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You talked early on about our preeminent science base and how advanced it is in the UK. Looking at that, from a curriculum perspective, what does the UK need to be doing to ensure that we retain that advantage. 

I think it's very important to say that there are some things in the modern world that are more useful than others. Now some people would fall off their chair if you said that we shouldn't be training lots of people in reading ancient languages. Somehow that's worth as much to the UK as an engineer, and has for a long time been this sort of carved in stone concept. It's utterly wrong. The taxpayer is paying for this.

Now whilst I would still want to make sure we had some people in the UK studying defunct languages. What we need are people who actually have skills. And the trick here is to understand the definition of skills is very broad. We're not just talking about science graduates, we're talking about arts graduates. We're talking about people that are doing skills which give them abilities for the modern world. Some of these things are generic - you can look at a history curriculum from a point of view of understanding risk. When you look at great historical events and the decisions that leaders had to make. Churchill was weighing risk. He was doing it various ways. How do we look at that? I would love to see a history curriculum which was about what risks were being weighed when this decision was made. Were those decisions made on a rational basis, even if it turned out that the dice went the other way? That way you'd have people who had a curriculum that was preparing for the modern world where it's about risk and probability, and subtlety of decision making. So again, we need to understand where things are going and we need to realise that the world is changing.