He is the son of a former prime minister, the proud new owner of a £ 22 million house in west London, and 38-year-old Euan Blair received an MBE on education services on Wednesday.
Tony Blair’s eldest son appeared in the headlines as a teenager to be found by police “drunk and incapable” in Leicester Square after celebrating the end of his GCSE in 2000.
More recently, he has called on the government to consider eliminating exams, as well as university degrees, for many people. As the founder of a £ 700 million apprenticeship training company in its latest round of private funding, he has a financial interest in education policy.
“We definitely need to make sure we’re tracking people’s progress across the classroom, but that shouldn’t exist through this current obsession with GCSEs,” he said at the summit. Times Education Commission last month. “You end up doing simulation after simulation, and that becomes the end in itself instead of really learning.”
Blair’s father was elected prime minister in 1997 after promising that his three priorities would be “education, education, education”, and later set the goal of getting 50% of those who leave the country ‘school in the university. The goal was not achieved until 2019.
But Blair Jr. argues that the nation’s “obsession with academia as a marker of potential and talent” is holding back people from minority groups and failing to address the needs of entrepreneurs in the digital age.
“When we look at the 50% target, the belief was that the more people go to college, the more people can access great opportunities, the more people transition from full-time education to full-time employment. “, he said. the Telegraph. “It simply came to our notice then. Many students end up in jobs that are considered low-skilled that would not require a degree in the first place. Getting a degree doesn’t guarantee you a job. “
Blair, who studied ancient history at Bristol University before going to Yale, said he “didn’t enjoy studying,” but when he was older, going to college was seen as the only way to get a job. first level. He says he came up with the idea to set up his training provider, Multiverse, after his first job at Morgan Stanley Investment Bank.
“I often tell people, ‘I started my career in investment banking by structuring corporate debt and derivatives, armed with a bachelor’s degree in ancient history and a master’s degree in international relations that didn’t teach me how to do the job,'” he said. say London Rising. , a conference discussing ideas on how to help capital recover from the pandemic last year. “I actually did an apprenticeship while I learned everything I knew about this job at work.”
His business, co-founded with his friend Sophie Adelman in 2016, offers what he says is “a genuine and credible alternative that can compete with the university.”
Multiverse combines out-of-school students with more than 300 employers, including Google, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Depop, and offers on-the-job training tailored to the needs of employees, as well as personal training and extracurricular activities and partnerships. similar to those of the university.
The training is funded at a rate of 0.5% applied to all companies with an annual salary of more than £ 3 million. This can be spent on your own training costs or transferred to other organizations, such as Multiverse.
Blair, a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC, says some youngsters have even turned down places at Oxford to join his plan.
It has also been popular with venture capitalists, including Google’s venture capital division, which has injected millions into the business. Late last year, a third round of funding valued Multiverse at $ 875 million (£ 700 million). It is understood that Blair owns just under 50% of the shares, meaning his stake could be worth up to £ 350 million, far more than his father’s estimated fortune of £ 60 million.
He recently splashed some of his money on a five-story townhouse in west London for £ 22 million. The seven-bedroom residence, which he shares with his wife, Suzanne Ashman, and their two children, features a two-story “iceberg” basement with an indoor pool, gym and garage for several cars.
He stepped on the property ladder soon after his mother, Cherie Blair, bought him a £ 265,000 flat to live in while studying at the University of Bristol.
Blair prefers to dress in the relaxed style of a Silicon Valley technology CEO, wearing Multiverse T-shirts or sweatshirts paired with jeans and often multicolored sneakers. He once said he had a branded top in almost every color “so he could wear a different one every day.”
He has been praised for prioritizing social mobility in Multiverse, where 53% of learners are people of color and 36% come from poorer backgrounds. Last year he was appointed to a government working group with the aim of improving socio-economic diversity in financial services.
Blair’s vital mission, he says, is to “make sure the best jobs of the next decade don’t just go to the same people who got the best jobs in the last decade.”