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This metaphor's used a lot in lots of different things.

If you can't explain it to your grandmother or to an eight-year-old, or even to an eighteen-year-old, you probably don't understand it well enough.

The flip side is that clever people can take complex problems and break them down to explain them to people who are less clever.

In a strange turn of events, my son and youngest child, Callum, has pivoted at the very last minute from heading towards a geography degree at Nottingham Trent University to a modern degree apprenticeship at Nottingham Trent University in chartered Business Management.

Callum started the chartered Business Management degree apprenticeship yesterday with our friend and his colleague Courtney Bartlety, who came into the business last year.

Callum has worked through all of his summer holidays since he was 14 years old, either at a video production company in Derby, getting the train as a 14-year-old, or in the clinic and academy with me.

He's never actually worked for or with me; he works within the team doing other things, but in his recent stint this summer working, he realised that spending 3 years studying geography at NTU with a massive amount of space within his day, lots and lots of socialising, and not a lot of focus on what would come after the degree was perhaps not for him.

On the one hand, that might seem ridiculous and stupid when an 18-year-old has a chance to just party his brains out for the next few years, but on the other hand, it might prove to be a stroke of genius.

The modern degree apprenticeship allows students to enter a degree aged 18 in the field of work for which they're interested in to work in that field of work through 3 years and become experienced in that area, together with obtaining the academic knowledge and degree qualification that goes with the subject.

It is 100% vocational.

In many cases (not Callum’s, unfortunately), you can get funding for this, although this has been reduced by the government recently (why the hell have they done that). The other huge one related to this is that you don't accrue any student debt.

The flip side is that you don't ‘the student experience’, but where the student experience involves taking ketamine and lying in your bed and eating takeaway food for a lot of the time, as it now seems to be for a lot of students I'm not sure how that is mind expanding or making you a better person at the end of 3 years.

Considering this approach for Callum and what to advise him to do, Alison and I considered what we did, but how the world has also changed since then.

The truth is, though, that I went into dental school at 17, which was the hardest first year of any course at university apart from veterinary medicine, during that hard first year, I also worked in Tesco all day Saturday and on a Tuesday evening, and by the time I hit 2nd year, my dental course was basically full-time and the Tesco work was still there.

I actually worked through university more than full-time, which probably set me up to be happy to drop straight into full-time work as a house officer and then a senior house officer in the hospital service.

Alison trained as a paediatric oncology nurse, working full-time in that job and working in Asda to fund herself through the process.

Hard work is not genetic; it's a muscle that you develop. Hard work wins, generally; effort plus intelligence does equal success.

One of the other great joys of this is that Callum wants to know everything about what's happening within my business, and therefore I find that I have to be able to explain it to him in ways that are simple on more than one occasion recently, he's questioned something I've done or a decision that I've made, and I've found myself realising that perhaps I should rethink what I'm doing.

Perhaps this will not work out, and perhaps Callum will take a different route further down the line, but the way the world looks now and in the articles in my newspaper this morning more and more people are heading towards this possible solution, because hundreds of thousands of people start a degree this September, and there are almost no jobs for people who finish a degree with no vocational experience.

Blog Post Number - 4645