Hello again,
We are storming into 2026 at Mission Equality with fresh new energy and some world class team members; you can see our new Head of Operations here and, if you missed it, we also have a new Head of Technology & Innovation.
We need this energy…We keep calling this moment a crisis. An education crisis. A skills crisis. A workforce crisis. An inequality crisis.
It may well be a crisis AND it shouldn’t be a surprise…It’s the absolutely predictable outcome of operating with systems designed for a world that no longer exists - still being defended, patched, and rebranded instead of being replaced, wholesale, as is required.
We’re watching institutions strain under conditions they were never built to handle but instead of naming that truth, we keep reaching for the familiar, the same old approaches to try and create change: reform, reskilling, resilience, better leadership, better frameworks.
But none of those touch the root problem…
The uncomfortable reality is this: the system is working exactly as designed and that design is now the fundamental liability, protecting the tiniest minority and harming the rest of us.
For years, we’ve been told the issue is a “skills gap.” That young people aren’t ready or skilled in the ‘right’ way. That educators need better tools. That employers can’t find talent. That equality just needed more commitment, more programmes, more goodwill.
Those explanations are tidy. Convenient. Excuses. And they’re also wrong. They avoid the harder question: what if the pipeline itself is broken?
What if compliance, standardisation and control - once useful in the industrial age - are now actively producing fragility, disengagement and exclusion? This isn’t a question and it should be a statement.
Which is why this is where most conversations stop because beyond this point, reform no longer makes sense.
That’s why we’ve released The Black Paper: Doing Education Differently.
The Black Paper is a systems-level diagnosis but it doesn’t stop there. Alongside the diagnosis, it documents a real-world pilot we ran to test a different approach in practice. No longer just a theory I’ve had for over a decade, we tested our hypothesis in live conditions, with real young people, real constraints, and real stakes.
The pilot was designed to answer a simple question: If we remove compliance as the organising principle and redesign learning around agency, relevance and equality - what actually happens?
What we saw wasn’t incremental improvement, it was a structural shift.
The Black Paper details:
What we changed at the fundamental level (not just curriculum or delivery).
What outcomes emerged when agency and self direction replaced compliance.
How young people engaged when learning was designed for the world they’re actually entering.
Why these results weren’t dependent on “exceptional” facilitators or ideal conditions.
What this proves about what needs to be replaced - not fixed - at scale.
In other words: this paper doesn’t just diagnose the failure or highlight the issues, it shows that the failure is not an accident…it’s designed, and therefore redesignable.
Inside, we examine:
Why the education → employment pipeline is structurally misaligned with modern work, and how we can replace this with a learning → leadership pipeline instead.
How compliance became the primary “skill” being taught - and why that is now backfiring on us so spectacularly.
What changed when we tested a different architecture, and why it matters.
What has to be replaced if equality is going to move from rhetoric to reality.
This paper is for people who already sense that polishing the existing system won’t get us where we need to go.
It’s for builders, educators, founders, funders and system designers who are quietly asking: what if the problem is the architecture itself?
If you’re invested in maintaining the current system with better language and improved optics, this will irritate you. If you’re looking for reassurance, you won’t find it here.
But if you want evidence that another way is not only possible, but already tested this is where to start.
Are you ready to build what comes next?
—
Lea Jovy
Founder & CEO, Mission Equality CIC
