Euan Blair: from PM’s son to £700m business and an MBE

theguardian.com:

He is the son of a former prime minister, the proud new owner of a £22m home in west London, and at 38 years old, Euan Blair was on Wednesday awarded an MBE for services to education.

Tony Blair’s eldest child made headlines as a teenager for being found by police “drunk and incapable” in Leicester Square after celebrating the end of his GCSEs in 2000.

More recently, he has called on the government to consider scrapping the exams, and university degrees too, for many people. As the founder of an apprenticeship training business valued at £700m in its last private funding round, he has a financial interest in education policy.

“We definitely have to make sure we are tracking people’s progress throughout the classroom, but that doesn’t have to exist through this current obsession with GCSEs,” he told the Times Education Commission summit last month. “You end up doing mock after mock, and this becomes the end in itself rather than actually learning.”

Blair’s father was elected prime minister in 1997 after promising that his three priorities would be “education, education, education”, and later set a target of getting 50% of school leavers into university. The target was not hit until 2019.

But Blair Jr argues that the nation’s “obsession with the academic as a marker of potential and talent” is holding back people from minority groups and failing to serve the needs of employers in a digital age.

“When you look at the 50% target, the belief was, the more people go to university, the more people can access great opportunities, the more we would transition people fairly from full-time education to full-time employment,” he told the Telegraph. “It has not worked out that way. Lots of students end up in jobs deemed to be low-skilled