Friday Diary · Week 1

The learning revolution

Join me.

Somewhere along the way, education turned into childcare.

I do not mean the people. Teachers and trainers are not the problem and never have been. I mean what we chose to measure.

We count who turned up. We count who finished. We hand somebody a certificate for attendance and call it an outcome.

Keeping people occupied for a fixed period is childcare. It is a perfectly good thing. It is not education.

Education is supposed to change what a person can do.

Who I am

I am Juliette. I am fifty four.

I started a company called Growth Engineering in 2004, with a one year old at home and another on the way. I have been building learning technology ever since. Twenty years of it.

I wrote a book about it too. Learning to be Human, on how AI can unlock what a person is actually capable of. It sold better than I expected, which told me I am not the only one thinking this way.

I am dyslexic. Writing has always either taken me forever or simply not happened. For most of my life the thing in my head could not get onto the page, and I got very good at working around that.

I mention it because it is not a footnote. It is the whole reason I care about this.

I was the kid who was clearly not stupid and clearly not keeping up, and nobody had a way to tell the difference. Everybody got the same lesson at the same speed. If it did not fit the way your brain worked, that was your problem to solve quietly.

So when I say learning should meet you where you actually are, I am not being idealistic. I am being specific about something that did not happen to me.

What it has cost so far

There is one more thing you should know, because it explains the hurry.

During Covid I took a government-backed loan so that I did not have to make anybody redundant. It seemed obvious at the time. Keep everyone. Get through it. Worry later.

Later arrived. The lender was sold on, and the people who ended up holding my loan wanted me to sell the company.

I said no.

They kept asking. I kept saying no.

In the end I put my own company into administration rather than hand it over. Then I bought it back.

I sold my house to do that. I cashed in my pension. I borrowed from my family.

I know exactly how that sounds. I would do it again tomorrow.

I did not spend twenty years building this to hand it to somebody who had owned the paperwork for eighteen months and had no interest in what any of it was for.

So when I say I am not doing this politely, that is not a turn of phrase. I have already burned the thing down once rather than let it go to the wrong people, and bought it back with everything I owned.

That is the level I am at. It is worth knowing before you decide whether to come along.

What I stand for

Education is not a system. It is a right.

I should say what I actually believe here, because the usual version is far smaller than this.

People are happy when they are living up to what they could be. Not comfortable. Not entertained. Fulfilled. I do not think there is another route to it.

And it does not stop with them. Somebody living their potential is kinder. More generous. More patient with everyone around them. They have something to give, so they give it.

Somebody stuck is not. I have been both, and I know the difference.

So this was never really about qualifications. A qualification is a means. What I am after is people getting to be what they could have been, because that is where love and passion and generosity come from. All of it.

That is the reason any of us are here, as far as I can tell. To leave the place better than we found it.

Education is how you do that. It is not a service, or a sector, or a budget line. It is the mechanism.

Which is why watching it get reduced to attendance makes me so angry.

What I am building

Zavmo.

It is a learning companion that takes you by the hand. You tell it the life you actually want. It works out what you already know, what is missing, and then it walks you there, teaching around the job you really do rather than a job somebody imagined.

Not up to your potential. Past it.

I mean that literally. Most people never find out what they were capable of, because nobody ever mapped the route and nobody ever stayed with them. That is the job.

A vision that big is worth nothing on its own. So we ground it in what the world already recognises and pays for. Regulations. Job descriptions. Real skills that employers name.

The ambition is enormous. Every single step of it is ordinary, and anybody can follow them.

That is deliberate. I have sat through a lot of talks about the future of learning that left the room inspired and no closer to Monday.

To do that honestly it has to hold two things.

What jobs really are. We have about fifty nine thousand UK job descriptions. What the work involves, what experience it needs, what skills sit underneath.

And what qualifications really exist. That is the regulated register, around six hundred thousand units of learning. The real ones, the ones employers recognise.

The whole trick is joining the two. This is your job. This is your gap. Here is what to learn next, and here is a qualification it counts towards.

Which is how I ended up doing data science

I did not plan this. Nobody warned me.

I run a learning company. I thought my job was learning.

It turns out that if you want to tell somebody the truth about where they stand, you have to get your hands dirty. In some very large, very messy piles of data.

The regulated qualifications register. The National Occupational Standards. The national statistics on who does what work and what happens to them.

None of these were built to talk to each other. A skill in one is a competence in another and a learning outcome in a third. Nobody was ever paid to make them agree, because until now no product needed them to.

My life is now data. I open the laptop and I am looking at distributions.

I love it, which surprised me most of all. I thought it would feel like admin. It feels like detective work.

And that is where Future Fluency came from

Here is the thing nobody tells you about getting the data straight.

Once you can see it properly, you can see what is not there.

I lined the jobs up against the qualifications and went looking for the things people are being asked to do now. Working alongside AI. Holding a team through a change nobody chose. Judging whether a machine’s answer is any good.

There is almost nothing.

The regulated world has certified the half that a course can teach, and left the half that decides whether anyone can actually do the job.

You cannot see that gap from the outside. You can only see it once you have joined the data up and gone looking. So we wrote the missing half ourselves. Future Fluency is ten of them, and we are working on getting them properly accredited so they count for something.

None of that would exist if I had stayed out of the data.

Why I am writing this down every Friday

Because the way this gets talked about is dishonest, and I would rather show you the real thing.

Founders write about the wins. I read those posts and I do not believe them. I know what my own week looks like and it has never once looked like that. Everything compounding. Every decision vindicated. It is a genre, and it is not true.

So every Friday I am going to write down what actually happened. The number that was wrong. The thing I was certain about and was not.

Three reasons to do it in the open.

If you are trying to change something big, you should be able to see what it really takes. Not the finished version. The Tuesday afternoon version.

Writing it in public means I cannot quietly rewrite the history later. If I say a number was wrong, it stays wrong on the page.

And one day my kids might read it.

This week, then

One small thing first. I started this diary the week after this one, so this entry is built from the record rather than written on the Friday. Nothing in it is invented. I simply had not thought of doing it yet.

We found 206,620 job titles that nothing had ever looked at. Most jobs have more than one name. A Project Manager might also be a Delivery Lead. We had all of those other names sitting in the database, and search had never once used them. Not rarely. Never. If your job went by the other name, we could not find you.

We fixed it. Search went from finding none of those roles to finding 77 in a hundred.

We were selling things that had been withdrawn. Qualifications get retired. The regulator withdraws them. Some of ours were still on offer. So you could look up your job and be pointed at a qualification that no longer exists. You would only find out when you went to sign up. That made me wince and we stopped it that week.

And we finally measured the join. We connect jobs to qualifications, and that join is the heart of the whole product. Nobody had ever checked whether it was any good. We measured it, raised the bar, and threw away everything underneath. That means showing people fewer options. It was uncomfortable and obviously right. Fewer real answers beat more plausible ones.

Three of those were the same problem, really. Something collected and never used. Something published and never checked. Something joined and never measured.

Not one fire all week. Just a lot of things everybody had assumed somebody else was watching.

Who I am looking for

I cannot do this on my own and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If you work in L&D or capability, tell me where I am wrong. I would much rather be argued with now than politely ignored later. The people who have picked holes in this have been more use to me than anyone who agreed.

If you are an awarding body, I am trying to get the human half of this properly accredited, and I would like to talk to you.

If your job is changing under you, go and look at what we have built. It is free to search and plan. Then tell me what it gets wrong about your role, because it will get something wrong.

And if you just want to watch this happen, come back on a Friday.

Twenty years in, I am more certain about this than I have ever been, and I am in a bigger hurry than I have ever been. Education can be more than childcare. I would like some company while I prove it.

If you want to go deeper

• The proposals hub, the longer arguments in one place
• Making learning unique, what this actually looks like on screen

All weeks →