Euan Blair: From PM’s son to £700m business and MBE . until
He is the son of a former prime minister, the proud new owner of a £22m home in west London, and at the age of 38, Euan Blair was awarded an MBE on Wednesday for services to education.
Tony Blair’s eldest child made headlines as a teenager after being found “drunk and incapacitated” by police in Leicester Square after celebrating the end of his GCSE in 2000.
Recently, he has called on the government to consider scrapping examinations and even university degrees for many. As the founder of an apprenticeship training business worth £700m in his previous private funding round, he has a financial interest in education policy.
“We definitely have to make sure we’re tracking people’s progress throughout the class, but this current obsession with GCSE doesn’t exist through it,” he said at the Times Education Commission summit last month. . “You’re doing fake after fake, and that becomes an end in itself rather than really learning.”
Blair’s father was elected prime minister in 1997 following a promise that his three priorities would be “education, education, education”, and later set a goal of getting 50% of school dropouts to university. The target was not hit until 2019.
But Blair Jr. argues that the country’s “obsession with academia as a marker of potential and talent” is holding back people from minority groups and failing to meet the needs of employers in a digital age.
“When you look at the 50% target, the belief was, the more people go to university, the more people can access the great opportunities, the more we convert people from full-time education to full-time employment,” he said. Wire. “It hasn’t worked out that way. Too many students end up in jobs considered low-skilled that didn’t require a degree in the first place. Earning a degree doesn’t guarantee you a job.”
Blair, who studied ancient history at the University of Bristol before going to Yale, has said that he “didn’t like to read”, but when he was growing up, going to university was seen as the only route to a top job. . He says that after his first job at investment bank Morgan Stanley, he hit upon the idea of founding his own training provider, Multiverse.
“I often tell people: ‘I started my career in investment banking structuring corporate debt and derivatives, armed with a degree in ancient history and a master’s in international relations that didn’t teach me how to work ,” he told London Rising. , a conference last year discussing ideas on how to help capital bounce back from the pandemic. “I effectively had an apprenticeship because I learned everything I knew about that job.”
His business, co-founded in 2016 with his friend Sophie Edelman, is what he claims is “a real, reliable alternative that can compete with the university”.
Multiverse matches school dropouts with over 300 employers, including Google, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Depop, and provides on-the-job training tailored to the needs of employees, as well as individualized coaching and extra-curricular activities and society.
The training is funded by a 0.5% levy on all companies with an annual payroll bill of over £3m. This can be spent on their own training costs or transferred to other organizations such as Multiverse.
Blair, a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC, claims that some youngsters have even turned down places at Oxford to join his plan.
It has also proven popular with venture capitalist investors, including Google’s VC division, who have put millions into the business. At the end of last year, Multiverse was valued at $875m (£700m) in a third round of funding. Blair is understood to own only 50% of the shares, meaning his stake could be up to £350m – far more than his father’s estimated £60m fortune.
He recently splashed some of his cash on a five-storey west London townhouse for a reported £22m. The seven-bedroom residence, which he shares with his wife, Susan Ashman, and their two children, has a two-story “iceberg” basement with an indoor pool, gym, and multi-car garage.
He set foot on the property ladder early when his mother, Cheri Blair, bought a £265,000 flat for him to live in while studying at the University of Bristol.
Blair prefers to dress in the casual style of a Silicon Valley tech CEO, pairing multiverse-branded T-shirts or hoodies with jeans and often multicolored trainers. He once said that he has a branded top in almost every color “so I can wear a different one every day”.
She has been praised for prioritizing social mobility in the multiverse, where 53% of trainees are people of color and 36% come from poor backgrounds. Last year he was appointed to a government task force aimed at improving socioeconomic diversity in financial services.
Blair’s life mission, he says, is “to ensure that the best jobs in the next decade don’t go to only those who have got the best jobs in the last decade”.
