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“I surrounded myself with wonderful people who were better than me at a lot of things. I think I’m more creative at certain things. If [dyslexics] are able to concentrate on things they’re good at, they will really excel at them.” Getting letters in the right order is, by contrast, “so unimportant really”. I am speaking to the businessman on Zoom as chairwoman of The Times Education Commission, which publishes its interim report tomorrow. I’m in cold, wet Hackney, he’s in the sun-soaked Caribbean, where he has been giving his grandchildren the sort of education he wishes he had had as a boy. “Yesterday I took my grandkids around Necker Island and we said, ‘There’s a scarlet ibis over there,’ and then we went on the internet and found out all about scarlet ibis and how they’d been wiped out in the British Virgin Islands a hundred years ago, then recently reintroduced, and how if a scarlet ibis breeds with a white ibis you get a pink ibis. Then we moved on to flamingos and giant tortoises. We were just getting out and about looking at things which are relevant and exciting. And sadly the conventional school educational system doesn’t really do that.” Branson insists there must be a total transformation in education to engage children in the digital age and prepare young people for the modern world. His family foundation Big Change, set up by his daughter Holly a decade ago in the wake of the London riots, is launching a campaign for a radical reshaping of learning in the wake of the pandemic. The entrepreneur says that he was lucky to have had parents who could support him when he dropped out of school, but too many children, particularly the most disadvantaged, are being failed by the “one size fits all” education system in Britain. “There are some people who need a particular way of being taught and there are others who definitely don’t need that way of being taught, and at the moment, everybody gets taught the same way,” he says. “So much emphasis is put on exams and that precludes schools from being adventurous. They’ve just to concentrate on exams, exams, exams. Creativity is stifled by the exam system.” The focus on grades is increasingly at odds with what employers want, he says. “At the Virgin Group now, for most jobs we don’t ask for test results. We look for character. It’d be hypocritical for me, who left school at 15, to be judging people based on exam results. “I would love to see a situation around the world where standardised testing is replaced by continual assessment, and people have a sort of education passport populated with everything wonderful that kids are doing, from academics to sports to how kind or how confident they are. For most jobs, you don’t need to be assessed in the formal, boring way which puts everybody in the same box.”