Economic growth starts in the classroom

If you want to meet the business leaders of the future, visit a school. The children in classrooms today are the inventors, makers and entrepreneurs of decades to come.

If we give them the education they need, that is. Businesses’ demand for skilled people keeps on growing. The world economy is changing, and it rewards the highly skilled as never before. There are huge opportunities for young people who leave school confident about their choices in the adult world.

But at the moment, too many are leaving school without the right knowledge or skills to take advantage of those opportunities. Today I will be speaking at SUMMIT: The Future of Growth, an event that explores the barriers to economic growth in the UK. Growth Britannia, a new report launched at the summit, finds that one of our biggest problems is that young people are deeply ambivalent towards studying science, technology and maths.