Julian Astle — one time adviser to Paddy Ashdown and more recently a senior Lib Dem policy advisor in the coalition — has just taken up an appointment as Director of Creative Learning and Development at the RSA.

Julian’s been writing over on the RSA blog about the real lessons from the referendum:

The moment Britain leaves the European Single Market will be the economic equivalent of stepping off a travellator onto terra firma – a decelerating jolt, followed by the realisation that you now have to move a lot faster simply to travel at the same pace.

So how, without the propulsion that free access to a market of 500 million consumers provides, can we maintain – or even increase – the speed at which our economy grows?

The answer – and the challenge awaiting the next Prime Minister – is to reorient the whole of government to the task of making Britain the most productive, most inventive, most enterprising country on earth. Just as the designer William Morris urged us to put nothing in our homes that we didn’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, so the task facing Ministers is to put nothing in their plans that doesn’t help deliver that overarching goal. This will require a process of decluttering that allows for even less sentiment than Morris was prepared to permit.

Education, though, should be the primary focus of governments looking to overcome the challenges posed by Brexit, argues Julian:

Of all the challenges we face, however, none is so great as ensuring that our education system equips our young people not only with the knowledge needed to pass exams, but with the understanding, the skills and the character attributes they will need to prosper in the world of work and in society more generally. With a good deal of manual labour having already moved abroad or become automated, and with new intelligent technologies forcing us to rethink what it is that humans, and only humans, can do, so we are going to have to think more expansively about the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of learning. Yes the ability to retain and retrieve information matters, but so too, increasingly, does the ability to think critically and creatively, to collaborate, to take the initiative and to develop the ‘can-do’ entrepreneurial mentality needed to navigate the more fluid, unpredictable and competitive world of 21st Century work.

And it is this last point that seems to me be to be the real lesson of Brexit. Because ultimately, it is through education, not through border controls, that our young people will develop the sense of agency – the belief in their ability to make a positive difference – that is the precondition for “taking back control” of their own, and their country’s, destiny.

You can read the full piece here.