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The Entrepreneur Says Our System Needs To Change At school Richard Branson would sit at the back of the class “doing my own thing”, baffled by the lessons. “I was a dyslexic school kid who had very little understanding about what we were being taught and what was going on on the blackboard,” he says. “Bizarrely for a dyslexic, I started planning a magazine to try to get young people to campaign for a change in the education system to make it more relevant to people, and also to campaign against the Vietnamese War and the Biafran War and other injustices that were going on in the world at the time.” One day the headmaster at Stowe, his independent boarding school, gave him an ultimatum. “He said to me, ‘Richard, I know you’re starting this magazine. You’ve either got to leave school and do it or stay at school and do your formal education.’ I was 15 years old and so I said, ‘Great — I’m off.’ There was so much about education that I and other fellow students were really frustrated about, and the frightening thing is that in 50 years not a lot has changed.” On Branson’s last day the head told him that he’d either end up a millionaire or in prison. That turned out to be prescient. By the age of 22, the entrepreneur had not only set up his magazine, Student, but had also opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, and founded the brand that would make his fortune. The Virgin Group now controls more than 400 companies, running trains, planes and even a rocket as the entrepreneur goes into battle with his fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to conquer space. Yet as he looks back at his career at the age of 71, Branson points out that he would still be considered a failure by an education system that defines success purely in academic terms. “I once did an IQ test as an eight-year-old. I don’t think I filled in anything,” he tells me. “Go forward 30 or so years, I was running Europe’s largest private group of companies. I didn’t know the difference between gross and net [profit], but it didn’t matter . . . what mattered was my character, whether I was good at inspiring people and motivating people, whether I wanted to make a real difference in the world.” Branson still cannot do crosswords and is hopeless at spelling, but is convinced that the dyslexia that held him back at school has been an advantage in his business career. “I think by being dyslexic, I learnt to become a good delegator, which is a really important thing in life if you’re becoming an entrepreneur and building businesses.