation cap versus hard hat’ comparison in Burnham’s announcement this week. While we want and need more people in trades such as plumbing, bricklaying, technical education is so much more than that. As Burnham has said himself, it “includes advanced manufacturing, AI, digital and technology, clean energy, life sciences, construction, health and care, or the creative industries, depending on local strengths and where the jobs of the future are being created.”

What is rapidly changing the whole parity argument is that work is changing – not least because if AI. All jobs combine thinking and doing. And all young people need to do both academic and technical education while at school. That is why an overarching qualification – not separate lanes – must be the right long-term approach.

What matters most is that all young people, whatever their background, need a real choice - the chance to go to university, the chance too of a high-quality technical route. They are not in opposition to each other. Both are needed. Both should be high status. That is surely not too much to ask.

New models of technical education

Getting more technical education into schools, not least from 14-16, is difficult and over time will require a lot more funding for facilities and better relationships with FE colleges. In my experience, what often happens is that pupils go to the local college for two days a week but that could fall on the days when they will miss a lot of english and maths lessons and so fall further behind in the basics. So there is a big timetabling challenge.

There has also been a cut-back in the amount of exposure of young people to the workplace with many of the young people I spoke to as part of the report Inside the Mind of a Young Neet, having done none at all. Work experience needs to become compulsory in the future.

But since Tomlinson published his report, new models of technical education have emerged as well as excellent partnerships between schools, FE colleges and businesses. They point the way to what the future might look like and need to be developed urgently.

UTCs

Former education secretary, Ken Baker, has been behind the growth of University Technical Colleges that provide industry -linked technical education from 14-19. After some teething troubles, they are now in many cases a model of the kind of education Burnham is looking to promote. There are currently 44 of them serving more than 20,000 young people.

UTCs are state-funded, all-ability secondary schools that have a core academic curriculum, normally English, maths, science and other GCSEs or A levels. The key is that they have a substantial technical specialism, such as engineering, advanced manufacturing, computing, cybersecurity, health sciences, construction, energy or creative media. They offer technical qualifications and practical work using industry-standard equipment. Employers offer a rich mix of projects, mentoring, workplace experience and careers activity. Each UTC is supported by at least one university and a group of employer partners. Universities contribute to curriculum design, governance, specialist teaching and access to facilities, employers help design and deliver projects and provide insight into real occupations.

For many young people, particularly disaffected boys, UTCs have given them a new lease of life. They have purpose, they feel they are treated more like adults and the things they often found hard when taught in isolation – like aspects of maths – suddenly become easier to grasp when linked to a real world problem.

The UTC sleeve

This is a new development. It is recognition that there are not always the resources to set up a brand-new UTC so instead there could be a ‘sleeve’ or unit within an existing secondary school offering a group of pupils a similarly high-quality technical education. In practice this means spending time in workshops and laboratories, and working on practical projects often set by employers. In addition, pupils receive careers guidance, work experience and employer mentoring. They also continue studying essential academic subjects such as English, maths and science.

Industry sixth forms

The model is best described as an industry academy: a small, specialist post-16 institution that attempts to reproduce the culture, working practices and expectations of a particular sector. There are some stand out examples like the London Screen Academy and East London Arts and Music as well as Ada, which specialises in digital skills. While a normal sixth form begins with a menu of subjects like history, biology, economics, an industry academy begins with a question such as: what knowledge, technical skills and professional behaviours does someone need to enter the screen, music, fashion or technology industries? Industry involvement is baked in from the start in terms of help writing the curriculum, setting live briefs and projects, providing mentors and masterclasses, assessing performances, portfolios or productions, offering placements and work experience, contributing equipment and facilities and helping students secure apprenticeships, employment and freelance work. The place feels like a more professional and purposeful working environment than a traditional school. At the moment, we just have a few. We could do with at least 100 of these across the UK.

10 steps to kickstart change

So, what steps could the government take to build on the ideas of the Tomlinson report? Here are ten that could kickstart change.

All of these ten points could be steps on the way to a new 14-19 landscape, a modern version of Tomlinson.

Opponents of Change

But none of it will be easy.

Let’s go through some of the arguments that opponents are already putting forward.

First, there is the perennial ‘dumbing down’, ‘soft on standards’ argument. Former education secretary, Michael Gove recently branded technical education - as ‘bring back stupid’, showing an inability to acknowledge the possibility that you can have rigour in history and science and rigour in engineering, plumbing and robotics. He does not address the one million young Neets, many of whom want to get high-quality technical training to set them up for well-paid job.

Second, there is the logistical argument. It’s too expensive, it’s too hard to do both academic and technical in one school, so let’s not bother. There are logistical issues. But the fact that it’s difficult, is surely not a reason to abandon the idea. Many European countries do it well, surely we can too. There are, as this piece suggest, promising examples of how technical education is already making a real difference.

Third, there are those who just defend the status quo - ‘it’s the best we can do, so let’s not rock the boat’. They ignore the third who fail GCSEs each year, and turn a blind eye to the one million Neets, the levels of school absence, the polling that suggests motivation and engagement is low, and the employers that say that school is not preparing young people for the future.

But this time, I sense growing confidence to counter these arguments and a prime minister who wants to make change happen.

Tomlinson’s legacy

I’ll leave the last word to Mike Tomlinson.

“People have said to me, ‘How do I feel about it not being implemented?’ My answer has been, Well, as a child I would write a list of what I wanted Father Christmas
to deliver to me, but I knew that I wasn’t going to get it all.”

For the sake of the next generation, now is the time to implement a modern version of
the Tomlinson report.

The ‘first hundred days’ have become a thing in politics. The term originates from Franklin D Roosevelt who became president in 1933 and embarked on a special congressional session that lasted 100 days in which he passed 15 major bills – the New Deal - that ensured the United States recovered from the Great Depression. Ever since, it has been seen as the model of “hitting the ground running.”

Today – the ‘first 100 days’ is acknowledgement that first impressions count. In the case of Andy Burnham – seventh prime minister in 10 years and the Labour Party deeply unpopular – this is the chance, maybe the last chance, to turn around the government’s fortunes.

There is, of course, no magic to 100 days as opposed to 90 or 110, but seeing each term (to use the unit of time I’m familiar with as a former teacher) as a key strategic period is a useful way to govern. Thinking in 100 day or three-month chunks forces the government to think beyond getting through the week.

Of course, all of these three-month periods should be part of an overarching strategy that Burnham puts together with a 2/3 year horizon, working back from where he wants to be at the next election. This in turn will need to fit into the 10-year plan that he has promised.

I used to write these strategies in Number 10. They require pulling together several inputs from different parts of the building: the policy announcements, the big events, a speech programme – all in pursuit of the key strategic objectives for the period.

Done well, the plan gives purpose and direction to Number 10 and the government. Rather than the prime minister’s diary being filled with activities from those who shout the loudest, this is a strategic way of ensuring he spends his time (his most precious commodity) in the most effective way possible.

What follows is what a three-month plan could look like; a template for the kind of short document that ultimately needs to be interrogated and then signed off by the prime minister.

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How to compile a 100 day/three-month strategic plan

Objectives

This is the key starting point. What does the prime minister want to have achieved in the first 100 days and how will he measure success?

I have given some examples below of what the objectives might look like (ideally there would be 3 to 5 - I’ve done a menu of 6) and the kinds of steps that might exemplify them.

(i)To establish that Burnham is an insurgent and his government represents a ‘circuit breaker’

e.g

a. Appoint a Cabinet with the biggest reformers in the key positions and an instruction to work at pace.

b. Structural changes – reforming the centre of government plus creating task forces/mission teams to deliver the key priorities. (Instead of assuming that new Ministers and one more heave from departments will get there)

c. Make No10 North work as a new centre of power outside of Westminster

d. Signal new policy directions e.g on education

(ii)To bring to life his big idea about devolution and ‘rewiring the state’

Burnham’s big idea is to hand power back to the people and tackle an overly-centralised state. This needs to be worked into a narrative that lands with the public, accompanied by a set of speeches, activities and policies that bring it alive

e.g.

a. A new devolution settlement with new powers and resources to communities

b. A massive reduction in Whitehall numbers and functions.

c. No 10 North opened and staffed and Burnham working there each week

(iii)To demonstrate a willingness to take tough decisions

If the perceived weakness is that Burnham is not willing to take tough decisions, he can establish the reverse in the first few months. And there will be many opportunities to do so.

e.g.

a. The zeal with which he gets stuck into public service and welfare reform

b. The tough choices in the first budget

c. the message of trade-offs to the faithful at party conference

(iv)To connect with the electorate and get them to take a second look at Labour

e.g.

a. Design a new communications strategy

b. Use Labour Party conference for a reset with the public

c. Use No10 North as a platform for keeping in constant touch with the public.

(v) To show economic credibility and a plan for a new economy

e.g.

a. Deliver a successful first Budget giving confidence there is a credible economic

plan for stability and growth in every postcode

b. Unleash the power of business – particularly small and medium sized businesses - to create wealth

c. Take the first steps to making the tax system fairer

d. Take tough decisions on spending eg welfare spending

(vi) To show he is sure-footed on the international stage

e.g.

a. First meeting with Trump

b. First meeting with European leaders

c. First visit to Ukraine

d. First armed forces visit

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Narrative

The narrative – or washing line – is what all (or most) announcements should hang off. The narrative has to be big and go way beyond – ‘this is a cost of living government’.

It needs to capture three things:

1. The big argument about an overly-centralised state and an unequal society requiring a new politics and a new economy - connected to the future and personal aspiration

2. A story about Britain’s place in the world – how it gets its reputation back - after the last 10 years of instability

3. A personal story about Burnham and his values and purpose

The narrative should be turned into a message note that gives Cabinet Ministers the context for all their communications and shows everyone pulling in the same direction.

Speech programme

Speeches still matter. They are where arguments are honed and stakeholders and the public get a sense of clarity and direction. Continuous explanation (long form and short form) is essential for a government to be effective in the attention economy. For a new prime minister this is particularly important.

e.g. He should make a series of big reforming speeches in the first few months that might include:

a. How I will rewire the state

b. Why we need to rethink education providing parity of esteem between academic and vocational.

c. How I will give young people their future back – building on Neet review etc

d. Why we need to change our economic model to ensure living standards rise

e. The part you can play in renewing Britain

f. My vision of Britain in the world

Big moments

There will be key moments during the first 100 days that need to be planned for. Some are already fixed: the leaders’ speech at Labour Party Conference, the first PMQs. Others are still to be scheduled (I have guessed when they might be in the table below). Some, not yet scheduled, are likely to happen in the next few months – for example, the first meeting with Trump, and the first major engagement with EU leaders.

The key is to build a strategy around them.

Building Burnham’s profile

Burnham needs to define himself as prime minister before opponents do it for him.

The public do not know Burnham well. While he is loved in Manchester, the rest of the country needs to get to know him. Some of this will come in his good use of social media and his successful narration of his premiership. But there needs to be a strategic view too of how he is seen to be making the shift from Mayor to Prime Minister.

The sort of questions that need answering are:

a. How does he want to tell his own personal story - his family, his political journey, his hopes and fears, his interests and passions?

b. What media vehicles best suit his new style of politics?

c. How does he best engage with opponents? How does he demonstrate his aim of greater cross-party working? How should he handle PMQs?

d. How does he remain an insurgent and not become just another incumbent? Should he have weekly/fortnightly town hall meetings? How should he use No 10 North as an antidote to Westminster business as usual? One sign of success would be that the political lobby has to create its own ‘Lobby North’ to reflect the amount of activity going on outside of London.

Designing a ‘playlist’ of big issues and arguments that need to be fought for each day.

What are the four or five big things that the government is fighting for on a daily/weekly basis? This is where the idea of a story factory comes in. Each of these needs a constant stream of media stories to win the argument and show progress. How does the prime minister’s diary reflect these priorities?

E.g.

a. Building more social housing

b. Growth in every postcode

c. Fairer utility bills

d. Parity of esteem in education between academic and technical

e. Reform of social care

One of the many reasons why the British government has been so unstable in recent years has been the lack of strategy and strategic capacity in Number 10. Short-term tactics have dominated over long-term strategy. Now is the time to reassert the importance of having clear objectives for each three-month period and relentlessly pursuing them. That is a good way of showing ‘grip’ and providing the clarity and purpose Britain so desperately needs.

Anyone taking over an organisation needs to wrestle with a central challenge – how much continuity and how much change?

For Andy Burnham it’s tricky. He’s promised to stick to the 2024 Labour manifesto. He will inherit the same challenges. He has the same 403 MPs to choose his Ministers from. So on the surface there is unavoidable continuity. At the same he will want to show that he represents a big change - in priorities, in approach, in communications and hopefully over time, in popularity.

But how to do this?

Here are five shifts in approach that over time could signal a different and more effective government. (More on A to B thinking can be found in one of my previous Substacks - here)

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1. From transactional politics to movement building

Too much of politics has become transactional. The governing assumption of the last two years is that cutting waiting lists and helping out with the cost of living will produce a political dividend. But it hasn’t and it won’t. It’s not that these things shouldn’t be done. They are important. But they are not sufficient. Labour needs to start building a project. People want to be seen, to be heard, to be given hope, to be part of something bigger than themselves. None of the 4OO young Neets I spoke to across the country talked to me about their financial situation, despite all but a handful being skint. That’s because what mattered most was getting a job, having a purpose, feeling they were getting on in life. In other words they want politicians to promote opportunity not just security. They want wind in their sails. And so does the rest of the country.

Burnham needs to construct an ambitious long-term project for the country and the Labour Party. The difference between having a project and being a problem solver is the difference between being on the front foot with your own agenda and merely responding to events. We keep being told that Burnham has a big in-tray. He does. But he needs to create his own to-do list and not just have one thrust upon him. He has already articulated two causes that he could build into a powerful movement: putting power in the hands of people and places and giving young people their future back. Both are right for the country, right for the Labour Party and have emotional power behind them.

The mistake to avoid: believing that transactional policies will win back the public.

2. From a blame culture to a collaborative culture

Politics is inherently competitive and individualistic. Sharp elbows. Winner takes all. Departmental silos. Prime Ministerial patronage. All work against collaboration. All ultimately lead to a toxic culture: people briefing against each other to get ahead. Refusing to take responsibility. Blaming others when things go wrong. Using privileged information to flaunt their status with journalists.

There has been little pulling together in the last two years. The Number 10 culture, the cabinet culture, the Whitehall culture has too often dragged down effective government.

Creating a culture of collaboration, of purpose, of urgency, of innovation, is perhaps the most important role of the new prime minister. He needs to set a different tone. To be clear on the expectations; what is acceptable and what isn’t. Burnham needs to model it and act decisively when people defy it.

It starts by making the centre of government an enjoyable and purposeful place to work. This matters a) for the effectiveness of the government b) for attracting the best talent c) for riding waves of unpopularity or media onslaught.

The new cabinet needs to be built into a high functioning team. That requires time to work properly together. As a first step, they should all work in the same open-plan office over the summer planning the way forward, building trust, and collaborating across departments.

The mistake to avoid: believing the culture will take care of itself because Andy is a nice guy.

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3. From incrementalism to bold reforms

One of the most powerful critiques of the last 2 years is that there have been good intentions and good policies, but there has not been enough welly behind them. There have been attempts to reform the planning system, yet too few homes have been built. There has been talk of closing asylum hotels but it’s painfully slow. There have been some measures to boost growth but they have been hampered by other policies that have stifled it. There has been a review of the curriculum and assessment but it was painfully timid, and failed to provide any way forward for our broken exam system.

If Burnham is to become the much-needed reformer of public services and the welfare state, then he will have to act quickly to put in place the architecture of real innovation and delivery.

In most cases, departments will not move fast enough nor have the infrastructure for delivery, so task forces or mission teams will need to be created: for tackling the Neet crisis, reforming schools, house building, parity of esteem between technical and academic education, closing asylum hotels, taking control of utilities, getting regional growth.

This requires a talent strategy to find the best leaders in the world for each of these areas. In each case, someone empowered to hire a multi-disciplinary team with the resources and the freedom to get the job done at pace. Think vaccine task force.

The mistake to avoid: believing that with a bit more oomph departments are equipped to deliver.

4. From ‘one and done’ communications to ‘always on’

The government needs to understand the full implications of new communications. This is not just about Andy Burnham being skilled on social media, though that is a start. It’s about totally ‘rewiring’ the way the government communicates.

This means moving from the government grid to a playbook method of communications. From a polished ‘event’ once a fortnight (one and done) to a continuous narration and explanation of the government’s intentions (always on).

By playbook I mean deciding on the campaigns and arguments that need winning and then going out and winning them every day. The current approach of only letting departments communicate when it’s their slot on the grid in three weeks’ time, means many arguments are lost before a Minister has started making the case for them.

I have argued for new roles at number 10 - the head of a content creation studio, (to produce video content) and the head of a story factory, (to generate compelling stories that provide real energy and debate in contrast to boring policy nuggets that go nowhere) which are essential if the government wants to seize the agenda and then keep it.

We need a prime minister who speaks fearlessly to voters every week – phone-ins, town hall meetings, serious engagement with opponents, including Reform voters.

The mistake to avoid: believing good social media is a substitute for a radical overhaul of communications.

5. From incumbent to insurgent

Burnham has rightly made much of his absence from Westminster over the last decade. In that time he has become a bottom-up politician, railing against the top-down injustices of an out of touch Westminster. So he has an argument and an enemy, great things for successful political narrative. He has the vibe of an insurgent but how can that be maintained once he is ensconced in Number 10? How does the ultimate insider, the person now presiding over Westminster and Whitehall channel that insurgent energy that is so desired by the electorate, particularly those frustrated by the timidity of mainstream parties? No10 North is part of the solution. So is the speed and radicalism of any devolution agenda and the rewiring of Whitehall. So is giving every region - including the North East, the South West, the Midlands, the South East - a pivotal role in key national projects of renewal.

The mistake to avoid: giving in to the pressure to shut up about Manchester!

“We are infantilised the moment we walk in here.” This was one of many stark comments from Labour backbench MPs who I have spoken to over the last few months.

There is a mixture of frustration, anger and sadness from MPs who had such high hopes and pride at getting elected, but feel in many cases that they have been treated badly ever since.

“There is so much that could be done with backbenchers, we are just not used,” one MP told me.

A big majority means a lot of MPs. Some are there who didn’t expect to be. Some have wafer thin majorities. Many arrive from high-powered jobs: running councils, military heroes, successful barristers, respected economists, social entrepreneurs, public servants. Labour has 403 of them.

Andy Burnham, the incoming prime minister, wants a big change to create a more vibrant and trusted politics: doing away with the current whipping system, or at least watering it down, so that MPs can better represent the places that sent them to Parliament.

The Whips are notorious in politics. The people with the power to make or break careers, using fair means or foul to get MPs to do as they are told.

Each week they send MPs a list of votes with an instruction:

1. One-Line Whip: Indicates a relatively low-priority vote where MPs are encouraged to attend but are not strictly required to do so.

2. Two-Line Whip: Indicates a more important vote where attendance is strongly encouraged, and MPs are expected to adhere to the party line.

3. Three-Line Whip: The most stringent instruction, requiring MPs to attend and vote in accordance with the party’s position. Defying a three-line whip is considered a serious breach of party discipline and can result in severe consequences, such as suspension from the party.

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The term whip derives from hunting, where a “whipper-in” was the person responsible for using a physical whip to keep the hounds from straying from the pack. These origins are not lost on MPs.

In Head North, written with Mayor of Liverpool Steve Rotherham, Burnham wrote:

Our experience of the Parliamentary whip system is that it has the effect of transferring power out of this flawed Parliament and into a small number of hands – largely unelected – in the heart of the Whitehall machine.

He went on to say:

When we were first elected as MPs, and entered Parliament, we were labouring under the misapprehension that we would have real power to change some of the things we came to see as wrong when we were growing up. It was not long before we realised that was a mirage. Unlike the US, where elected representatives are allowed an independence of thought, the UK’s whip system turns representatives of the people into human rubber stamps – or, in a phrase MPs use knowingly about themselves, ‘lobby fodder’.

From my research into the rise of populism and the disaffection with politics, one of the things that comes up repeatedly is the feeling that politicians are reading from a script, playing a game, and not being their authentic self. We can debate whether the celebritification of public life is a good thing or not, but what is clear is the public responds to a personality; politicians who are able to stand up for what they believe. That’s why I am with Andy Burnham on this one and always have been. I am attracted to the more fluid American system, (despite presidential and parliamentary systems being very different) where politicians have more freedom to stand up for the place they represent.

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The case for reform

Here are three reasons Burnham is right to make change.

First, it would make representation more place-based

Why should we expect an inner-city MP to vote exactly the same way as a rural MP? Why should we expect a leafy suburb to have the same needs as a post-industrial Northern town? Place matters. That’s why Mayors are the most popular politicians in the country. They put place first and party second and that’s what people respond to.

Take a look at the table below. Two contrasting constituencies. One, Keir Starmer’s in Camden. The other, Torcuil Crichton’s in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, formerly the Western Isles. Both Labour. But very different – in size, in age, in housing, in the local economy.

Are there policies that should apply to both? Yes. Should these two MPs be made to vote the same way on everything? No.

2. It would improve policy

Whipping makes all disagreement look like disloyalty.

But surely we want to use the expertise of MPs. We want them to improve legislation. We want them to tell Ministers why things won’t work. A government that has to negotiate with its own MPs is more likely to spot practical problems early: rural transport anomalies, coastal deprivation, skills gaps, farming impacts, SEND pressures, and so on.

The Whips’ Office currently does pass backbench concerns up to the leadership, but the pressure still runs overwhelmingly in the other direction.

One MP told me, “I tried to constructively improve policy for those with disabilities but I was threatened with losing my job.”

3. It would restore trust

Too many Commons votes are foregone conclusions. If MPs could amend, disagree and negotiate without career death, debates would matter more. Select committees already show that cross-party, evidence-led politics is possible; the Commons’ chamber could learn from that.

At present, MPs often say one thing privately, another thing locally, and a third thing when they have to vote. This breeds cynicism and lack of trust.

As Burnham reflected:

When an important issue is being discussed in the Commons, and people all over the country are tuning in to hear it, it is often the case that they simply cannot understand how the vote comes in as it does. This is because the debate will often reflect the passion of MPs who turn up to speak. However, what people will not realise is that there are many more who are not listening to a word of the debate and will emerge from their office or the Strangers’ Bar when the division bell sounds to vote as they are told. This does more damage to trust in politics and Parliament than people in there realise.

Increasing rebellions

There is clear evidence that even without changes to the whipping system, over time more MPs are getting a taste for rebellion.

Thanks to the research of Philip Norton and separately Cowley and Stuart we can piece together the post-war trends which show clearly the increase in rebellions after 1997.

So whether the government of the day likes it or now, MPs are becoming more independent-minded. That is a good argument for making sensible changes to the whipping system, so that acts of rebellion are channelled into more constructive forms of dialogue.

The case against

The party managers of all parties will shudder at the thought of loosening party discipline. They will be armed with arguments, many of which need to be taken seriously.

The first thing that is worth stating is perhaps the most obvious, that with a big majority more flexibility towards MPs is easier. All of this is harder if the majority is in single fingers.

Hilary Armstrong, a brilliant chief whip under Tony Blair, says that if her team knew that a three line whip made it very hard for someone because of their local context she would let them off the whip.

But there is also a balance to be struck, she says, between the independence of MPs and the fact that they owe their victory to the national campaign, the national platform and the national manifestos.

There is a trust issue too. An election victory is a mandate to implement a manifesto not have an anarchic free-for-all in which key policies are watered down.

The case against is also about the possibility of small factions holding the government to ransom and MPs becoming vulnerable to lobbyists or being spooked by media storms.

“Pork barrel” politics is the name given to representatives who rather than scrutinising legislation objectively, try to extract more money for the place they represent or the specific cause they are fighting for. In America this is commonplace. Some would argue we don’t want that to happen here to the same extent. (Others might say, that’s the essence of place-based politics.)

Change that might work

What I took from my conversation with Armstrong is that there needs to be a return to the sophistication of a whips’ operation that did allow diversion from the norm. A whips team that did a ring around of MPs at the weekend not so much to enforce discipline but to genuinely listen and find out what was going on for that MP and for their constituency: issues bubbling up and arguments that needed countering. With so many current MPs sitting on small majorities this is even more important.

“Ultimately,” she says, “politics like everything else is about relationships. It’s about respecting MPs, respecting Parliament and building strong relationships with MPs. Government has to always remember that MPs are not just selected to be the party hack, they are elected by the public.”

So changes need to be careful, deliberate and properly explained. Something like this:

• Fewer three-line whips and reserved for manifesto commitments, budgets, confidence motions and core government survival votes.

• New ways of working with MPs to ensure their expertise is used more extensively in shaping policy.

• New ways of MPs engaging the public to provide better feedback loops on policy and legislation - including deliberative democracy and citizens’ juries. This has been tried successfully

• No withdrawal of the whip for a good-faith constituency vote, provided the MP publishes their reasons. In an extreme example, Hilary Armstrong reminded me that when she discovered Jeremy Corbyn had voted against the Labour government more often than the Tories had, she asked Tony Blair what he wanted to do about it. Despite New Labour’s reputation for ‘control freakery’ at the time, Blair said suspending him wasn’t worth the hassle.

• A stronger set of processes so that MPs can scrutinise and amend legislation without it being characterised as disloyalty.

Andy Burnham is right to do everything he can to connect politics once more to the people and to places. He knows too, that many are sceptical.

Whenever you raise this idea of removing the whip system, they like to dismiss it out of hand as political naivety. What I would say back to them is this: political naivety is seeing the dangerous decline of trust in politicians and doing nothing to change the system which has brought that about.

Rebuilding trust in politics can only be done by taking bold moves to do things differently. Being an authentic politician who fights for their area, who puts place before party – at least some of the time – could be one of those steps that produces real change.

It won’t be easy. The mainstream media, too often stuck in the old ways of doing things, will still characterise disagreement as conflict. But it’s just possible that over time, the country will see more confident MPs, more authentic views and ultimately start to trust politicians a bit more in their attempts to change the country.

I’ve just returned to the UK from a wedding in the United States. A lot seems to have happened in my absence! There is definitely a renewed sense of possibility in the air.

Can Andy Burnham become the first mainstream politician to successfully embrace the anti-establishment, anti-Westminster, anti-bureaucracy, ‘just get things done’ feeling in the country?

Can he harness the anti ‘business as usual’ impulse that sent Trump to the White House – twice, Farage to surge in the polls, and populists to win across the world, and channel it into a powerful insurgent movement for change?

Seven prime ministers in the last 10 years is the clearest sign that the damaging, needless, generational-defining mistake of Brexit has left Britain rudderless and on the backfoot. Change has been promised, attempted, argued for, by each of those Prime Ministers. There has been clear progress in the last two years. But voters’ patience remains at breaking point and Reform is waiting in the wings.

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So, this is it. The final chance for a politician from one of two traditional mainstream parties to make the change needed to put the country back on track and see off the populists.

Andy Burnham comes armed with something neglected, something important, something game-changing – a big argument. He makes a compelling case that Britain is overly centralised and top-down, in contrast to the bottom-up politics he has practiced in Manchester over the last ten years. He has a take on the world. He has a diagnosis. He has some solutions.

Changing the story

In the words of this Substack, it’s about changing the story.

Changing the story to hope. Changing the story to possibility. And crucially for think tanks, policy makers, businesses, charities, social entrepreneurs, he is asking them to contribute to a big question. “How do we get all parts of the country firing?”

Manchesterism is about place-powered growth: devolve power to a real economic region, build long-term civic institutions, use public authority to shape markets, and turn growth into better transport, education, housing, skills, jobs and public services.

There will be critics who will say it’s anti-southern, too parochial, doesn’t meet the challenges of this moment. He should ignore the doubters and not make Starmer’s mistake of spending two years in opposition making the case for mission government, as a way of building a movement for change, only to abandon it once in power. This is Burnham’s project. He is fired up about it and should see it through.

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In the work I have done on the rise of right-wing populism, and in the more recent work on young Neets, I have been struck by the feeling of so many that they have been disrespected, that their lives are harder than they should be, that the next generation has had its future stolen, that there is so much untapped potential. This lack of agency is corrosive. It is felt acutely by those who do not go to university and have few routes to success and by those in crumbling towns with little prospect of fulfilling their aspirations. It is a cry for fairness. And for the rebuilding of the ladders of opportunity.

Politics not economics is the root cause of our problems

It is fashionable to say that the root cause of Britain’s ills is economic stagnation. Burnham’s diagnosis is different. He starts with politics. It’s the broken political system that both sustains and is responsible for the lack of growth and lack of opportunity.

Everything he believes flows from the erosion of political trust, from a Westminster politics that is dysfunctional and a Whitehall that finds it so hard to get anything done. I think he’s right.

For Burnham, there is a clear enemy – the centralised, out-of-touch state.

In Head North, the book he wrote with Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotherham, he says:

Westminster remains an antiquated world into which degrees of democracy were introduced as the franchise was extended. But, fundamentally, it remains the same: a system built to concentrate power in the hands of the already-powerful and that much has not changed through the centuries. This over-concentration of political power in one place in too few hands is the main reason why Britain is one of the most politically centralised and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world. In our view, it is also the underlying explanation for more widespread failure.

And he elaborated on it in his speech this week:

The stark imbalance in resources between national government and local government is holding back growth. If councils can’t fix potholes, what chance do they have of bringing forward major regeneration schemes to get growth going? While national government has got bigger, particularly since the pandemic, local government is threadbare and without the resources to fulfil even statutory responsibilities. This is not just bad for councils and the areas they serve; it is bad for everywhere.

With a powerful statement of intent:

I am going to give Britain the circuit-breaker it needs, by building a more collaborative politics in Westminster, by taking power out of the centre and putting it in the hands of the people and places who can use it best and, in so doing, creating a new sense of agency, possibility and hope flowing around the country.

The agenda that flows from this, driven by No 10 North – to ‘rewire the state’ - requires not just devolution, but an overhaul of Whitehall: the skills of the people it recruits, the incentives that drive the culture, the ending of artificial silos. But Burnham should be under no illusions that the mismatch between Mayors thinking about place and governments thinking in departments will be incredibly hard to change.

What Burnham understands are the issues that really matter in rebuilding trust between politicians and the people. The issues that have eaten away at pride, self-esteem and aspiration. Get these right and he might be able to lance the Farage boil:

• A 10 year mission to raise living standards

• Rebuilding the high streets

• Growth in every postcode

• A ‘complete rethink of the education system’

• A fairer tax system.

He is doing something else as well. He is building a politics that is authentic to him. His ‘irreducible core’ is about fighting for people and places.

His personal story is about a growing radicalisation and alienation from the workings of Westminster as a result of Hillsborough, Covid, and being forced repeatedly as Mayor to go cap in hand to get more out of the government.

Mayors have to be collaborators. To get things done they need to be convenors and persuaders; getting multiple actors to pull in the same direction whatever party they belong to.

New politics

Burnham’s mantra reflects this:

1. Place-first not party first.

2. Problem solving, not point scoring.

3. Long-term not short term.

But Westminster makes this very hard, particularly the first one. The House of Commons demands Punch and Judy, point scoring - not least at PMQs where the aim is to rile up your own backbenchers.

At its heart Burnham’s big devolution argument and new politics could pull off something audacious – a revolt of the people against the populists.

Where Farage offers victimhood, Burnham offers agency.

Where Farage offers scapegoats, Burnham offers common purpose.

Where Farage offers a return to the past, Burnham offers hope for a better future.

His narrative, launched into the mayhem of the attention economy, has the potential to be a long-running box set, rather than a 30 second Tik Tok clip.

All good narratives get you thinking; this one has the potential to do just that.

What if schools were run by Mayors not the DFE?

What if every project/mission had a regional HQ to drive it?

e.g.

• Advanced manufacturing from the Midlands;

• Housing and planning from the North West;

• Youth opportunity/ Neet zero from Birmingham or the North East;

• AI and digital government from Cambridge, Bristol or Edinburgh.

What if there was one civil service – local and national combined – and everyone who joins does a stint in both?

Pride in a place called Britain

Finally, a big challenge.

If this is to be a successful fightback against Reform - a positive story that builds a new coalition - then there is one element missing from the Burnham speech that will become vital in Number 10. How he ladders up a sense of local pride into a bigger sense of national pride. Pride in a place called Britain.

How does Burnham become someone who fights for Britain with as much passion as he has fought for Manchester? To show how massive devolution to communities does not undermine national purpose but strengthens it.

A country that is more than a collection of proud towns and cities but a nation with a renewed sense of direction and confidence in its place in the world. Leading in Europe again. Standing up for British values. A beacon to the world for human ingenuity and innovation. Pride in local places and pride in country.

Then, this grassroots revolt - this new bottom-up politics - really might restore hope and see off the populists.

People say Britain is ungovernable; the challenges we face are too big. That it is impossible being Prime Minister these days. Six prime ministers in ten years is all the proof you need.

But I just don’t buy it. The British state is in many ways stuck in the past, but it can be gripped.

All successful governments are in the end about talent. It needs a dynamic Prime Minister leading a group of key ministers, civil servants and advisors who are:

a) the right people in the right jobs

b) moulded into a high functioning team

c) given a powerful sense of direction and

d) empowered to lead, take risks and innovate

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That requires three things for success: finding, recruiting and retaining the best talent.

Yet, each of those things is done badly in politics, and in recent years, particularly badly. There are too many incredible people who have been put off working in government. There are also too many talented people who are knocking on the door of government to offer their services but are ignored or rebuffed.

Finding talent does not just mean asking a few trusted people to cough up the names of their friends but doing a proper search beyond the usual suspects – genuinely encouraging applications from the widest possible range of backgrounds. It often requires persuading people to take a pay cut and be in the media firing line – all for the pleasure of serving their country.

Recruiting talent means having processes that genuinely try to ensure the best person for the job gets the position. One revolutionary (for government) but essential thing that should be done is to interview for all the key jobs with a proper field of applicants. And I include Cabinet posts in this.

Retaining talent means valuing people, trusting them, respecting them – and not throwing them under the bus if they make a mistake.

Large amounts of turnover suggest either bad appointments in the first place, the wrong people in the wrong roles, or a failure to treat people properly so they leave.

In politics, there is something else that can dominate and cause harm – and that is putting ideological purity over competence: better to have someone with no leadership qualities whatsoever, as long as they are in my faction.

This post suggests there are a group of 25 roles which are crucial to making the British government effective. Get the appointments to these roles right, then let them build high functioning teams, and big change is possible.

Everyone will have a slightly different list. And of course, I could have named the entire Cabinet, because all of them wield immense power. I have instead chosen those I believe should form the engine of a state that could drive real change.

These will be the crucial appointments of any new Prime Minister.

For each role I outline the big change needed - changing the story - the kind of ‘A to B thinking.’ I wrote about in this Substack.

I then set out a brief job description for each. This, of course, would be shaped to the context and the political mandate of the government.

Too often roles have no job description at all, or the politician has no idea what the Prime Minister really wants from them, or the civil servant has a list of 15 responsibilities, none of which are prioritised, or the advisor is kept busy with meeting after meeting without a driving purpose.

So here’s the list. Some are about giving an existing traditional job a sharper focus. Others are suggestions for brand new roles to make government more effective (marked with an asterisk), e.g chief builder, a head of participation, a director of content creation and a head of devolution.

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The Engine Room of Change

1. Prime Minister

Changing the story: From pessimism and decline to optimism and possibility

Job Description

• To set a powerful direction for the country

• To understand the future and position the country to take advantage of the opportunities and mitigate the risks

• To hold the space for a purposeful national conversation

• To drive change with unrelenting pace and direction

• To exercise sound judgement on vital matters including national security and unexpected crises

• To attract the best talent and build high functioning teams

2. Chancellor

Working with a team of important growth Ministers including climate change, energy, technology business, housing and transport.

Changing the story: From a faltering economy that holds people back to an economy unleashed to grow and create new wealth for everyone

Job Description

• To grow the economy

• To create the best possible climate for wealth creation

• To ensure every part of the country creates wealth and benefits from wealth

• To ensure the tax and benefits system is fair and promotes work and higher living standards.

3. Home Secretary

Working hand in glove with the Justice Secretary.

Changing the story: From fear and loss of control, to control over our streets, our communities and our borders

Job Description

• To keep the public safe and promote social cohesion and an integrated society

• To ensure that the criminal justice system works effectively from police to courts

• To ensure the immigration and asylum system has integrity, speed and fairness

4. Chief of Staff at Number 10

Changing the story: From noise and competing agendas to grip and a powerful sense of direction

Job Description

• To grip the centre of government and make sound judgements – controlling the Prime Minister’s time, meetings, decision flow and follow-up; making sure the private office, policy unit, political team, comms team and delivery operation are aligned; and prevent drift, duplication and chaos.

• To drive the Prime Minister’s agenda and turn political priorities into effective government action.

• To act as the PM’s senior political operator and chief troubleshooter, managing relations with Cabinet, MPs, advisers, party HQ, and key external players. Ensure the right people are in the right jobs – including these 25. and these

• To spot problems early, coordinate the response to crises, and protect the PM from political damage.

5. Principal Private Secretary at Number 10

Changing the story: From Whitehall bureaucratic sluggishness to pacy, co-ordinated, timely, decision making

Job Description

• To ensure Whitehall acts on the Prime Minister’s priorities and blockages are removed

• To ensure the Prime Minister’s attention is sequenced on making the right decisions at the right time.

• Ensure all meetings, papers, engagements are properly organised, high quality and effective

6. Chief Secretary to the Treasury

Changing the story: From managing the system to shaping a taxation and spending agenda that meets the priorities and values of the government

Job Description

• To ensure that there is enough money to spend prudently on the government’s key priorities and on outputs and impact

• To ensure that spending is under control

• To root out wasteful spending

• To make sure there is the right balance between taxation and spending.

7. Chief Economist to the Prime Minister

Though for past Prime Ministers (notably Thatcher and Lawson) this can cause conflict, I believe it is important that both Number 10 and Number 11 have their own chief economist. Here I focus on the PM. The key here is that this is independent advice that is based on both expertise and an awareness of what the government is trying to achieve. He/she provides sound advice on how quickly or effectively the government can pursue its agenda, understanding the head winds, the context and the international situation.

Changing the story: From economic decline to economic renewal

Job Description

• To offer the best independent economic advice – on growth, living standards, tax, spending, productivity, public investment, regulation, inflation, labour markets and fiscal trade-offs.

• To shape the government’s economic strategy and turn the PM’s political priorities into a credible economic programme: what is the growth model, what are the key levers, what are the delivery bottlenecks, and where should No.10 push departments hardest?

• To ensure that resources are prioritised, well spent, and if necessary reallocated. This could be a specialist appointment working closely with the chief economist.

• To stress-test policies before they reach the PM or the public - acting as the PM’s internal challenge function: interrogate Budget decisions, manifesto promises, industrial strategy, upcoming risks, welfare reform, skills policy, infrastructure, housing and net-zero policy.

8. National Security Advisor

I have chosen the national security advisor but of course he/she is part of a triumvirate with the foreign secretary and the defence secretary.

Changing the story: From Britain adrift from Europe and America to Britain shaping new strategic, economic and security alliances.

Job Description

• To advise the Prime Minister on security and co-ordinate the key players on national security, intelligence, defence and some foreign policy issues.

• To co-ordinate the security machine: to bring together departments, agencies and officials across Whitehall so that threats, crises and long-term strategy are handled coherently.

• To support national security and foreign policy decision-making

9. Health Secretary

The health secretary and the CEO of the NHS (who it could be argued should be in this list separately) have to work seamlessly together to transform the nation’s health.

Changing the story: From a slow, expensive sickness service to a fast, responsive prevention service

Job Description

• To ensure people live long and healthy lives

• To transform the NHS into a modern, technology enhanced, public service

• To prevent illness in the community before the need for expensive treatment in hospitals

• To ensure the British workforce is healthy enough to work

10. Education Secretary

Changing the story: From a system that fails to prepare young people for the future, to an opportunity springboard for every young person to find their calling

Job Description

• To ensure all young people are prepared for the world they are going into

• To overhaul the curriculum and assessment regime so that there are a range of high status pathways for all young people

• To make lifelong learning a reality

11. Welfare Reform Secretary

Changing the story: From a system that keeps people – particularly young people – inactive to one that provides the dignity of work for all those who can

Job Description

• To reform the welfare system to promote work and properly support those most in need

• To create a system that works for young people – and Neets in particular

• To end poverty

The story tellers

12. Director of Communications

This role is changing fast. It needs someone who is pro-active not just reactive. Who is amplifying the government’s agenda in creative ways, not allowing it to be pushed onto the back foot. Crucially it is someone who gets a new comms environment in which digital, video-based content comes first.

Changing the story: From a ‘one and done’ mindset of carefully polished events to an ‘always on’ narrative that cuts through the noise.

Job Description

• To ensure the Prime Minister grabs the attention of the public and tells a coherent story about the direction of the government

• To ensure all events, activities, speeches, daily updates from the Prime Minister pack a punch.

• To shape the message, big themes and big arguments of the government and ensure that all activities flow from them

• To bring alive the central cause or causes of the government showing how its activities are values-driven and designed to serve working people

*13. Director of Story Development

This is a new role I have written about recently, here. It sits at the intersection of policy and communications. It turns policy into debates, controversy, cut-through communications. It is a separate skills set which needs a dynamic leader and team.

Changing the story: From worthy and dull launches of policy nuggets to interesting, controversial, debating points that spark discussion of key issues.

Job Description

• To create a ‘story factory’ that ensures cut through for the government’s agenda

• To be the bridge between policy and communications – helping to ensure policy development has message and politics and communications has depth.

• To lead a multi-disciplinary team of experts in marketing, campaigning, story-telling, news journalism.

*14. Director of Content Creation

This is a new role supporting the Head of Communications and delivering the stories that emerge from the story factory. Number 10 and all departments need to create a studio to design, video, edit, upload content multiple times a day.

Changing the story: From mainstream media first to video-led continuous story-telling

Job Description

• To create a studio at Number 10 that produces rich, varied and compelling material throughout the day

• To understand and shape new media activity

• To provide long form – eg podcasts – and short form content for different audiences – all with the purpose of explaining the government’s philosophy, values and approach.

The strategists

15. Director of Political Strategy and Insight

Changing the story: From short-term tactical politics to a long-term, strategic project

Job Description

• To shape a coherent political strategy that is tested with the concerns and aspirations of working people using polling, focus groups and other methodologies

• To bring together politics, communications and policy into a sustainable political project

• To ensure focus, coherence and consistency to the driving central narrative and argument of the government

• Ensure the government doesn’t drift away from the people it is meant to serve.

16. Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit

Changing the story: From being trapped by Whitehall tramlines to ensuring new thinking and ideas flourish and are shaped for maximum impact

Job Description

• To curate a rich, expansive and curious intellectual conversation about ideas and policies – both inside and outside of Whitehall.

• To commission new thinking and research from a range of sources.

• To ensure policy has short, medium and long-term horizons and is robust, imaginative and workable.

• To work with departments to shape a powerful and sustainable agenda

• To join up policy across policy domains

*17. Head of the Strategy and Innovation Unit

There have been various incarnations of this role and unit under previous governments including when Labour was last in power. It is a vital role to ensure the government is constantly ‘looking around corners’ and seizing the opportunities of the future.

Changing the story: From closed, linear, predictable thinking to curious, expansive, and shaping a new set of possibilities

Job Description

• To focus relentlessly on the future - spotting the trends, the coming crises, understanding the implications of major changes such as AI

• To ensure government is drawing ideas and inspiration from the widest possible sources

• To foster a culture of innovation - constantly testing new ideas and learning from experiments and pilots.

18. Head of Impact and Data

I have combined this role, but it could be separated into a head of delivery/impact and a head of data. The two are obviously inextricably linked.

Changing the story: From incomplete, slow data to fast, real-time data so there can be swift interventions to deal with blockages

Job Description

• To create a system where all the key performance indicators for government are tracked systematically – housebuilding, knife crime, boats, etc – with enough granular detail to answer the question who, what, where, when and why are getting in the way.

• To ensure that policy and legislation is turned into real impact for real people – and test that impact on the ground in communities, being clear that legislation and inputs are not the same as outputs and outcomes.

• To create the processes and feedback loops to ensure precise accountability and fast action so that no blockage festers.

The Enablers

These are the people and teams that oil the wheels, improve systems, join up the different actors – in short help to get things done.

*19. Head of Civil Service Reform

Without a reformed civil service, gripping the state is impossible. I have made the case for abolishing the role of Cabinet Secretary. It is antiquated and a distraction from the real and complex job of reforming the civil service.

Changing the story: from an institution constantly on the back foot to an organisation that has the skill to solve complex problems

Job Description

• To reform the civil service so that it is leaner, more strategic and capable of delivering real impact

• To overhaul the incentive structures for civil servants so what is valued is impact, reform, risk taking and experimentation

• To create the structures for cross-Whitehall working.

*20. Head of Talent

There have been various versions of this role, but it needs now to be made more central, based in Number 10 and be more than ‘an appointments function’

Changing the Story: From ad hoc, last-minute recruitment to fill a gap to strategic talent spotting and development

Job Description

• To ensure a pipeline of the best talent for the key roles (notably these 25)

• To become a triage system to ensure offers of support are channelled to the appropriate place and harnessed

• To ensure robust recruitment processes are used to unearth the best talent and to avoid a culture of favours, unsupported word-of-mouth, or poor last-minute decisions

21. Head of Technology and AI

This person needs to work closely with a chief software engineer who can tool up Whitehall to produce cutting-edge products to make govt work more effectively. eg digital ID.

Changing the story: From technology resisted or added as an after-thought to technology solutions embedded in all aspects of reform and problem-solving

Job Description

• To ensure every senior civil servant, Secretary of State and Minister is equipped to make strategic technology decisions

• To ensure all citizen-facing government activities use technology to ensure a fast, responsive service

• To ensure all the processes and ways of working of the state are enhanced by technology and AI

*22. Head of Participation

A new role for someone to ensure the government is permanently engaging with the insights and lived experience of citizens.

Changing the Story: From a broken contract between politicians and the public to a renewed contract based on in-depth listening and dialogue.

Job Description

• To build deliberative practices into all government decision making

• To ensure feedback loops in all policy making

• To ensure greater transparency in the trade-offs in decision making

*23. Head of Devolution and community building

A new role to lead on the centre giving away power

Changing the story: From an out of touch, over centralised state to one that is bottom-up, with power as close to people as possible

Job Description:

• To shift power, wealth and opportunity out of Whitehall - to devolve as much power as makes strategic sense

• To empower Mayors and local leaders to lead on growth, skills, education and opportunity

• To rebuild local civic infrastructure and make place-based renewal central to the government’s mission with the tools and resources to achieve it

*24. Head of Missions/Cross-cutting priorities

Changing the story: From government in silos without the right mix of talent, to mission-led multi-disciplinary cross-cutting teams making change at pace

Job Description

• To build multi-disciplinary teams to tackle the thorniest problems eg knife crime, Neets, VAWG

• To ensure these projects have all the resources, talent and freedom needed to get the job done

• To be the champion of these projects across Whitehall and to challenge any Ministerial or civil service resistance

*25. Chief Builder/Head of New Institutions and Major Projects

This is a special new role and potentially the most important. It is someone who is in charge of building the new institutions of state capacity: the new delivery bodies, new public companies, new digital infrastructure, new markets, new funding vehicles, new partnerships, new digital products, new civic infrastructure and new capabilities inside and outside the state. It is the engine of a reformed state. This role would sit at the intersection of engineering, institution-building, procurement, public entrepreneurship and delivery.

Changing the story: From a state that announces things to a state that builds things

Job Description

• To ensure the government has the capability to build new institutions

• To act as the Prime Minister’s senior builder: stress-testing whether the machinery exists to deliver the government’s biggest promises, and creating it where it does not.

• To lead a small, high-quality, multidisciplinary team of engineers, product leaders, designers, financiers, commercial experts, procurement specialists and institution- builders.

• To bring engineering discipline to government: clear goals, prototypes, milestones, accountability, iteration, risk management and rapid problem-solving.

• To ensure major projects are not trapped in endless process, consultancy, procurement delay or departmental turf wars.

Beyond the 25

Of course, this list implies overly top-down government. This is not the intention. It is meant to indicate how government and the state can work more effectively. I am a huge believer in devolution – and maximum devolution – and mayors and local leaders are crucial to Britain getting back on its feet. There are clearly other vital players as well – from the governor of the Bank of England to the CEOs of key regulators like Ofgem and Ofcom. Regulators that are currently badly failing the country. And of course there are essential people to making sure legislation is passed at pace - most notably the Leader of the House of Commons and the Chief Whip.

Building a team with power, purpose and direction

The job of the Prime Minister is to build, inspire and hold this team to account. His or her job is to ensure that all the key people are working seamlessly together.

In today’s fast paced world, silos kill effective government. For two days a week, the majority of the 25 should be in the same open-plan office together. Those informal conversations, by-passing weeks of bureaucracy, would ensure things get done a lot faster. And the trust that would be built up from deeper relationships would ensure better working.

In the last few years, the country has too often looked ungovernable. But it isn’t. Get the talent right, build a collaborative culture, provide a clear direction – and then anything is possible.

Mission-led government, built by the Labour Party in opposition, killed off in government, was briefly resurrected this week with the publication of Alan Milburn’s diagnostic report into young people aged 16-24 who are not in education, employment or training (Neets). His review is in two parts, with the solutions report coming in the autumn.

This was also the week Britain passed one million young Neets, a grisly landmark.

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, deserves huge credit for appointing Alan Milburn to lead the review and to power ahead with welfare reform - knowing he would be truly independent, not pull his punches and at times say uncomfortable things for the government.

Milburn is providing a masterclass in how mission-led government could be done.

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Mission-led government

Mission-led government starts with a thorny problem and a big goal. The thorny problem: one million young Neets. The big goal: Neet Zero, abolishing Neets.

It then needs a dynamic leader to drive the mission and ask the vital questions. This is what Milburn did.

1. Is there something different about this generation or is this just a familiar cyclical problem? (Answer, yes this is different.)

2. Who are the Neets, by gender, geography, background, barrier to work? This data, as in so many areas in government, is not readily available.

3. What is the real diagnosis of what is going on? Not a collection of prejudices or hunches, but a combination of the lived experience of young people - packed with nuance and insight - and the data analytics looking at the system as a whole.

Build a multidisciplinary team and embrace the messiness

Next, Milburn built a powerful multidisciplinary team with different perspectives, with each member of that team willing to challenge each other on their findings.

Matthew Upton, the brilliant principal advisor to the review, describes it as a “a web of formal and informal networks. We asked the question: who is the best person in the country on this part of the problem? I couldn’t give a stuff who they work for. They can be inside or outside Whitehall. We needed to aim off for status quo bias and build in creative thinking.”

Upton explained that the review wanted academics and frontline experts to challenge each other and to ensure that any ideas would not fall apart as soon as they came into contact with reality. Whitehall civil servants from different departments have been seconded into a central team and are working closely together and at pace - something that is still too rare.

Upton said: “we need to let it be messy.” For me, this is a profound point about leadership in today’s complex world. Leadership is often linear and one-dimensional. It is set in tramlines and finds it hard to properly deal with complexity. Agile leadership allows for messiness. It knows that curiosity, challenge and refinement unlocks better solutions. It is a style of leadership that is comfortable with the uncomfortable – being able to sit with uncertainty until insights emerge. This kind of leadership requires courage and an intellectual confidence to let vigorous and healthy disagreements play out. It then needs real clarity to cut through the messiness and chart a decisive course.

Making an argument – defining a cause

At the heart of Milburn’s approach is getting the argument right. The argument flows from the searching questions. It is crucial to a) developing the right solutions b) building support among the public and stakeholders and c) dislodging people from entrenched positions.

Politics is all about winning the big arguments.

Milburn set out a compelling argument at the launch event which could be summarised as this:

And because this argument is so strong and has real depth, when fielding tricky questions at the launch, Milburn was able to pivot skilfully back to the central message, the killer facts and the moral purpose behind it all.

Milburn then took the argument to the next level by turning it into a cause. This is how a mission truly takes off.

“Building a better future for the next generation can be the cause around which the whole country can unite - not just government, but employers and educators, local leaders and local charities, parents, and communities. Our country’s future relies on the next generation. It is the job of this generation to ensure that every young regardless of their background or the circumstances, has more opportunity to learn or to work. This, in my view, should be the priority for government. More importantly, it should be the priority for us all.

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Lived experience matters as much as data crunching

Mission government is also about bringing together qualitative and quantitative methods.

Shuab Gamote and I were asked by Milburn to listen deeply to young people across the country. This would become a sequel to our first report, Inside the mind of a 16-year-old and last week we published, Inside the Mind of a Young Neet.

To be clear, this is not the usual way policy is made. Again this review is doing things differently.

Listening to the ‘client’ is vital in most walks of life. In the technology sphere ‘user experience’ is at the heart of all product design. Yet in policymaking, both in government and think tanks, there is a deeply ingrained default position that the real policy work is high level data analysis and lived experience is there to ‘add a bit of colour’ or worse, deemed too particular, ‘emotional’ or unrepresentative, to be useful.

In contrast, this review has used the lived experience of young people to both highlight the complexity of the Neet challenge and to make the high-level data actually mean something that real.

The review has also listened to those on the frontline and deliberately sought to build a coalition of support that includes mayors, charities, businesses, teachers, parents, health professionals, and all the key stakeholders who interact with young people. It is this coalition that will provide national collective purpose to the mission.

Getting media cut-through

The review has shown that it is possible to get cut-through media coverage without needing to have new policy nuggets or be spending money.

It is, as I have written in previous Substacks, about igniting debates that resonate with people.

Some of this is about creating phrases that encapsulate an idea, some of it about tapping into people’s views of what has gone wrong.

Here are some examples from the coverage of the last few months:

• The death of the Saturday job.

• The bedroom generation

• Milburn rejects the snowflake generation label

• Milburn’s interim review warns of ‘generational fault line’ as Neet numbers could hit 1.25 million without reform

• The rejection economy

• Exam obsessed schools leave pupils unready for work

Now the hard bit

Milburn is only half-way there. The really hard bit is yet to come.

Now people realise he is serious about reform, and realise too that Pat McFadden is backing him all the way, you can bet the forces of conservatism will whir into action. Like a panicky goalkeeper trying to put off a penalty kick taker, some of those who nodded enthusiastically to the claim that one million Neets are a national scandal, will fight hard to defend their patch of the current system for fear of something worse.

Failing systems are failing for a reason. People have got locked into operating within them. Those ways of working calcify. They become harder and harder to dislodge. This becomes the real test of mission-led government – can it make the goal so important and so necessary that opposition falls away? Can it combine a powerful argument, with the strength of its coalition, a set of workable solutions, and a timeline for effective execution, to drive change forward?

Ten ways to ensure bold solutions to the Neet crisis

Here are ten things that would ensure the solutions are both radical and have a chance of succeeding:

1. Horizon scan properly. Get all the best ideas from around the world. The pool in which policymakers often fish is too small, with a lot of recycling of old policy. It is crucial that we don’t just copy from other countries but take the best of their ideas and lift them to the next level. We need a mindset not just of catch up but leap-frog.

2. Push new thinking as far as it will go. One way of doing this is to use a technique designed to enhance creativity. The aim is to take a specific lens (this can be done with more than one lens) and push its implications to the limits. It’s not that you then do everything that you come up with but the process has freed you up to be bolder. I would gather the best and most creative technology brains, particularly as young Neets are a digital cohort, and ask the question: how might technology better connect young people to work? I am sure there will be some brilliantly creative answers that include ways of motivating young people, providing advice, winkling them out of the bedroom and connecting them with volunteering, work experience and internship opportunities.

3. Test all emerging ideas with a panel of young Neets. The trap policy often falls into is to lose sight of the client in the final stretch. This is a point of real jeopardy, when policy becomes unworkable because it does not go with the grain of how people think. With young people this is a particular danger, because this is a generation wired in a different way from most policymakers.

4. Make the distinction between hundreds of small policy changes – and there will be many ideas thrown at Alan Milburn in the coming months – and the big ticket items that will really move the dial.

5. Provide a timeline for the changes with distinct short, medium and long term in mind. Reviews and commissions often have 20 recommendations with equal weight and no indication of the best sequence. It is important, particularly in this case, for the government to be able to act immediately on some of the ideas.

6. Use the traffic light model from Inside the Mind of a Young Neet to tailor solutions to young people who are close to employment (green), those who are a very long way away (red) and those who have some significant barriers (amber).

7. Understand the different pressures on small and medium-sized businesses compared with big businesses and tailor solutions to them. Small businesses collectively employ the most people but obviously find it harder to adapt to the specific needs of employees.

8. Design a clear accountability map with roles and responsibilities for all the main players – from mayors and local leaders, to businesses, government departments and charities.

9. Be clear where the biggest blockages lie and work with politicians to remove them. The Prime Minister has a huge role to play in this.

10. Keep the momentum behind the mission - energise it as a national cause and keep the voices of young people centre stage.

It’s not too late for mission-led government

Making a powerful argument, igniting debates, building coalitions, getting Whitehall to work differently, listening properly to lived experience. This is how government should work. It’s what should be done for house building and knife crime, tackling violence against women and girls and reforming the outdated school curriculum and exam system.

For those, including former Prime Ministers, who say there wasn’t a plan for government, it’s worth pointing out, mission government was the plan. And as Alan Milburn showed this week, it’s not too late to bring it back.

Here is some more context about the report.

The report is based on listening to more than 400 young people across the United Kingdom over the last few months.

It feeds into Alan Milburn’s independent review of young people and work commissioned by the government.

Download the report here:

Inside The Mind Of A Young Neet Report

2.6MB ∙ PDF file

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For the last few months I have been travelling across the UK with Shuab Gamote listening to young people who are NEET.

Tomorrow we publish the fruits of that journey in a report called Inside the Mind of a Young NEET - and it will feed into Alan Milburn’s major review of young people and work for the government.

In some ways it is the sequel to our listening exercise which we published last year: Inside the Mind of a 16-year-old

We have criss-crossed UK - Glasgow, Cardiff, Wrexham, Belfast, Bradford, St Neots, Clacton, London, Newcastle, Bristol, Rhyl, Grimsby. We have spent time listening to carers, those who are care experienced, those with mental health issues, those who are neurodivergent, graduates and young offenders. We have spoken to young people who are currently NEET and those, in their teens, who are at risk of becoming NEET. Our project was to truly listen to young people, without a pre-conceived agenda, to get underneath all the big - and small - things that matter to them when trying to get on in life. I believe it is only by understanding these nuances that good policy can be made.

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This is a story of unimaginable resilience from a generation frequently branded as snowflakes.

It is also the story of extraordinary individuals who are working with young people in charities and social enterprises across the country in a skilled, patient - frankly extraordinary way - building confidence, developing social skills, supporting job applications, and navigating the bureaucracy at times of transition so they don’t fall through the cracks.

This is also a story of real pain and anguish. It is easy for politicians to describe an anxious generation and the scandal of one million NEETs.

But it’s a very different matter to look into the eyes of young people who are traumatised, ground down, despairing, or just lost. The girl parcelled out to 11 sets of foster parents in 18 months. The boy bullied at school for more than a decade. The carer living moment by moment in constant fear her sister will kill herself.

It is worth saying here that people convey so much before they speak. In how they show up. In how they greet strangers like the two of us. In how they respond to questions. Many talked to us while spinning fidget toys - helping them sit still and cope with living with ADHD. Others found it difficult giving us eye contact. In many cases, we could tell instantly that there was a lot going on in this person’s life. And of course, employers would be able to tell the same thing,

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As a headteacher, I knew some young people enjoyed school more than others. I knew some struggled both academically and socially. But I had never systematically spoken to young people in their early twenties looking back at their school experience. Young NEETs are a population who disproportionately have not succeeded at the exam game. Not all of them, but many of them. But what I hadn’t been prepared for was the sheer trauma of school for so many.

When asked one word to describe school - in Belfast and Bristol and Bradford and Newcastle and Camden and Rhyl and Wrexham, and Glasgow - the words that came out were laced with a depth of emotional scarring I simply had not been prepared for. And sometimes before the word came out, there was a bow of the head, a memory quickly reappearing, and a sadness that spread across the face, like the darkest of clouds. This was a time to forget. A childhood of painful struggle.

I was also struck by the nearlies - those near misses, those starts that faltered, those pivotal transition moments where support was needed but not given. The upheaval when moving from primary to secondary. Starting college, not once or twice but three times - each occasion on a different course, each time for different reasons lasting no more than three months.

Listening to young people, it was clear how hard many of them were trying to find work. They had often written hundreds of applications but never heard back. So many of the young NEETs who were in work had got their break from someone they had known, not through the formal application process.

In one respect perhaps more than any other, this generation is startlingly different from previous ones. We have created the circumstances - accelerated by Covid and addictive social media - in which the bedroom is a place of comfort, so much comfort, that young people can spend days, weeks, months and in some cases years, particularly after a setback, occupying themselves on screens and losing the motivation and the oomph to break the cycle and do something else. When we asked a 20 year old or 22 year old or 24 year old to tell us what they had been up to since leaving school at 16, their answer too often, was ‘nothing really’.

On our travels we also found a craving for connection, for social interaction, for creativity and playfulness. Everywhere we went we kept discovering young people’s hidden talents, moments of energy, of possibility and of potential. Much of it unrecognised. Almost every young person had something they enjoyed doing or were good at - from caring for horses, to archery, to cooking fresh pasta, to making raised garden beds, to crocheting, to playing football, to looking after fish. All of them lived off humour, banter, praise and respect.

It became clear, the more we listened to young people, that the issue of young NEETs is not just a welfare issue or an employment issue - it’s a deeper issue about the society we live in. We have created circumstances - run the economy into the ground, locked children away during Covid, regimented them in schools, turned a blind eye to bullying, given them the social media tools of destruction - and then let them drift. In safeguarding you train teachers to spot the signs of neglect in a child. Well these are the signs of neglect towards an entire generation. We have not safeguarded their future. We have let the tide go out and stranded them like flapping fish without water on the beach, gasping for sustenance. This is the stranded generation.

So what we publish tomorrow is the result of listening to more than 400 young voices from across the UK. I hope people read the report. And I hope it spurs us all to action.

Today Labour is at risk of becoming a vote machine for Reform.

It is reinforcing the view that neither Labour nor the Tories can govern effectively.

Wherever you go, you now hear a phrase that should send chills down the spines of mainstream politicians: “What have we got to lose by voting Reform?”

The centre is being hollowed out, the fringes are taking over.

The longer it goes on, the harder it is to repair.

Once a first vote is cast for Reform, however much in protest, then the second vote and the third become easier. The dynamic shifts, a party, once seen as extreme, gets absorbed into political life.

Let’s be clear, the Tories’ local election disaster, barely commented on because the Labour soap opera provides juicy daily cliffhangers, means they will not be back in the race for a very long time.

So the Labour Party is the only option for those wanting to stem the populist tide - and they’ve only got one more shot at getting this right.

I would suggest three things above all others are needed from its leader: courage - to do the difficult things, better communication to cut through the noise, and a cause to galvanise supporters and the country. Anyone who wants to lead the Labour party should be tested against these three Cs.

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Courage - to do the difficult things

The country needs courageous leadership because this is a time of fast-moving parts, complex problems and zero ‘benefit of the doubt’.

It requires courage to undertake root and branch reform of the state and public services so they can properly deliver real change.

Courage to not just get a bit closer to Europe but do everything it takes to secure a better economic future.

Courage to devolve power from Westminster to mayors and local communities - with new powers over education, skills, taxes and housing.

Courage to overhaul the tax system - tackling the massive inequalities of wealth.

Courage to reform the welfare state as an engine of opportunity - particularly for young people.

Courage to boost growth and support entrepreneurship even if other priorities have to take a back seat.

Courage to take on Reform with confidence and relish.

This is about big, bold reforms. Changing the story on how Britain is run and how the country gets things done.

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Communication - to cut through the noise

Is there a mainstream Labour politician who can make the leap from the traditional form of political communications - slow, infrequent, based on an outdated grid - and embrace a new approach? Can they combine personality, authenticity, clear messages, great story-telling, attention-grabbing issues and permanent, rolling narration? Can they move from a ‘one and done’ approach - delivering a speech and moving on, to an ‘always on’ approach, narrating their daily activities, breaking down the barriers between politicians and the public? This shift needs to be part of what comes next. I’ve written about it in different ways in this Substack (for example, on the attention economy, and on social media) over the last few months. It is essential, if the Labour Party is to get back on the front foot.

A Cause - to galvanise supporters and the country

What is a cause and why does it matter? For the left, a cause is the ‘moral purpose’ - the values-driven articulation of its purpose - to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many not the few. In each age it needs to be given new life and new expression. It is what builds a party into a movement. A cause needs to be embraced with energy and passion. It needs to start from the heart (its power) and be made real by the head (the big argument) and be delivered by the hand (brilliant execution). A winning trio of head, heart and hand.

For me, the cause for this moment is to give young people their future back. This is the anxious generation, the stranded generation, the betrayed generation, the lost generation. Politicians have shafted young people. And having spoken to more than 1000 of them across the UK in the last year, I know how much they need a government on their side. I know too that if we don’t get this right, the next generation will give up on mainstream politics for good.

In the next few days I will publish a report on young people who are NEET with my co-author Shuab Gamote, to feed into the Milburn review commissioned by the government. This will lay bare what is really happening for the one million 16-24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training - and the multiple barriers standing in their way.

This mix of issues; from social media, to loneliness, to jobs, to housing, to poverty, to mental health, to lack of social spaces, to an outdated school curriculum adds up to a genuine crisis. Tackling it - making Britain once more an engine of opportunity, empowerment and aspiration - should become the heartbeat of the programme of anyone wanting to lead the Labour Party in the future.

The 4th C: Comfort Zone

Three Cs: courage, communication and a cause. But there is a 4th C, that serves as a warning: comfort zone.

Both the soft-left and centrists have their comfort zones - off-putting places for much of the public.

The comfort zone of the soft left

To its critics, the problem with the soft left is it’s soft. In an age when the public want strong leaders, where decisions are tough, problems intractable, and Britain is in a hole, there is something bracingly counter-cultural about a political grouping that still proudly champions being ‘soft’. But such is the case with the ‘soft left’. As soft-left Cabinet Minister Lisa Nandy once admitted, the term “sounds a bit like you’ve sort of collapsed into a jellyfish.”

Critics say the soft left follows the path of least resistance - the politics of virtue signalling, superiority - the ‘moral conscience’ of the party. It can become a hostage to unity, preferring that everyone feels good about themselves, instead of confronting the hard truths and difficult choices.

So is the soft left willing to take the tough decisions needed to turn around the country -on welfare, on the economy, on public service reform? Is the soft-left capable of building new homes at pace? Does it have the statecraft and the willingness to take on the NIMBYs? Will it reform the welfare state so that people who can work do work? Will it reform the state so that it can get things done? Will the soft-left grapple with the concerns of working people on crime and anti-social behaviour or boats and asylum hotels?

The comfort zone of the centrists

The centrists have their own comfort zone - bloodless technocracy. A place of targets and planning laws, committees and spreadsheets. A place where vision too often goes to die. A belief that you can fix systems and solve problems without much regard for the people within them. A belief that your supporters should make do with pragmatism because anything more gutsy will ruffle feathers and provide a damaging whiff of irresponsibility.

This is the politics of “you should be grateful, I’m delivering”. It is the politics of incrementalism - slowly, but surely lumbering, outdated institutions will grind their way to small improvements. It is too often cloaked in fear: fear of the media, fear of the markets, fear of losing, fear of your own convictions. It is a politics that lacks curiosity; it gathers data but not deep insight. It is a politics that generates policy, but only of the lowest common denominator; policy from a narrow pool of ‘policy people’, policy with the radical edges rubbed off.

Both these comfort zones spell disaster.

So what comes next needs to be anchored in the 3Cs, but not the 4th. It needs to have courage and a cause. It needs to generate more hope, more sense of possibility, more forward momentum. A new politics that combines bold moves and feisty communication.

The answer to that refrain: “What have we got to lose by voting Reform?” needs to be “a lot” - but that will only happen if Labour gets a grip.

If you are still smarting from the drama Adolescence, or despairing at the antics of HSTikkyTokky in Louis Theroux’s Manosphere documentary, or reading the frequent headlines about the epidemic of misogyny in schools, you could be forgiven for thinking boys are not only a menace to society, but if they aren’t fixed soon we are all going to descend into an Andrew Tate generated abyss.

But ‘fixing’ boys as if they are a faulty tap, is not perhaps the best way of dealing with half the population.

Instead, may I suggest that now is the time to step back. To stuff the hyperbole into an air-tight container. Slot the ‘moral panic’ into a drawer marked: “this happens every decade.” And start to work out what is really going on.

Rather than leave such a vital societal issue to panic-filled headlines or quack remedies, I am delighted to have been asked to chair a Commission on Boys’ Education by a thoughtful evidence-based new organisation the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys.

The commission will explore the education system from early years to further and higher education and propose the solutions necessary to ensure boys are not just academically successful, but thrive at school, at work, and in life.

The overarching question we will pose is:

How do we support boys to thrive in school and support them to become capable, confident, kind and purposeful young men?

Why boys and why now?

Before agreeing to lead this project, I asked myself if it was useful to look at education through the lens of gender. I would normally have been sceptical. At the mixed school I co-founded, and where I was headteacher, I believed strongly that the curriculum needed to work for each young person, that cohort interventions (for example, by class, gender, ethnicity) were sometimes useful, but often the label reinforced the idea that this group of young people were a problem.

As for gender, what I have seen reinforces my view that we still have a long way to go for the school experience to work for girls. Too many feel anxious, in part the effects of social media. Many still think science and maths subjects are not for them. Some feel harassed at school as some boys bring ‘influencer’ language and disrespect into the classroom. So, addressing what is happening with boys should always run parallel with continuing to improve school life for girls.

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So why boys? And why now?

The biggest reason is that empirically something big is going on. The data is stark. Boys are now performing a lot worse in school. Five statistics tell the story:

The Commission will seek to understand the root causes of these disparities and develop actionable recommendations for government, policymakers, the education system, boys and their parents.

But more than that, based on conversations I have had with more than 1000 young people in the last year – for the report I co-authored with Shuab Gamote, Inside the Mind of a 16-year-old, and more recently for the work I am doing on young people who are NEET, it has become clearer that something is going on here with boys that needs further research and investigation.

When you talk to boys, you realise quickly that there are multiple interlocking issues. For different boys they come together in different combinations: weak literacy, a dwindling sense of belonging, few strong role models, punitive discipline codes in school, online misogyny, lack of purpose, limited practical routes into adulthood and a culture that treats boys as a problem to be fixed, not as young people with strengths to build on.

So the issue is complex, which is why I am so delighted to be accompanied on this journey by some brilliant commissioners: practitioners, teachers, headteachers, academics and researchers each with a different perspective on the issue.

Our style will not be just to beaver away behind closed doors but debate the issues and draw on the experience and expertise of those working with boys on the frontline. Importantly, we will also have an advisory group of young men who will be a sounding board for everything we do.

Our aim is to get as many people to contribute to the thinking as possible.

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Changing the Story on boys

Like so many walks of life, this is an area where there is a desperate need to change the story. Richard Reeves, chief executive of the evidence-based American Institute for Boys and Men, has done more than anyone to make the case for both new stories and concrete action to support boys and men.

Sophie King-Hill, an academic at Birmingham University, talks of the two common but unhelpful narratives that are most visible. The first is the traditional man: the silent type, keeping his emotions in check, showing that he is the man of the house. The other is the toxic man: domineering, swaggering, treating women badly.

King-Hill believes that we need better stories and role models offering boys more agency and a range of routes to manhood that can provide a genuine alternative.

Her work is echoed in the ideas and practice of others on the commission like Alex Blower who has created Boys’ Impact, a movement dedicated to addressing the gap in educational outcomes for boys and young men who receive Free School Meals. His work draws on the research of Susan Morgan and her team at Ulster University whose project Taking Boys Seriously gives some powerful guidance for working with boys in schools - including building deeper connections and offering real pathways to a better future. Her work has been taken up by many schools looking for a better way to engage boys.

Jeffrey Boakye’s work as a teacher, and an author is all about wrestling with big ideas about identity - and in particular, black identity. He has written some hugely successful books that explore these themes. I wrote about his approach to discernment in a recent Substack.

The commission is really lucky to have such experienced and thoughtful headteachers and system leaders as Jo Heaton and Caroline Barlow. Both are leading the way in thinking about how boys, particularly those from working class backgrounds, can thrive. Ian Pryce brings real expertise on how we can improve pathways and chocies in education having been the successful CEO of the Bedford College Group for many years. Stuart Manifould, has seen boys both in the school setting as a teacher and in more informal settings - in sport, on the streets and now in a new youth zone he is opening in Crewe.

Three of the commissioners in different ways are bringing a participative, deep listening approach. Luke Tryl comes with a wealth of experience at Ofsted and the DfE, and now leads More in Common a research and polling organisation set up to tackle polarisation and strengthen social cohesion by finding common ground. Polly Curtis leads Demos, a think tank that has pioneered deliberative democracy as well as ways of modernising public services and rebuilding the social contract. And Shuab Gamote has spent the last year listening to young people across the country, thinking deeply about the on-line world, and developing ideas on how best to support young people.

Our commission will not just focus on solving the current problems. It will look forward. How will AI shape education in the future? What qualities will boys and girls need to be successful in the future? How will work change, and how must school change to meet those needs? That’s why it is exciting to have Sana Kharegani, an AI entrepreneur and expert, as a commissioner and also Bill Lucas who has spent much of his career developing the capabilities and competencies needed to be a powerful and life-long learner. Ed Fidoe, Chief executive of LIS, is looking to the future at his pioneering new university. I wrote about his approach to Interdisciplinary learning - solving problems not just studying single disconnected subjects - in my last Substack.

It is a brilliant group of commissioners. And we want to tap into the widest possible set of perspectives on the issue. Which is where you come in!

Please help us by giving us your insights and ideas. If you are working with boys and young men please give us the benefit of your experience and expertise. Our email address is here: boysedcomm@menandboys.org.uk. More information is on the website here:

Commissioners

Here is a link to biographies of the commissioners: http://www.menandboys.org.uk/boys-education-commission/

Resources

There are many excellent books, articles and reports on this issue. Some on boys more widely, some specifically on education. Here are ten resources that are well worth a read if you want to delve deeper into this subject.

According to Walter Isaacson, his recent biographer, Leonardo da Vinci had one quality above all others - relentless, questing curiosity.

He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes an aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon and the edges of shadows.

He was not confined to a single discipline but was an apprentice in a workshop where anatomy and drawing, maths and music, engineering and philosophy were pursued as interlocking disciplines.

He painted the Mona Lisa at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge and then drawing the deluge.

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Today our problems are complex. They require a type of thinking that draws more on Leonardo’s apprenticeship - different lenses to see the world, ways of connecting insights across disciplines, and one overriding passion - curiosity.

Our education system, of course, does the opposite. It seeks conformity not curiosity. Head down - do as you’re told, not head up - scan the horizon. It implores us to choose whether we are an arts person or a scientist. Qualitative - poring over Shakespeare’s sonnets or quantitative - manipulating numbers. We hear children from a young age saying I don’t do maths and carrying that into adulthood. We hear others say I can’t draw. It’s baked in early. You are seen as a bit maverick if you pick A levels that combine sciences and arts subjects.

Worse, everything that happens in school serves the requirements of university. University entrance is more powerful than any education secretary. As long as universities want people to study single subjects for three years, school will be a funnel, narrowing young people’s perspectives as they get older, not widening them. 8 subjects at GCSE, 3 at A level, 1 at university. Why? Because the head of maths at a university wants to identify potential PHD students. Our entire system works back from the presumption that everyone is going to become an academic. It’s nuts. There are some students who want to specialise, of course. Indeed we need some people to go deep, very deep into physics or chemistry for example. But to the millions of young people who don’t want to specialise in one thing, the system says, tough luck.

There are two painful consequences. For the young people, who I am currently listening to across the country, who are NEET, there was no recognition in school for what they were good at beyond GCSEs. That’s in part because of the act of cultural vandalism, from the last philistine government, in deeming music, art, drama and design to be of no value – excluding them from the EBACC. And for the students heading to university, who would have preferred a broader American-style system of majors and minors - breadth as well as depth - we conspire, in the UK, to make them both uninspired by the university experience and ill-prepared for a complex world.

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T thinkers and Key thinkers

As headteacher of School 21, I talked a lot to students about breadth as well as depth. I was attracted to the idea of T thinkers. Indeed many employers said that is what they were looking for. T thinkers are those who have a specialism, the stem of the T, the expertise a team can rely on. They might be a coder, a mathematician, a designer, or a philosopher. But they would also be able to make connections between things, to think strategically about systems and the bigger picture. But school and university tends to produce the vertical part of the T, at least in part, and not the horizontal.

I came across another type of thinker more recently. Apparently, this is one stage beyond a T thinker. Key thinkers add more layers to T thinking - still making connections across the horizontal bar, but going deep on more than one thing; some genuine specialisms as well as other areas where they are dabbling, experimenting. We can think of this way of thinking as like a key shape.

This is definitely not how our formal education works. Schools don’t let you dabble. That would involve far too much curiosity and initiative - and would be seen as a distraction from the main - if not only aim - of passing exams.

But increasingly I have come to believe that both T thinking and Key thinking lack something important.

Interdisciplinary thinkers

They do not acknowledge the complexity of problems or the need to bring to bear a range of disciplines and skills to tackle them.

This is where interdisciplinary thinking comes in.

There is a pioneering new university that is putting this into action. The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), founded and run by the visionary Ed Fidoe, which opened its doors to undergraduates in 2021, starts with a complex problem, not the subject discipline, and teaches students to solve it. They take the thorniest problems we face - climate change, the ethics of AI, inequality - and teach students a combination of qualitative (e.g. ethnographic research) and quantitative (e.g. data analytics) methods to understand them. Their unique degree course, a Bachelors in Arts and Sciences in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, educates young people in a range of disciplines - for example, neuroscience, linguistics and statistics - that they can deploy in combination to crack the problems.

Ed Fidoe explains:

If you take Covid as an example. You need somebody sitting around the Cabinet Office table, who could understand and put together some biology and chemistry, but also the maths to understand growth rates, the psychology of how humans are going to behave, together with law and politics. You need people who can integrate all of those things. Not be the deep experts themselves, but someone capable of have probing conversations with all the different experts. And I think businesses need to think about that kind of talent now, and our education system is simply not producing it.

Fidoe explained a term I hadn’t heard before, interactional expertise.

I don’t think it’s okay now for a leader to not understand a little bit of the physics of the energy transition, to not be able to have a conversation about material science if they’re making products. Many leaders might understand a little bit. They’ve read, perhaps a book about AI, but they get a little sheepish if they want to have a longer conversation with somebody who’s got technical expertise. But the successful leaders of the large organisations of the last 10 or 20 years were people that could combine expertise in a range of different areas, put them together and challenge engineers, challenge marketing people, challenge designers. They could speak the language of each of those areas. There’s a term for this which is interactional expertise - this notion of an expertise level that is between not knowing anything and somebody who’s an academic in that area. A Journalist might have interactional expertise in science and politics. They could converse with leading experts in those fields but also make original connections between them.

What Fidoe believes, rightly in my view, is that this is the degree of the future. With so many professions like law or accountancy going through huge transitions with the march of AI, the interdisciplinarian, the polymath, will surely have the edge and the resilience to withstand this upheaval.

When I spoke to some of LIS’s first cohort of students at their graduation ceremony, I was truly blown away by what the degree had given them. They showed a range (the word often used at LIS), a comfort with making connections between big concepts, drawing on the arts and sciences, and talking not just about theory but its real world application. This is a different breed of graduate.

A new lease of life for a beleaguered civil service

Is this just another way of saying we need more generalists? No. I think this is different. I’ve been reflecting on what it might mean for our civil service (but the approach could apply to any sector) which is currently adrift, struggling to grapple with the complexity of the problems the country faces.

This table illuminates what the change might entail. It will mean rethinking the civil service fast stream to recruit not just the traditional generalist to serve in private offices, but a new type of interdisciplinary civil servant able to bring imagination, fresh thinking and multiple lenses to the most challenging problems. (I’m not ignoring here the need to also recruit key specialists in areas such as AI). That way we will get a more powerful civil service and a more successful state. The table below shows what this might look like.

To make this shift will require radical changes to our education system, which is not geared to solving the complex problems of the future. We need to move away from a single, narrow, pathway that panders to the needs of a university system that moves at a glacial pace, and is out of touch with what this moment requires.

The government has to grip this and plan boldly for a world moving at break-neck pace. That means overhauling our stifling exam system, broadening what is taught in schools and getting young people to make connections between disciplines from an early age.

It’s time to be more more curious, more polymath, and more determined to tool people up to be the creative problem solvers of the future.

And maybe a bit more da Vinci. According to Walter Isaacson, Leonardo had “a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering and humanities. He knew that art was a science and science was an art. What set him apart was the ability to apply imagination to intellect.”

Policy wonks and spin doctors are two different tribes. They think differently, they act differently. They have different vibes, different attention spans, different ways of looking at the world.

The spin doctor spends his or her waking hours on the phone to journalists, jousting with columnists, trailing speeches, pre-empting bad news. His foe is the political lobby, hostile papers, 24-hour media, viral clips. Spin doctors thrive on pace, intrigue, unpredictability; the wink, the nudge. Information is power. The exclusive ‘treat’ for an obedient journalist or an eager influencer.

For the policy adviser, a good spreadsheet is the equivalent to a splash in the Times. A juicy factual morsel in an Institute of Fiscal Studies report sets the heart racing. A seminar filled with professorial to and fro about social mobility, public-spending pie charts, or patterns of migration, make life worth living. Symbolic policies, while often looked down upon as ‘populist’ or ‘pandering’, are nonetheless seen by the policy guru as their moment of glory: ‘That was my hypothecated tax in the manifesto.’ ‘I was the first to use the term Sure Start in 1994.’ ‘Congestion charging came out of my visit to Sweden.”

Policy advisers see nuance as clever, necessary, essential to a good policy. Comms advisers see it as unsellable, impossible to capture in a headline, a recipe for confusion, wilful misinterpretation, or even, political meltdown.

In 10 Downing Street the communications department is on the ground floor, policy in the attic. Make of that what you will. (Perhaps policy people are better with stairs.)

Spare a thought for the policy process. Work takes months, sometimes years. Experts gathered. Roundtables conducted. Submissions analysed. Evidence Marshalled. Numbers crunched. Charts created. Policy generated. Departmental sign-off. Stakeholder approval. Document written: Consultation document. Green paper. White paper. Pamphlet. Discussion paper. Note for the Minister. Briefing note.

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But now what? What happens next?

Down the corridor the policy goes, down those flights of stairs, around the corner to the comms team.

The policy adviser arrives with an aim. To make people truly understand the time it took, the thoroughness, the thinking, the elegance of a problem solved. He or she wants to make people appreciate the layers, what was left out as well as what was put in. He wants the celebratory email from the stakeholder, the pat on the back from the frontline worker, the nod of approval from the Substack of a respected economist.

There sits the comms official. Busy. Answering an enquiry from an influencer about whether Larry the Cat has choked on his own vomit. From an investigative journalist sniffing around the Prime Minister’s decisions as a lawyer thirty years ago. From a podcaster about what Keir Starmer knew and when did he know it. The comms advisers are checking up on departments, making sure they don’t subvert the ‘grid’, controlling what is spewed out by more than 20 government departments. They are compiling briefings for Ministers doing the morning rounds of interviews. At the same time, despite being schooled in mainstream or legacy media, they are trying to come to terms with the speed, pace and anarchy of social media. So, the time to digest vast policy documents is ever shrinking.

Yet, that spin doctor is now meant to read 180 pages of dense prose about leasehold reform, sovereign wealth funds, or floating off-shore wind. The policy adviser is convinced the policy is so well polished that it is the story. And occasionally they’re right. 2p off income tax. Independence for the Bank of England. The introduction of the first Minimum Wage. All need little razzamataz. But most policy - not so much.

So how to launch it? This buffet of initiatives.

The comms adviser asks himself….

What’s the topline?

Will it fly?

Will it create controversy?

Will it ‘go viral?’ The modern day equivalent of ‘will it be above the fold?’ the aim of being in the top of half of a broadsheet newspaper.

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This mismatch between policy and comms is structural.

It is the reason good policy goes nowhere, announcements get no coverage, the government appears to be adrift.

It is the sink hole where policy goes to die.

So, what can be done?

The story factory

There is a solution. But it’s not easy.

I call it the story factory. Because humans connect to stories. and good stories stir the emotions and get us to think differently.

The story factory is a place where stories are created, honed, and amplified. It is where a policy document is turned into a heat-seeking communications missile.

The story factory should sit metaphorically half-way along the corridor between policy and comms.

It halts policy on its journey down the corridor, and does its magic, before letting it proceed on its way to comms.

So, what is that magic? What must happen in that liminal space between policy and comms?

Who works in the story factory?

Sitting in the story factory are a group of special people: creative, lateral, maverick.

It is a craft to develop stories, angles, ways of making policy ignite. It is not last minute, it is not about putting ‘lipstick on a pig’, dreaming up a headline on a press release, or reading a Ministerial speech a few hours before it’s delivered and trying to extract some news. It is not to be done in a bit of spare time from the day job, a nice to have. It is essential, the core business of effective, modern communications.

In a nutshell, it is about generating that most elusive of things - cut-through.

The attention economy is relentless, restless, unforgiving. It has upended business as usual comms. But we should be clear, it still ultimately follows the first rule of journalism, or at least the one I was taught at journalism school many years ago. ‘Dog bites man’ is not a story. ‘Man bites dog’ is a story. In other words, news has to be new. It needs to be surprising. At it best it compels you to share it with your friends and family.

These people understand the blurring of politics and entertainment, that humour is a secret weapon, that controversy gets attention.

These are the kinds of people needed in the story factory.

1. A journalist – who knows what news is

2. A digital expert– who knows how to grab attention

3. A writer/copywriter – who makes the language pop

4. A marketing expert – who understands a call to action

5. A campaigner – who knows what emotional power looks like

6. A strategist – who knows how it all fits the big picture

7. A story-teller – who takes people on a journey

And yes, there are some comms people with policy specialisms and some policy people who get comms. They too should be added to the mix.

The factory needs to be properly staffed, properly resourced and given real status. If not set up right, it will be squeezed, ignored, or resented by both comms and policy. The talent won’t always be in-house. And might need to be brought in for these sessions.

And it will require a different kind of meeting - a brainstorm, a workshop. A long way from the familiar half-arsed meeting that goes a bit like this: 30 minutes allocated. People dribbling in past the start time. Too late to hear the purpose of the meeting. Everyone multi-tasking. Half listening, half looking at their laptops or mobile phones, thinking about their next meeting as much as this one. Three types of attendee, some in person (IRL), some on-line (WFH), and some on the move (OTM), creating confusion. The meeting is formulaic. No one is at their best. Most resent being there. Action points are neither summed up nor chased.

This is no way to be creative, or generate powerful arresting content.

Story development requires an extended period of uninterrupted time. Ninety minutes minimum. Pre-reading of key documents a requirement. A space away from the hurly burly. Devices switched off. Post-it notes and whiteboards the tools of choice. Skilful energetic facilitation providing prompts and probing.

Creating stories

The aim is a series of compelling outputs from a menu that might look like this.

1. The benefits of the policy - the winners.

2. The people who will stand against it - the enemies.

3. The problem it is trying to solve - why this is urgent.

4. The emotional resonance - why we should care.

5. The cause we are fighting for - how it exemplifies our values.

6. The creative ways of dramatising why it matters - how do we turn it into a campaign?

7. The political dividing lines with the other parties.

8. The powerful language that will make it memorable.

9. The big argument we are trying to win.

10. The most controversial aspect of the policy - the talking point for a radio phone-in and the hook for a short video.

This last one is perhaps the simplest way of crystallising the aim: have you announced something that compels someone to dial into a phone in and debate it?

But there is something else going on here. Mainstream parties have become too risk averse. Too much is bland and safe. In contrast, the story factory is a place of innovation, of pushing the boundaries, of daring to make waves. It is a place where the creative process is given a chance to flourish. And the result? Good policy does not get sucked into the sink hole.

This is one way of meeting the fresh demands of the attention economy. Creating the stories, the momentum, the dynamism that means government (indeed all organisations) can keep hold of the mic and start to grip the agenda.

“My aim is to teach discernment.”

This was not what I expected from someone about to embark on teaching English to eleven-year-olds in Newham.

But it summed up the ambition and audacity of Jeffrey Boakye.

When we set up School 21, a brand new 4-18 school in Newham, I was determined to find an extraordinary English teacher. The English language was to be a big driving force for the school. We wanted every child to become a confident and fluent reader, writer and speaker. We did about five rounds of interviews. Each time I thought there was something missing.

Then Jeffrey came along. I watched him teach and knew there was something very special going on. He proved to be an extraordinary teacher, thinker, provocateur, and since leaving the classroom, a brilliant author. My favourite of his many successful books being Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored.

One of Jeffrey’s greatest achievements – and no mean feat - was to get every student to enjoy writing. For many, the transition from primary to secondary marks a shift from writing for pleasure to writing as a chore. But not with Jeffrey. And his focus on discernment, in writing as a craft, was one of the reasons.

There is something appealing about the word discernment. It is a serious, almost old- fashioned word. It is more than judgement and more than critical thinking. It says not just that I am making a judgement but that I can truffle out truth and quality. Growing up, my father regularly asked me and my siblings a challenging question –is what you are doing worthwhile? He had a strong sense of what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. In his view, reading a book was definitely more worthwhile than watching TV (and there were only 4 channels then and no social media!). Playing sport was preferable to watching sport; being active was preferable to being passive.

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I asked Jeffrey recently what he meant by discernment, because I couldn’t help thinking that in an age of bewildering quantities of addictive media, its time has certainly come.

“When you’re presented with what feels like infinite options, avenues, volumes of content, the real skill is being able to discern what is valuable, to understand where that value comes from in a very specific context, because it might change from context to context, and to have some basis of knowledge that gives you the confidence to know that your conclusion, that your choice, is the next best step forward.”

The context of what they are consuming is rarely taught to young people in school. And context is crucial. Understanding, for example, the way big tech companies are monetising our time. Context is the fuel of discernment. It allows you to use your values to make choices.

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In Jeffrey’s words:

“It’s knowing what is worth spending your energy on. It’s knowing what is worth the critical analysis. What’s going to give you a bigger insight. And that only comes with understanding your craft, and it is predicated on you doing a lot of work to understand the fundamentals, because then you can get into the nuance.”

This is the case for expertise, one of the six attributes we pursued in our school. To develop expertise and out of it to develop judgement, critical thinking – and ultimately discernment.

“So, if I’m reading a poem, is it the semantic field that’s important? Is it the vocabulary that’s important? Is the context important? Is it the voice? What’s important? A good craftsperson can discern these things at a very high level, because they know their craft.

At School 21 we talked a lot about craft. The craft of teaching. The ability of students to craft beautiful work. To do multiple drafts. To critique work. To be proud of the quality of their endeavours.

“Discernment also has contained within it the loaded term, refinement - which I think is important. It’s caring about and paying attention to the details that others neglect. Refinement is something you can sense. When you go to a nice restaurant, you understand that there’s something going on which is better and that it’s not superficial. It’s not just being dressed up as nice.”

“If you can encourage discernment in the classroom, then you can get to a place where you’re not patronising young people, because they have an understanding of nuance.”

One of Jeffrey’s great qualities as a teacher was being able to move young people seamlessly from analysing a Shakespeare sonnet to understanding the nuance behind an emoji or a comment on social media.

“If you use the wrong emoji in a text message, it’s game over. You can say the wrong thing or it’s the wrong tone. I think it’s an art form - not using punctuation in certain places, different types of language, the tone, the sarcasm. Even in that, there’s a level of refinement, in how to be a commenter on social media. I think it’s quite subtle. I think that it allows you to respect young people, because a lot of the time older generations don’t understand what they’re seeing, so they don’t respect it, and that’s dangerous, because that creates a gulf between the generations.”

In Jeffrey’s view AI provides an even greater challenge for discernment.

“AI lives and dies on this discerning conversation. Because the real skill now is how you use things like Chat GPT, and whether or not we take the time to even want to discern what is true, what is good, what is reliable? So if we’re using large language models to create things or to assist in processes, the real skill becomes this very human thing of discerning what the value of it is and knowing the provenance of the information. I see that people’s discernment threshold is quite low, they’re happy with what comes out of AI. Maybe I’m just a dinosaur, but I like the idea that someone has created something with a motivation behind it. Process is important. Craft is valuable because it engenders appreciation.”

New technology often acts deliberately and skilfully against discernment. Its speed encourages instant reaction and kills reflection. It recycles lies so that after a while their repetition almost convinces us they must be true. And it flattens everything so that expert analysis sits side by side with propaganda, lies, gossip. And, of course, as we have seen dramatically in the recent court cases in the United States, the algorithms are designed not for truth or analysis or nuance or discernment – but addiction. They are about stealing our time, not gifting us wisdom.

I have thought a lot about what should be taught in schools, and how so much of it has been tossed overboard as the exam factory model has become the antithesis of a good education. Students are taught that the knowledge they need for exams is incontestable – there is a single right answer – a 5 mark question requires this, a 7 mark question requires that. In other words, students are taught that questioning and critical thinking is not how you do well in exams – with the implication that it’s also not how you do well in life. We are training young people to do as they are told, to not question, to keep their head down, to accept what they are given. In other words to make them more likely to be taken over by technology, more at the mercy of AI, and less equipped to seek out truth and find compromise between differing views. In short, to lack the starting point for much that is worthwhile in life - curiosity.

In this as in so much else, it is the questions we ask that provide the best way of taking back control. I wrote a Substack post about this. Discernment depends on the questions we ask ourselves.

A discerning person might ask a combination of analytical and moral questions in an attempt to understand the relationship between what they are consuming and the effect it is having on them.

1. Truth. Is this claim accurate? What is the evidence? Have I cross-referenced this source with another source? What has been left out?

2. Context. Who benefits if I believe this? Who is making money out of this? Where does power lie? What was the motive of the author?

3. Worth my time: Is this worth my time – and if so how much? What deserves my attention? What is noise? What is urgent, and what is merely engineered to feel urgent? What kind of person am I becoming by consuming this?

4. Moral purpose: What values are being normalised here? Does this enlarge humanity or shrink it? Am I being drawn toward positive emotions or negative emotions?

5. Self-knowledge: What triggers me? What flatters me? What confirms my biases? What kinds of narratives am I too ready to believe?

6. Quality: Was there craft – depth behind this – or just superficial appeal? Is this simplification or genuine clarity? Does this deepen perception or merely stimulate my reaction?

7. Citizenship: Does this distinguish argument from virtue signalling? Does it provide evidence or just assertion? Does it show complexity or just simplistic blame? Does it distinguish public service from performance?

Ultimately this is about the hardest thing of all - to choose to live life with a greater repertoire of experiences. To be discerning about what we watch, read, consume, and do. And without teaching the next generation discernment, without all of us asking these questions, we are likely to drown under the vast and never-ending weight of content or be mown down by the AI juggernaut heading towards us.

What is the balance between “we” and “I” – the collective and the individual - when rebuilding communities?

We need the “we’ more than ever - more shared spaces, more collaboration, more understanding of different views, more collective endeavour. At the same time, we need the “I” – again, perhaps more than ever. The erosion of agency, the sense of disempowerment, of hopelessness is fuelling discontent, and the rise in support for populists.

Historically, the left’s comfort zone has been “we”. It has been suspicious of the “I”. We know that individuals flourish in a strong community. But we know too that communities are built not just by people coming together to shape their future, but people’s entrepreneurial spirit being unleashed.

Last week in Liverpool I saw how starting from the I - an individual’s idea, drive and dynamism -can build a powerful we.

“My name is James Green. I’m the founder and CEO of Public Life, and my job today is to introduce you to nine incredibly inspiring people. So how did we get here? Well, 12 months ago, we opened applications for Citizen First, and we took on a challenge to find hidden entrepreneurs from across the Liverpool City region, inspiring local people with innovative ideas to tackle the health and care challenges facing them and their communities. To do that, we offered a full time, real living wage salary for a year to give financial security, some great business mentoring and amazing tech support, and we mobilised the city region around them. Hundreds applied. (They had 20 times more applicants than places). And today you get the opportunity to see the businesses built by our inaugural citizen first cohort.”

What followed was an inspiring and uplifting two hours with the entrepreneurs telling their powerful stories.

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Sensified spaces

In a packed room at Anfield, the home of Liverpool football club, framed by the words: “With hope in your heart,” Faye Boswell who had worked in both mental health and as a travel agent, used her inspire to inspire her idea:

“Why do we have reviews for food, shopping and travel yet have nothing that will tell us whether a space will feel genuinely calm and supportive for the millions of people who are neurodiverse or suffer from sensory sensitivity. That’s the situation I found myself in with a neuro diverse sister and a young child in the family.”

Her new enterprise, Sensified Spaces - a trip advisor style platform, – is transforming the experience of those who seek calm places in an overwhelming city.

Faye has gone from working as a travel agent to building the app because she is on the programme. Now she’s secured pilot partners with a collective annual footfall of 40m, including Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Liverpool ONE shopping centre.

My Sleep Health

Sean Bailey was completely paralysed when he broke his neck on the football field.

He was told he wouldn’t walk again. He spent months in hospital and used the experience to develop his ideas about the power of sleep.

“Sleep is one of the only processes in our body that affects every single cell.”

Whether it’s those who work night shifts or suffers from insomnia, sleep deprivation affects millions. 85% of those who are autistic or have ADHD, have sleep issues, he said, but few get support. The cost of sleep drugs was prohibitively expensive and many got addicted. The waiting list for sleep clinics, he said is long, particularly if you’re waiting for a sleep clinic with an ADHD referral. And many of the much-hyped APPs or watches, he believes, don’t tailor strategies to your need.

Bailey, who made a miraculous recovery from his injuries, has built an AI-powered sleep app that gives tailored advice — ‘a sleep doctor in your pocket’. Now he’s about to launch trials in NHS settings.

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Hair Anywhere

Hair Anywhere is what founder Frankii Panchoo calls a ‘kick-ass inclusive beauty company’.

“I’ve been a hairdresser since 2007, working in salons, homes, festivals, and community settings. Over the years, I noticed one nagging issue: even when a space is technically accessible, the service often isn’t. Most salon basins, for example, are fixed into chairs - making them unusable for many wheelchair users. So, I set out to build something different.”

Her answer was to buy an old ambulance, customise it into a luxury mobile salon and then go to people’s homes or the places they most frequent, like local supermarkets, and do their hair there. She now aims to build a fleet of similar mobile salons.

Let’s be Blunt

Leanne Lucas was the yoga teacher critically injured in the horrific July 2024 attack that claimed the lives of three little girls in Southport at a Taylor Swift dance workshop.

In response she was determined to do something to combat knife crime. Analysing the statistics, she realised that far from zombie knives causing most of the deaths, as politicians often imply, it was in fact household kitchen knives. This was true for both deaths on the streets and even more so for domestic violence attacks. This led her to set up a new company Let’s be Blunt, with a key aim of moving from traditional pointed-tipped knives to ones with rounded ends. Her argument was that there was no need to have the sharp tip for cooking and in rounding it, many lives could be saved.

Leanne has recently secured a commercial partnership with a major UK knife manufacturer, Viners. This month round edge knives with her message on them were launched in hundreds of Morrisons stores across the country.

Laurel’s Wood

Caera Byrne’s idea was born in lockdown, when she saw the benefits to her young son of being in the natural world. After much negotiation, she became the custodian of 16 acres of private woodland, set up Laurel’s Wood CIC and started to provide services to the local community.

Caera’s initial focus was local schools and families. Then she found there was a particular impact with young people with SEND. She talks movingly about a selective mute child speaking while on one of her sessions. As part of Citizen First, she developed an academy model - including securing investment and launching a pilot - with a particular focus on young people at risk of becoming NEET - a major issue in the Liverpool City Region.

To complete the brilliant presentations, Lorcan McGuinness, only 23 and describing himself as autistic, wowed the audience with his robotic inventions to assist surgery. Abeer Al-awlaqi’s business helps women navigate perimenopause and menopause through personal nutrition and lifestyle advice. Mat Richards has created a company that delivers accessible physical activity and creative media to make spaces, including schools, genuinely accessible to disabled people. And Katie Bowater, a former GB water polo star, has set up the UK’s first network to support young entrepreneurs with the lonely first stages of getting a new idea off the ground.

How the Citizen First model works

The argument of this project is that the UK is building infrastructure for business and infrastructure for the public sector. But, what’s missing, they say, is infrastructure for communities - a systematic way to back people with lived experience to turn their insights into businesses. Citizen First can be that missing layer.

1. Inclusive opportunity
A CV-less, open-call recruitment process that reaches hidden entrepreneurs traditional programmes miss. On the current programme 90% of applicants experienced economic disadvantage.

‍2. Financial stability
A year’s Real Living Wage salary plus seed funding, removing the financial barriers that prevent people from pursuing their business ideas. Because it’s only people with the backing of savings or family income who can take the risks of starting their idea without payment.

‍3. Meaningful support
Small, tight-knit cohorts with a dedicated full-time business advisor providing hands-on guidance throughout the journey.

‍4.Specialist expertise
Applied learning through a business experimentation curriculum, with one-to-one coaching from experts in business model innovation, plus tech support from experts in the field.

‍5. A powerful local network
Direct, ongoing access to civic bodies, local businesses, and academic institutions, embedding each new enterprise in the wider system from day one.

The key challenge will be what happens after the first year. Which of the businesses get the financial backing to continue and grow. Which can properly survive when the intensive support is removed., Which entrepreneurs have the confidence to continue at the same pace. The early response seems to be very positive - with some of the fledgling businesses securing investment, funding, commercial partnerships and becoming revenue generating for the first time.

Restoring agency

What was so uplifting about the presentations is that each of the entrepreneurs was marrying their lived experience to a powerful idea. The progress in just nine months, really had been astonishing.

Many of the ideas focused on well-being, the marginalised and the next generation. They were about our humanity. At a time when life feels so hard for so many, these ideas were about tackling the barriers for people to live a calmer and more fulfilling life.

The government is currently given £20m to nearly 300 neighbourhoods to regenerate them. There is a very real danger that the money gets frittered away in unstrategic squabbling as MP, local authorities and other major players fight over the resources. The danger when money is involved in this way is the driving question becomes: how should we spent this pot of money? And not: what is the strategy that will build a lasting legacy of real change in this community?

Far better, surely, to build real agency by investing in projects like this - backing people with ideas to make their community a better place. To put this into perspective, for £20m you could pay a salary for a year for 800 people in an area to get good ideas off the ground. If, more realistically you did that for 50 or 100 and did it around a theme or set of themes agreed by the community (one of which could be, for example, tackling the crisis of young people who are NEET) then there could be a big impact - and a real legacy.

I can’t help thinking that every pot of money government puts forward is tied up in levels of bureaucracy and process that are a long way from the entrepreneurial spirit, the speed, and the sheer commitment and passion I saw in that room at Anfield. That’s got to change.

What James Green and his team has found with Citizen First is that starting from the 'I' is how you mobilise the collective in a place. More than 50 organisations across the Liverpool City Region have got behind the hidden entrepreneurs — the Mayor and Combined Authority, University of Liverpool, local businesses. He talks about it as bringing the two halves together: citizens with their ideas, lived experience and entrepreneurial spirit, and institutions with their resource, expertise and networks.

There is one other theme I will pick up in future Substack posts. It is the idea of hidden talents. Why are so many talents hidden? Children’s talents hidden by our exam-obsessed school system. Adults with great ideas ‘hidden’ in our communities.

A final word from James Green, the inspiration behind the project.

“What we’ve created is a little pocket of public life alive with agency. And I honestly can’t think of anything more important to build right now. It can feel quite hard to be optimistic in the future at the moment, right? And I was reflecting that sometimes things just feel stuck. People living in communities, facing social issues, knowing what needs to be done, but not quite knowing how to make their ideas a reality. And institutions wrestling with these complex social issues, needing to engage and involve residents and citizens in that work, not always knowing how to do that as effectively as they would like to. And what we’ve built together with Citizens First is a proven model that just works. So imagine if this wasn’t just a little pocket of agency. Imagine if this was a layer of civic infrastructure in every major town and city across the country.”

Let me start at the beginning…….

I was a new advisor to Keir Starmer in opposition. I had been out of politics for quite a while pursuing a career in teaching. Leaving politics behind after nine years working for Tony Blair, I became first a teaching assistant, then a history teacher and then a headteacher.

I thought how fortunate I was to be able to return to politics armed with fresh experience and a new toolkit that I hoped might be put to good use. Teaching children and developing staff had made me think deeply about the craft of running meetings, sharpening discussion, getting quickly to the heart of the matter. And I had another motive as well. There was always an imbalance between politics and the sectors it served - a superiority that comes from the politician having the power and money and the headteacher, hospital CEO or business leader having to show the required deference to get their fair share of it. What I felt was missing, was a recognition that the craft of politics could be enhanced by practices used in professions such as teaching.

I loved one technique above all others. It was my go-to activity for the classroom and sometimes for staff training. Because every time I used it, what ensued was something special – a discussion, a debate, a conversation – rich, deep, potent, like the finest Ethiopian coffee beans.

This technique had a name. Enigmatic. Beautiful. Twinkling with possibility. It was called Diamond Nine.

The idea was to have nine options or nine things or nine attributes or nine causes or nine hopes or nine possibilities - as you can see it didn’t matter what it was, but there needed to be nine of them. Not ten or eight. But nine. Each of the nine items was written on a separate piece of paper and placed in an envelope, ready for those taking part – pairs, small groups – to empty onto a table, ready to move them around as the debate began.

The task was to place those nine items into a diamond shape:

One at the top.

Two on the next row.

Then three.

Then two.

Then one.

The one at the top was your favourite, the best, the most important, the one that mattered most.

The one at the bottom was the least important, least favourite. The diagram shows you what it should look like.

The discussion was all about what should go where - and why. It forced the participants to justify their reasons, connect the different items and wrestle with trade-offs - deciding which of the nine were dependent on others and which you couldn’t do without. For example if you wrote out nine causes of the First World War and got students to do a Diamond Nine, they would have an in-depth discussion about short term, long term, and trigger causes and once done, each group could then move around the room analysing the thinking of other groups.

Similarly if you asked members of staff to have a similar discussion on the nine best ways to support children with special educational needs in the classroom, there would be a similarly insightful debate.

It works because the oracy combined with the manipulation of the pieces of paper, plus the formal structure of the diamond, creates a satisfying outcome.

So, just a few weeks into the job, and armed with an envelope, and nine cut-up sentences I was given an hour’s slot to work with Keir to get to the heart of what he believed. The feeling in the office was that there had been too much chopping and changing with themes and we needed to get to his strongest beliefs.

I was told repeatedly, he doesn’t like the word vision. He saw grand visions as too impractical, allowing people to dance around problems rather than solve them.

So on the nine pieces of paper, I wrote concrete objectives because I knew he wouldn’t want abstracts.

I cut them out, put them in an envelope and tried to reassure him that I had used this technique successfully on many occasions in education.

Keir humoured me. He opened the envelope gingerly and poured the nine bits of paper onto the wooden desk in the meeting room at party headquarters.

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He read each of the pieces of paper in turn.

1. GROWTH ACROSS THE COUNTRY. Wages, productivity and business investment rise, and in every part of the country.

2. CLIMATE/ NET ZERO Britain is on track to become carbon neutral with zero-emission electricity by the end of our first term in government.

3. PUBLIC SERVICE REFORM Invest in and modernise public services in the community to prevent problems at source as our population ages.

4. EDUCATION AND SKILLS More young people leave school well-prepared for the future world of work and adults have the chance to improve their skills throughout their life.

5. MAKING WORK PAY More workers earn decent pay, progress, save and retire with dignity; and fewer people are trapped in poverty.

6. RESPECT AND NEW POLITICS More people feel pride and belonging in their country with decisions made closer to them, and more people trust government to create positive change.

7. INEQUALITY Tackle inequality and extend opportunity ensuring all parts of the UK are thriving, the gap between rich and poor is closed, that everyone is included in prosperity

8. HOME OWNERSHIP More people have the security of owning their own home and affordable home ownership is available to first-time buyers.

9. SAFE AT HOME AND ON THE STREET More people feel safe in their own home and on their street because crime is falling, convictions are rising, and law and order is restored.

I then took him through the exercise. The big question, I said, is: which of these is most important to have achieved after 5 or 10 years of a Labour government? Do any of the statements leap out at you? Which do you think are less important? Is there something you really care about that is not included?

It was striking that his first instinct, before a lot of discussion, was to put inequality first. “My aim is to look people in the eye in a place like Burnley and know that we have properly matched their ambition with the policies to help them thrive.”

This was the point in the hour when he was most passionate. He seemed to be a genuine ‘levelling up’ politician.

In the second row he put climate change and public service reform. Both, he believed, to be big, important causes.

As the diamond shape started to form, I tried to probe his thinking. How did he see the relationship between growth and tackling inequality? Should climate change be in the second row? Was the reason that public service reform was so high because it was a catch-all that allowed him to cover both health and crime?

Others from the team joined on-line to discuss the outcome and bat around the different priorities. As the discussion developed, Keir became more convinced that everything flowed from growth. Without growth, there could be no equality and none of the other policies would be achieved. In the final formulation, tackling inequality came lower in the diamond.

This was the final diamond from our session.

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I’ve written it out more clearly here:

The meeting seemed to have gone well.

I was delighted that, as I had hoped, the process had focused debate and forced prioritisation.

A few months later, still slightly smug from the triumph of the first Diamond Nine exercise, and having used the same technique successfully on an election strategy planning away day, I attempted to use it again, but this time in an even more exacting environment: the main political strategy meeting.

In the room at the new Labour Headquarters was Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden, Morgan McSweeney, Stuart Ingham, Deborah Mattinson, Katie Martin and Matthew Doyle.

Starmer has never liked political strategy meetings. He sees almost all of them as too circular, the iterative process mostly a waste of time.

Keir came in. I failed to read the room. He was not in a good mood. It later emerged that there had been a major malfunction with the autocue and precious speech prep time had been lost.

He looked at me holding my envelopes. I ploughed on. Keir seemed increasingly annoyed. I hadn’t seen him angry before. He appeared to be saying with his eyes: “Why has this idiot got his bloody games out again?”

I split the meeting into two groups with two sets of nine items. The purpose of this Diamond Nine, which was agreed before the meeting, was for us to get quickly to decide where we were vulnerable in the upcoming election and where we would be under most sustained attack. In short, we needed an answer to the vital question: If we were to lose the election, what would have happened? It was a way of getting ahead of the game and pre-empting attacks.

Again, there were nine options. It was mostly the usual charges against a Labour government. We would tax too much. We would be irresponsible on the economy. We would open the borders.

Both groups started debating. Keir was silent, fuming. He was not enjoying shuffling bits of paper around.

To be fair, the others including Rachel Reeves and Pat McFadden went along with the process.

In fifteen minutes there was consensus. In my experience this kind of agreement usually takes many, many hours of to and fro. The irony, lost on Keir at the time, was that one of the huge benefits of a Diamond Nine is that it forces a decision and curtails endless debate.

The issue that both groups put number one in their Diamond Nine was the commitment Labour had at the time to spend £28bn annually on the Green Prosperity Plan. The fear was that it would lead to a massive attack on Labour’s extra borrowing and at worst could lead to a Liz-Truss-style attack on Labour’s irresponsibility.

Again, the process had worked. But Keir was not happy.

The meeting quickly moved on to other business. There was not another strategy meeting for many weeks. I never dared use a Diamond Nine again.

I remember it well. The first word she spoke. “She said, ketchup. Listen, she said ketchup. She’s a genius. Say it again. ketch-up! ketch-up! I promise you, she really did say ketch-up.”

What happens when a baby says their first word is that several systems come together: the baby has learned some of the sound-patterns of their language, has started to understand that words refer to people and things, has enough control of the lips, tongue, jaw, and vocal tract to produce a recognisable pattern, and can use that sound intentionally in a real social moment.

Babble is the technical term for the stage before actual words are spoken. Those first sounds turn into words over time. Researchers think social interaction plays a crucial role in making it happen. Babies do not learn words in isolation: they learn in back-and-forth exchanges, with adults responding to their sounds, faces, gaze, pointing, and attempts. Studies show a parent’s feedback can make babble more speech-like, and joint attention, when baby and adult are focused on the same object or event - seems to be especially important for first words. Words emerge when sound, practice, understanding, and social meaning all line up.

Face to face talk carries tone, timing, facial expression, gaze, posture, and rapid turn-taking. Those cues matter. They do for a baby and also for adults. It’s the fuel of wellbeing. Studies during and after the pandemic found that face-to-face communication was more strongly associated with better mental health and wellbeing than any digital substitutes - though obviously at times digital interaction was clearly better than no contact at all.

Today those first interactions with babies and children are becoming more fractured. A generation is growing up for whom extended talk is not the norm.

Parents push the baby buggy while glued to their phone (we’ve all done it). Evening meals are increasingly eaten in front of the TV. (Again, been there) Young people from 8-14 years old spend more than 3 hours a day, on average, on screen, rising to 4 hours for 13-14 year olds. 13-14 year old Snapchat users average more than 2 hours a day just on Snapchat.

Young people speak on the phone less, meet up in person less, go over to each other’s houses less.

The exam pressure of schools, accompanied by often rigid behaviour codes, means the pressure on young people to be silent - silent in lessons, silent walking down the corridor, silent in assembly, sends a clear message: this is not a place of deep dialogue. Research from Voice 21 shows that pupils who do not feel confident speaking in the classroom jump from 29% aged 5 and 6, to 52% by 14 and 15 years old - an increase of 23%.

One of the main findings of the research project I conducted with Shuab Gamote, Inside the Mind of a 16-year-old, was how conversations in school were drying up because of safeguarding concerns and teachers not feeling equipped to tackle the thorniest of issues.

Speaking to young people who are NEET as well as those in school who are at risk, it is clear that too few of them have an adult they can trust to talk about the things that really matter to them.

These issues are not just about young people. Adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online a day. Women spend 26 minutes a day longer online than men, with a daily average of 4hrs 43 mins.

Data from the Campaign to End Loneliness suggests that 3.8 million UK citizens feel chronically lonely. OECD surveys suggest 1 in 10 UK citizens have no close friends.

Working from home is bad for collaboration, connection and creativity

Working from home is killing talk - and collaboration.

The evidence is beginning to suggest that organisations are less creative and less collaborate when everyone is remote. This should not come as a surprise. This is not an argument for a wholesale return to work, a balance is important, but it does mean that those interactions at work really matter: the conversations we have before and after meetings, the much fabled water-cooler moments, the going out to buy a sandwich together, and crucially those ‘apprenticeship’ relationships when you sit next to someone and learn informally from them.

Research with software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm found that sitting near colleagues increased coding feedback by 18.3% and improved code quality, with the gains concentrated among younger and less experienced employees.

A major study of 61,182 Microsoft employees found that remote work made collaboration networks more static and siloed, with fewer connections between different parts of the organisation. It also shifted communication away from more immediate, synchronous interaction towards more asynchronous communication - for example disjointed on-line messaging. The researchers concluded that this could make it harder for workers to acquire and share new information across the network.

Reducing working life to transactions – people at home delivering their tasks without connection - is a long-term dystopian nightmare. But perhaps, the rapid implementation of AI will force organisations to reappraise what humans uniquely offer in the workplace and creativity through dialogue will make a comeback.

What are the solutions?

Authors, Peter Osborn and Eddy Canfor-Dumas’s have made the case for A Talking Revolution. “We’ve had a revolution in the technology that connects us around the world, in the hardware and the software – now we need a revolution in the ‘humanware’, the quality of how we actually communicate with each other, one to one.”

We have become overwhelmed by one type of talk – transactional talk. The kind of talk that requires something from the recipient. The teacher asking for homework, telling a teenager to tuck their shirt in. The parent wanting to know if a child has tidied their room, or what they want for tea. The work colleague asking whether an employee will meet a deadline or what should go on slide number 5. The Number 10 advisor telling a backbencher to vote the right way, toe the line.

But where is the conversation with no agenda? The open-ended conversation? The listening? The conversation that tries to deepen connection?

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Places to talk

In Grimsby last week I met Anne Bickerstaffe, the inspiration behind the Care Hub, a place for drop-ins for those in the local community to sit, talk and connect. Her community centre does not look like any other. “Our hope had always been that by creating a beautiful, warm and cosy space that people might feel comfortable enough to talk about things they had been dealing with on their own. Already in the first week, we’ve had so many conversations with people who wouldn’t have considered themselves to be in crisis, but as their stories unfolded, it became clear they needed someone to listen, and help to work out what to do next.”

Through donations and local support she has indeed created a space that is beautiful - including William Morris wallpaper.

She is already seeing the benefits. Anne described one of the more than a hundred people who dropped by in the first week:

“One man has come in every day. He is sleeping on the floor of a storage lockup outside Grimsby after his father went into a care home, and now walks 6 miles every day to come to our Hub for somewhere warm to sit during the day. He has admitted that he doesn’t like talking to people, but he is starting to open up a little more each day.”

She recalled that:

“A man in his 50s came in on the first day and told us that he had been walking into town every day for something to do, because his wife had died just three weeks earlier. The funeral had not yet taken place, and he was still trying to make sense of what had happened. He spoke about the circumstances of her hospital admission following a fall, and how she had not been given enough oxygen for a pre-existing condition. He had not come in asking for support, but he welcomed a safe space to talk about his anger and grief. He stayed for a long me, and then came back every day this week.”

Sir David Robinson is one of the most influential thinkers and practitioners on how we rebuild civic spaces to foster connection. His Relationships Project describes what is at stake.

How are we to heal divided communities, to respect difference, trade fairly, care for the displaced, respond to crises, or share the natural world? How are we to live together?

More than ever, the big questions that we face are all about relationships. Their substance and quality will determine the direction and quality of our lives.

Wider society, meanwhile, has been moving in the wrong direction: we network and transact as never before but being well connected is not the same as connecting well. Meaningful time together has been displaced by fast and shallow connection.

We value competition, individualism, speed and scale rather than effective relationships, collaboration and the common good. Our organisations have become more remote and less human as these attitudes are wired into every aspect of our lives.

We can do better. Covid and lockdown showed us all that our health and happiness, as individuals and as communities, is built from the aggregation of our personal relationships. We could build a better society, an equitable economy, effective government, flourishing businesses, successful services, happy, healthy, thriving communities if we put relationships first.

Strong relationships are not a frilly accessory in a happy neighborhood, a thriving school, an effective health service, a flourishing business, or a strong and cohesive society. They are the making of it all.

Working towards a world of good relationships, wherever we are and whatever we do, is simple common sense. We want to make it common practice.

Finding the time and the place to talk and listen at home, at school, in the community, in politics, is the essence of national renewal.

Reducing polarisation

Oracy and talk also reduces polarisation. It is obvious. We know it. But it happens too rarely. There is now strong evidence that mixed discussion groups are less polarising than echo chambers. A Cambridge University study shows that when you put Labour and Tory supporters together to discuss an issue, low and behold it fosters greater understanding and less animosity.

One of the most striking large-scale example is Stanford’s America in One Room deliberative polling project. More than 500 registered voters from across the US spent time discussing major issues in moderated, mixed groups. The researchers reported “large, depolarising changes” in both policy attitudes and affective polarisation. Democrats’ feeling-thermometer ratings of Republicans rose by 13 points, while Republicans’ ratings of Democrats rose by 14 points after deliberation.

Perhaps the biggest and best experiment in this kind of deliberative democracy was carried out in Taiwan, driven by the then Minister Audrey Tang. vTaiwan, launched in 2014, is an open consultation process that mixes online and offline discussion so citizens, officials, experts, businesses and civil-society groups can deliberate together on contentious policy questions, especially around the digital economy. They used on-line platforms and AI to gather information from the public, including panels of citizens, and took them through a deliberative process particularly on ideas for up-coming legislation. The aim was to identify where there was “rough consensus” and turn that into policy or legislation. That has happened successfully in more than 26 cases.

Talk in schools, talk in politics

What is wrong with politics is the same thing that is wrong with schools. Citizens and pupils have too little agency. Life is done to them. There is little dialogue. Politicians announce, teachers pronounce. Citizens are disaffected; pupils are disillusioned. Alienated voters turn to populism, alienated pupils turn to a more exciting online world.

The answer to both is talk.

To reconnect politicians to the public requires new forms of dialogue, learning, for example from the Taiwan experience. There needs to be a deeper conversation, where politicians listen as well as lead. Policy makers in turn need to talk to real people, get beyond the Westminster bubble and understand people’s lived experience.

In schools, teaching needs to be dialogic – a conversation in every classroom to deepen thinking and understanding. This was good enough for the Ancient Greeks – Socratic seminars, as we call them today, put dialogue and deliberation at the heart of the classroom. The classical Trivium – the Latin word meaning ‘where three roads meet’ - was about grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Philosopher, Michael Oakeshott famously described human civilisation and education as "the conversation of mankind," an ongoing, intellectual adventure involving different ‘voices’. That should be the spirit of education.

Talk at home

As a teacher, I sometimes used to set ‘talk’ for homework. For example, to have a conversation with a parent, carer or sibling about a key moral issue being debated in a piece of literature they were studying. The aim was to signal the importance of oracy not just literacy or numeracy. To bring the benefits of talk home.

When I talk to teenagers in schools across the country, it is clear that each of them has a phone or screen in their bedroom at night and they are using them, often until 2 or 3 in the morning. I have not met a single child who has the device taken off them.

This is not a sustainable position. All of us have a responsibility to do something about it.

All of us have the power to think more intentionally each day about the conversations we have - their quantity and quality - so that together we deepen the connections and relationships that make us fully human.