Getting Educated | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

This week, we've been out on the road again!

The last couple of videos have been filmed fairly close to home. This was partly because that made sense for those videos—the Uber video needed to be filmed in Plymouth, after all.

It was also a practical consideration though. I wasn't going to disappear too soon after my baby was born!

But, this week, we've been off again...

Myself, Georgia, and Jack hopped in the car and drove to Cambridge to film a piece we're working on about university: does it still offer the same rewards of higher salaries and social mobility than it once did, or has it become a bit of a scam?

In search of a suitably university-y location to film, our initial plan had been to go to Oxford, which is a little bit closer. Unfortunately, the filming bylaws there made it pretty much impossible.

As such, we made the five hour trip to Cambridge instead. Which was a delight!

We'd scouted a bunch of great locations on Google Street View (as we usually do), but found even more great spots while we were there. Everything is just so scenic.

We also had loads of people come up and say hi whilst filming, which was lovely. It's always nice to be reassured that some of you are real people who exist in three-dimensional space!

The colleges themselves are even more foreboding than I'd expected. But fascinating historical sites. I'd love to go back at some point with more time to see the sights rather than just be rushing around trying to get everything filmed before heading home!

Back in Plymouth, we've also been conducting a bunch of interviews for this piece: we've spoken with the president of the National Union of Students, a Professor in Social Mobility and a Member of Parliament, so it's a pretty stacked interview panel!

Being able to head to locations like this (and arrange interviews) makes such a massive difference to the videos, but take quite a bit of logistical work, so it's always really nice when the video begins to come together and looks great—which I think it is so far.

Hopefully we've managed to put together a really comprehensive piece on the role of higher education in 2025, why some aspects of it feel broken, and what can be done to fix it.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!