‘Parents should experiment with non-traditional education paths’

Tessa Cooper, 27, is director of People and Culture at the social learning platform FutureLearn. She has an 18-month-old daughter, Sally.

I went through traditional education and I struggled, both with sitting in a classroom continuously, and with what we were meant to do with our lives — we seemed to be on a very set path. I rebelled against that. But the biggest thing my parents did equip me with was the ability to create connections with other people, and to understand when to look for information. They gave me the skills to be constantly learning. I think if you’re not getting that from parents, you’re not getting that from schools. And that’s more and more what employers are looking for. So while it was hard to get my foot in the door, when I did get in, building my personal network helped me advance quickly. Education now needs to be about learning to learn, so that you can find things that fit around life, which is going to get more fragmented. After my first job, I went back to uni to do a Master’s, then I got pregnant, so paused. But that learning was not wasted. On maternity leave, I was determined that I would continue my career. It gave me the space to see how we needed to change the way we look after our people and our teams at FutureLearn. The same insights are true with parenting. We are at a point in time where parents have a huge ability to change our system for the better, to shape the way children think about learning, and grow as people, by trying lots of different things: homeschooling, alternative schooling, not going to uni, apprenticeships. The only way we find out what works is by experimenting. Parents like to think that ‘one size fits all’, that the system that works is the system they know. In today’s world, the opposite is true. We must learn to work with, and be comfortable with, ambiguity, with finding your own path. Learning will get ever more personalised. We already talk about our daughter Sally’s education. We’re thinking about not putting her through a mainstream school. You have to realise that the great thing about how quickly things are changing is that everyone is learning, that everyone is out of their depth — so no one is. Try things out, and if they don’t work out, change. What’s key is that young people should find organisations that feel a responsibility to their employees to keep training them.