The expansion of UK universities has “not worked” to create a “fairer society” and the Government must now get more people into apprenticeships if it wants to succeed in levelling up, Euan Blair has said.
Tony Blair’s son has built an estimated £160m fortune with his company Multiverse, which urges people to avoid university and take an apprenticeship instead – a business model arguably at odds with his father’s famous drive to get 50 per cent going to university.
In an interview with i to mark National Apprenticeship Week, Mr Blair said he had inherited a hunger to change society, but saw business rather than politics as the best way to achieve it.
He co-founded Multiverse in 2016, initially with the name White Hat. The company matches young people with employers in the tech and professional services industries and provides them with the training to complete an apprenticeship. Firms such as Citi, Morgan Stanley, Mercedes Benz, RightMove and Facebook’s parent company Meta are among its clients.
Both Multiverse and Blair have enjoyed meteoric success. The company recently expanded into America, helped by a fundraising round last year which saw the startup’s value rocket to almost £650m, giving Mr Blair a paper fortune reported to be as high as £160m – needless to say much larger than his father’s.
“For a long period of time we’ve allowed universities and academia to be the gatekeepers of who gets access to the best careers and then effectively who the winners and losers in society are,” the 38-year-old tells i. “That’s a problem when there’s no major correlation between academics and job performance, and also when the make-up of elite universities does not reflect the make-up of wider society.”
To make matters worse, graduates “accumulate huge amounts of debt” but often fail to get the decent jobs to justify it, he says.
Given the nature of his business, it is unsurprising that he constantly finds himself being asked about the 50 per cent target. “The belief was that the more people who went to university the more evenly opportunity would be distributed and it would create a fairer society… it’s not worked out like that,” he says.
Mr Blair suggests that his father’s thinking has also matured – the response to stalling social mobility, Euan says, “is not sending more people to university, doing the same thing and expecting a different result… he would agree with that”.
Another question which always crops up is whether he plans to enter politics. If he’s sick of being asked, he is too polite to let it show. “No!” he says with a laugh. “Look, it does not exactly seem tremendously appealing does it?”
Is he put off by the toxicity of political debate? “I’m sure that doesn’t help, but I feel I can do much more about the things I care about, doing what I’m doing, than if I went into politics.”
He does accept that his family background is likely to have influenced his decision to found a start-up with a social mission. “I don’t spend too much time being all that introspective about it, but it probably has. I still follow politics very closely – the idea that you can drive systemic change to achieve better social outcomes, always appealed,” Mr Blair says.
“The fact is you can do that now through business,” he continues, warming to his theme and speaking with a fluency that feels familiar. “Record amounts of funding are being deployed to solve intractable social problems.
“You’re seeing a wave of companies be set up that are increasingly saying, ‘How can we, in tandem with building a big scalable business, address major social problems that policymakers may not be able to address?’
“There are various problems in politics, from a fragmentation of consensus that existed for a long time on certain issues to increased politicisation of everything from education through to healthcare. How can you as a private company go and tackle some of those problems and drive systemic change? That’s always been an exciting motivator of this.”
Mr Blair is certainly not short of opinions on policy. He wants ministers to “ditch the photo ops in hi-vis jackets and hard hats” when promoting apprenticeships, arguing it has led to a misleading perception that they are only for roles in engineering and construction.
“That’s not the real experience of hundreds of thousands of apprentices around the country, particularly given this huge growing demand in digital and tech,” he says. He is also “not convinced” that young people are leaving school with the right skills.
When asked about media speculation on his net worth, Mr Blair is momentarily knocked off balance. “I don’t really even know what to say to that! I don’t pay any attention to it.”
But he has inherited a talent for staying on message: “The thing is the valuation is put on the company, it’s not put on me.”
New labour: how apprenticeships can equip firms for the tech revolution
Euan Blair says apprenticeships can address “two of the biggest issues” of our time – equipping businesses with the skills they need for the tech revolution, and giving them access to “diverse talent and not the same small group of people”.
Apprenticeships seem to be rising in public esteem. According to an Opinium poll commissioned by Multiverse, 66 per cent of UK adults felt apprenticeships had grown in value over the last five years. Forty-one per cent thought that an apprenticeship was better for preparing young people for work, compared to 17 per cent who felt a degree was better.
But Mr Blair thinks there is more work to be done to promote the option. The Government already collects data on post-graduation salaries for university courses, but he wants them to do the same for apprenticeships to enable “easy side-by-side comparisons” for school leavers.
To help set young people up for work, he argues there should a greater focus in schools on qualities such as “professionalism, succeeding in the workplace and building a network”.
He also backs Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s call for “digital skills” to be put at the heart of the curriculum.
“It’s essential,” Mr Blair says. “For a long time people talked about functional skills, which was supposed to be the fundamental skills that were English and maths. Sure. But IT, digital skills, anything related to tech and data need to be just as prioritised.”
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