Not that it's for everyone, but my great hope out of this week's discussion on kids leaving school early, is we can start to shift the debate a bit.

And shift it around what has for most of my working life been an artificial bent, if not a dose of snobbishness around higher learning, and the alleged merits of university and techs being the gateway to success.

For many, of course, they are. For many, they will continue to be so.

But not at the expense of so many who were never really cut out for classrooms.

I wasn't cut out for a classroom.

But the difference between me leaving school at 16 at the beginning of the 1980s is I could get away with it.

The trouble of the ensuing years is that as higher learning became the acceptable and often only route, is kids who were better off in the workforce were stuck at school because they weren't allowed in the workforce because they didn't have the paperwork.

Some of the people I work with in my industry today have got paperwork, whereas once they didn't need it .

And I can tell you from personal experience, the paperwork they have been made to get has made not one jot of difference to their ethic, their output, or their talent.

And my suspicion is it's the same in many a job and profession. In many a job and profession, the trick is not the paperwork at all.

It's the skill, the talent, the desire. And that's the stuff that isn't taught in a classroom.

How many entrepreneurs have we heard the stories of who dropped out and made a fortune? Left young and followed their dreams?

The ability to see people as individuals has, at least in part, been lost as we mass produce graduates in a production line fashion.

The plight of the tech around at the moment has a lot to do with this.

Endless courses, leading lord knows where, are suddenly redundant because increasing numbers have worked out that its not for them or they don't need it, and maybe they never needed it in the first place.

Learning is so much more than a classroom, an enrolment, a course, or a degree.

Hopefully we've turned a corner.

Hopefully as the 17-year-olds venture out into the world directly into workplaces we no longer place the same worrisome emphasis we have too often in the past.

Sometimes in life just doing it is all the education you need.