Natasha Porter, CEO @ Unlocked Graduates

Hey everyone, I'm your host today, Ingmar, and we have a fantastic guest here at The Graduate Guide podcast, Natasha. It's lovely to meet you, it's lovely to have you. Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

Yeah, I'm Natasha Porter, I'm the Chief Executive and founder of Unlocked Graduates.

Unlocked Graduates, what does that mean?

So, uh, we are a graduate recruitment organisation and training organisation. It's a graduate programme for graduates to come in to make the world a better place, essentially. We place people in prisons, which sounds really unusual as a graduate programme. We place them on the front line of prisons, actually as prison officers, and they spend 2 years on a leadership development programme, learning amazing leadership skills through the prism of working on the front line of a prison, working to solve one of the most challenging problems our society is facing. Which is that people coming out of prison often reoffend, and it costs us about £18 billion a year, just that reoffending cost. And that's what we're trying to fix.

Wow, super impactful and unconventional career path.

Yes.

I can imagine. We'll zoom into that a bit later during our conversation. I'd love to start with your own personal journey. You studied literature in your bachelor's. Yeah. And then you became a teacher, I think.

Yeah. So I studied at the University of Warwick. I did English Lit largely because I love reading. I love literature. I just, yeah, I love stories. I love reading books. And I actually, but one of the reasons I chose literature rather than politics, which I was really into, was that injustice makes me very like angry, cross, but also sad. I can feel like quite overwhelmed sometimes by like the injustice in the world. And I thought if I studied a politics degree and I was like upfront thinking about that injustice for years, I just, I wasn't sure how happy I'd be. So I thought I'd do something that was more about stories, more about literature. And coming up to the end of my degree at Warwick at that time, there was like, it felt like there was loads of pressure to go to a corporate job. So consultancy, maybe banking, maybe law. And loads of people were getting on these graduate programs, and I, like, I really felt like I should get a job somewhere corporate. And part of that was, um, I guess I wanted a job that would impress people, that showed that I'd done okay. Um, but it also just felt like where you were meant to go when you got a degree from a Russell Group university. Um, the problem was, firstly, I found the application so boring. Like, I would struggle to to complete them. That was a kind of indication.

As many do.

Yeah, it was just, it was, and actually even trying to work out what the job I'd be doing was, I'd like go to the place on the website and I'd find it so boring, I'd do something else. And then I found it quite hard to like even have enough interest to understand it. I think secondly, I was—

By the way, sorry to interrupt, by the way, word on the street is that those companies make their application processes boring because they have too many applicants. So it's kind of for them a test. Okay, who will end up all the way?

I failed.

Who wants it so badly? Very good.

Okay. I didn't get through that. I think the second thing was like I felt quite strongly about— I did. I kind of knew I didn't want to work there. Like I didn't want to make rich people richer with my job. I didn't want to do something boring. I like, I struggle to get out of bed for things that are boring. I wanted to do something interesting. I really like I really like people, I really like building relationships with people, I really like just chatting. And every time I looked at these jobs, I was just like bored beyond belief just thinking about it. So I wasn't sure what to do, but like thinking about applying to all these jobs, and I happened to go to a careers fair for charity work. And what I thought I might like to do, and this sounds a bit strange, but I just thought I might like to, was drive like supplies into war zones. And— or something like that. You know, I wanted to like, I wanted to help and I wanted to, I wanted to like somehow fight injustice and I wanted to do something worthwhile and meaningful. But I didn't quite know what that looked like. And I guess that was all I could come up with. And then I went to this charity careers fair and it felt like you had to pay to do— it was like, come and, you know, do charity work. You get to pay us £3,000 to work for us for 6 months. And I was like, But that doesn't sound like a job. Like, that's not how I understand jobs working.

And by the way, oftentimes from the industry, then people who are actually meant to receive the help, they complain about that. They just say, why don't you just give the money to us? We can do much more with that money than to have someone who, like, you pay flights for and pretends they— Yeah.

And like, you're bringing your massive inexperience to a very complex situation to be someone else that almost needs resource. I think that discussion wasn't like as I think that was less clear than it is now. But I definitely felt that wasn't necessarily the solution. And I stumbled across this thing that had just started up called Teach First. And I thought, well, I definitely don't want to be a teacher. Like, that is not— partly, I think, because of the status, actually. I thought it would be a bit embarrassing. And partly because I'd been expelled from schools a few times.

You have? From high school or?

2 high schools. I like, I didn't much like school. I struggled with authority. I had a, I didn't have so many of those, like there's people who are like, a teacher changed my life. I had like teachers who I really liked and got on with, but I didn't have that kind of experience of school. But Teach First had a list of employers they worked with and it included Penguin and BBC, and I thought I might want to get into the creative industries, but it felt quite hard to get in as a graduate. I couldn't quite see the route in, but I thought, well, I'll go and talk to them. And what they told me about was a leadership program. They almost sold it as like, you happen to be a teacher, but really you're on a leadership program. You are teaching at the same time, so you'll be doing literature, which I was like, oh, I love literature. I didn't want to do a master's. I wasn't quite sure how to spend specialised. But anyway, it sounded like somewhere where instead of having to be like, right, I'm going to be a lawyer, or I'm going to be an accountant, or I'm going to be whatever, and, and then getting stuck in that career for the rest of your life, you could do 2 years, learn loads of skills, and then make the decision about what you want to do. But with some of the experience that meant you could go to the BBC or Penguin or one of those creative industries, or maybe into a charity without doing that like 2-year internship. And when I was at uni, there was like no payment for internships. It was, and I couldn't do that. So, so, um, so I did that program, Teach First program, thinking I'll do this for 2 years and then I'll get a proper job. Um, and, and I think because it was a graduate scheme, it was hard to get into, it like wasn't so embarrassing telling my friends that I was going to be a teacher. I don't know why that was so embarrassing, but it really was. It was that I was doing this I think it was partly that I just thought it was take the piss because I hated school so much. That it was a leadership program and I was developing leadership skills. And what happened was I went to a school close to where I'd grown up in North London. And what I thought that, like, I thought that I was clever through my life. You know, I'd done really well in my exams. I'd like, even though I'd been expelled from school, I'd got like scholarships for my schools and, you know, I'd always done really well academically and I thought I was probably very clever and that's why that kind of stuff had come quite easily to me. And what happened when I went to that school was I met children much cleverer than I was, like funnier, cleverer. They were much harder working, much better behaved, actually like, and like better people than I was as a child in some ways. And their outcomes, I just saw so many of them at 16 when compulsory school finished, dropping out of the system and having the kind of trajectories that meant their adult life was going to be much harder than mine. And I saw, you know, like getting, getting pregnant very young, getting into criminality, getting— but, but these were great kids. And what I began to realize was that the privilege of my childhood, the fact that I— and my parents were immigrants, they arrived in this country in the '70s, but they were white, they spoke English, they had been to university and they were literate, they were educated. And that gave all sorts of privilege to me that meant I'd had this life where I'd been able to have all these opportunities. And even though I'd behaved really terribly and then I was working with these kids who were amazing, but didn't have all those opportunities and their outcomes were dramatically different. And what I realised was that in this country we are not a meritocracy. Like, it is an accident of birth that determines a huge amount of how successful we are. And like, that made me so angry. And those kids who I bloody loved, those kids, and you know, who went up, who should have had great lives, who were given bad advice or not given the right opportunities or really let down by services that should have supported them, by adults who should have supported them, that is the thing that has got me out of bed every day since, wanting to change it.

Wow. And this was a big impetus for your further career journey then also, which we'll talk about.

Yeah.

And there are very clear numbers on this also. That we know today that people from a lower socioeconomic background, or you can measure it, for example, the people who receive free school meals.

Yeah.

The percentage of the people who receive those free school meals as compared to the ones who don't, it's the ones who don't, they get jobs that pay above the average living wage and the other ones don't. And it's—

Yeah.

It's very clear to see that in the numbers today. Let's maybe move on from Teach First.

Yeah. What was your next step? So I decided to stay in teaching, actually. And I used to have this mentor from— oh, she was from some, like, some big— some Unilever, from Unilever. So, like, a big corporate company. And I used to meet her because I still thought I need to go corporate now. I've done my 2 years of teaching. I need to get a proper job. And we used to meet in this pub in Vauxhall, so I used to live there, and we'd talk about like what that, what my career trajectory would look like. And she was like, you're well paid. Yeah, yeah, I'm, you know, I am well paid actually. I got promoted. You've got management experience already. Yeah, I'm like having a bit of management. You really enjoy your job. Yeah, love my job. You know, you get excited about going to work. Yeah, I really do. You get to innovate. Yeah, because I'm also like hugely entrepreneurial. I really like innovating and starting stuff up. She was like, 'Why, why are you moving careers?' And it was the first time I— because I think I had such a hang-up about like needing to get a proper corporate job, and, and I suddenly thought, 'Why am, why am I moving careers?' So, so I stayed in teaching, and in my third year, um, I had some friends from Teach First and teaching, and, um, the government had announced that they were gonna like let people start up new schools where there have been failing schools or Generations. And there was this guy who I knew and we'd been doing loads of work on, you know, what a better teaching workforce would look like, what better schools would look like. And he was invited to start a school and we'd heard about these schools in America that were amazing. We were really excited about them. And I called him up and said, "I'm in, like, how do I help you start the school?" So 4 of us ended up starting our own school.

Starting a school?

And that was my third year of Teach First. So, my third year of teaching, four of us. So I was teaching all day in this school. I'd stayed on in my Teach First school. And then at the end of the day, we jump on the tube, we go to this office where we were working from down on the Strand, and we'd work in the evening trying to build our model school. So like, you know, what's the uniform going to look like? What's the school day going to look like? What rules are we going to have? What's the curriculum? And we were looking at these amazing schools in the US which had closed the gap for the most disadvantaged children. And we were saying, how do we apply this to the UK? So we built a completely different model of school, and it was a model of school that had never been done in the UK before. And we tried to apply this American, like, amazing success story for the most disadvantaged children to the UK context.

What were some of the patterns that you saw were really successful in the US that you transitioned over to the UK?

So one of the things, like, I guess one of the key things is there's no silver bullets, there's no magic. Kind of formula. And I think what's— I think there's like this typecast of public sector, you know, being a teacher or a social worker or a prison officer where you think it's a bit crap. It's like it's not going to be very well paid. It's probably really bureaucratic. It's like always a bit mediocre, but it's a steady career. You can do it for the rest of it.

Very safe.

Very safe. And like, and that is None of that is interesting to me. None of that has ever been— I don't want that kind of career. If I did, why not go to some consultancy and get well paid for it?

We don't name names here.

Yeah, but why not be rich and do it? But actually, being rich isn't, sadly enough, to get me out of bed in the morning. And I think what we did was these schools in America, one of the things that's really obvious is the state school that I taught in started at 9:15 in the morning and the school day finished at 3 in the afternoon. And these were children who often, you know, they were growing up in homes where they didn't have books in the house, they didn't have mum and dad really, you know, hassling them about. They didn't have necessarily the same stuff that you've got. So I went to a, you know, my parents arrived in this country in the '70s. The business my dad started happened to make enough money to send us to private school. In my school, we started at 8:30 in the morning, we finished lessons lessons at 4 in the afternoon. I then did normally 2 hours of after extracurricular school. So just the hours of schooling are more in a private school than a state school. Why? Why are we giving less schooling? So one of the first things we did was just have a really long school day. And we did loads of English and maths because often kids were arriving to us like behind in English and maths age 11. And we said, okay, We've got 3 years before the GCSE curriculum arrives. We'll just do loads of English and maths in those years. But we did loads of stuff about making school cool.

How did you make school cool?

How do you make school cool?

What do the uniforms look like?

And the first year we really failed on this. But we went out again, we went out to the US, we saw some of these schools and they were like, you need rewards for the good kids. You need it to be really achievable that kids get these rewards and they need to be cool rewards. And by the way, like going on a school trip to see an exhibition at a museum is like not typically going to cut it. So find out what the kids will think is really cool. So it was like, you know, an afternoon ice skating with bowling and you get junk food or, you know, a pizza party or— So one of the things we used to do, I used to do at lunch, at the end of term, so the best behaved children in my year group who'd been consistently good, showing up to school, and we tracked all of that. So we knew exactly. And then they used to wear a gold wristband and they could use the teachers' toilets. They could, they could sit on the sofas whenever we were reading in class. They got like privilege. Wow. And at the end of term, I'd call them onto one of the lunch tables and I'd call a pizza delivery and they deliver pizza to the table and I'd serve them squash instead of water. And then they'd have like lunch, like pizza and squash.

That's unheard of. Unheard of.

So cool. But like every other kid in that lunch hall, and those were the kids who worked hardest. We used to do an auction where they could buy cool stuff and like, because they used to earn, you know, school currency when they were well-behaved and handed in their homework and showed up to school. And we had someone on our board who, the board of trustees for the school, the governors, who had a box Arsenal. And so there's like, you can go to this box in Arsenal and you can take two of your friends. And obviously that's the most expensive thing. Yeah, because like, who doesn't want that apart from the Tottenham supporters and all of them? But most of the kids support Arsenal. But then what you've got is like the nerdiest kids who work hardest, who like, they're the ones who can bid for that prize and then they can take some other kids. So they get all the social capital. So we did loads of stuff to make Like the problem where that school was, was there were huge gang activities. It was like incredible deprivation, the highest child poverty in London. And on the estate where a lot of our kids came from, there were people who drove great cars, who wore amazing trainers, who like were really aspirational role models. And their money came from criminality. And it was a really easy gateway into criminality on the estate. Like it was 'You know, you just take this money for me. It's like, it's not illegal. It's completely fine. We'll give you a couple of hundred quid.' Well, as a kid, you're like, 'Why wouldn't I do that?' But then before you know it, you're in that life of criminality. So we had to make it cooler to work hard.

To compete with that.

Yeah. And like do well academically and go on a legit career path than to go down into a route of criminality. And that is, that requires us to, you know, you don't win that battle initially by offering tickets to a museum. Yeah. So we had to make it genuinely cool to work hard. Wow. So, and, you know, like, I'm really entrepreneurial. You got to, like, invent stuff all the time. You got to, and we weren't interested in being, we were, what we wanted to be was the best school in the country. So we set a target the average GCSE pass rate for kids on free school meals was lower than half. So less than half of children got past their GCSEs at that time and or got the kind of benchmark. The best school ever in the country was this school that had started in Hackney and they had, I think it was 83% A* to C. So we were like, we're going to get 100%, like we're going to be the first school in this country which has a large proportion of kids on free school meals. We had of 75% on free school meals at the time in the first year group, we're going to get 100%. And that was completely unheard of and people kind of said no, but we wanted to be the best of the best. And we ended up with our front of cohort getting 93% in Start C and they got 95% in A* to B in English. So like the best result. And in the private sector, that's like a unicorn, right? That's like the best of the best organisation. But it's possible to do that in the public sector.

That's so inspirational. How many pupils were in your school at that time?

Well, so we, one of the things we really thought was small classes were really important. In fact, small numbers of children because we thought relationships were the most important thing. So at that time it was 60 children in a year group. That school's now increased because it's done very well, but it's actually maintained really good results since it started. It still serves a very disadvantaged cohort, but it was just being part of that was amazing.

Nice.

It was an incredible— and so I saw the Frontier cohort through, and when they finished their GCSEs, I thought, well, we've worked this out for one school. I want to do this nationally. I want to work out how do we share what's learned with like all schools serving these contexts. And I went into government because I thought you do it in government.

Public, boring public sector.

Well, I thought, like, maybe I'm wrong about it. I went to a think tank first of all, and then I went into government thinking this is how you scale up. First of all, sorry. So initially I went to a think tank and then I went into government. And what I really missed, I miss being frontline. I missed working, like, I missed the pace. I missed entrepreneurialism. I missed designing something awesome, building something myself. And influencing people was like, it's an amazing skill set. And, you know, it's very slow. It's very careful. You get these small wins. Yeah. I just like moving fast, building things, seeing what works, failing fast. Like, I really like working in entrepreneurial startup environments. And I really like exceptional high performance and making the world a better place. And that I, like, I didn't find that in the areas of government where I was. So I was part of a review of education in prisons.

Was that the first touchpoint with kind of the prison?

Yeah, apart from kids in my school, in that past school, and a couple of them going to prison. Sometimes for, I mean, just like avoidable and stupid stuff, really stupid stuff, but also stuff that if they were wealthy, like if they were wealthy middle-class kids, they wouldn't have gone to prison. There's no way they would have got, you know, they would have had a lawyer. They would have gone to court. They would have got a slap on the wrist. They would, but there's no way that they would have got a custodial sentence. And again, me and my friends were doing things just as bad. Often not getting caught because the police weren't looking for kids who looked and sounded like us. And when we were getting caught, definitely not getting those kind of consequences. And again, it felt like this country, there's a lack of opportunity and I want to be part of fixing that because I don't want at the end of my life to be like, what did I do with my work? Like, oh, I made rich people richer and I got a bunch of, like, a bunch of money, you know, obviously it would be lovely to be, but I mean, what did I want to achieve with my life? And whereas actually, I think with what I've been able to do, you know, in public sector, you can do this really cool work, you can make a real difference. You actually like, you can earn decent money, you can still have a nice life, but at the end of it all, you can look back and think, yeah, like things are a bit better than I found them. And that, yeah, that opportunity just came calling, I think.

So I think what's so inspirational about your journey is that this solving injustice is like served as the motivation of all those kind of positions. We chatted before a bit about the prison industry, and there was a statistic that you mentioned which I found really shocking, and I would like you to repeat it here, which is that how many, as a percentage of the people who go to prison, end up being in prison again in the next years?

Well, so at the moment, the reoffending rates are slightly less clear because COVID means the courts— there's a big backlog in the courts and all that. When we started the programme, it was pretty solidly about half of everyone who was released would be back in prison within a year. Wow. And just for context about who's locked up, about 60% of people in prison don't know how to read and write at adult levels. About 1 in 4 have grown up in care, so have been taken out of their family home as children and, you know, for whatever reason had to grow up in the care system. And, you know, many have— about over half actually arrive in prison with a drug addiction. This is a group of people who have often lacked opportunity from early childhood and, you know, we we give them social workers and we invest really heavily in them, and then teachers, we invest really heavily in them. And but when we get to prison, what's interesting is the workforce who looks after this group of people. Yes, we don't invest very much. And that's what part of what Unlocked wanted to fix. I think it's interesting you say, you know, it's, it's really inspiring that you're motivated by injustice. I think loads of people are motivated by injustice. I think loads of people, when especially, you know, finishing their degree, are like, I don't want to sign up for this consultancy.

That's true.

Yeah, they sponsored my hockey team for the last 3 years, but I don't want to do this job where I don't believe in what I'm doing and I'm just doing it because I feel like I have to do it. But I think where I've been really fortunate is I stumbled across stuff that gave me the opportunities that meant I could do that work. And part of why I wanted to start Unlocked was to give people an opportunity to like— 'Cause you know, our participants, you earn about £40,000 a year. It's actually a decent salary. It's a very decent salary. It's a very decent, you get a fully funded master's in leadership. So you're learning these amazing leadership skills. You get to be a great leader. But in that kind of formative part of your career, you get to fight injustice and make, you get to kind of, but you don't only get to fight injustice, you get to really see how unjust our society is. And part of what I want is, you know, after the 2 years, go to that corporate job, you know, go and do whatever you think you need to do in order to really develop your career, but know how fortunate you are, know the privilege that you carry and know how unjust our country is for that group of people and like, and advocate for them, fight for them, like use your position to try and make the world more just. And I think like, I know people, you know, who work for all sorts of corporate organisations who are deeply upset about injustice. And I think the thing is, there are things we can do to make the world more just. And part of what— yeah, part of what we're trying to do through Unlocked and part of what I think is really exciting is in public service is that you can do a job where you are actively like fighting injustice. And like, what a privilege to make the world a better place and get paid for it and develop these amazing skills in the process.

That is genuinely an incredible opportunity. Yeah. And I think it's kind of similar to when you were at Teach First and they offered you, hey, this is a leadership program. You can still after this join a corporate.

Exactly.

If you wanted to.

I mean, I, you know, I sometimes think, you know, what am I going to do when I grow up? You know, what's my life? You know, I think because I do, I'm always slightly looking for the next, you know, I like, I love I love fixing stuff, I love new opportunities, you know, and you do kind of think, oh, I could go and, you know, maybe I could go and get really rich somewhere, but then sadly that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning as much as, you know, earning a perfectly decent salary but making the world a bit of a better place.

Do you have some insights into cohorts of people that got into this graduate scheme, Unlock Grads? What did they do after?

Yeah, and I think what they did on the programme is also really exciting. Yes. So we've got, in fact, she stayed on in prisons. So not the example of someone who's moved into different things, although I think she didn't, probably didn't think she was going to stay in prisons when she joined. One of the things that she did on the programme was she arrived at her prison, a local prison in London, and lots of people when they go to court don't think they're going to go to prison. You know, they just think, 'I'm going to court again, I didn't go to prison last time.' And So they often don't come prepared to go to prison. And one of the things people don't bring is reading glasses. But when you arrive in prison without reading glasses, you can't read any books, you can't read any forms. If you're locked in your cell for 22 hours a day, you know, and you can't— it's really debilitating. So one of the things she did was fundraise £1,000 to buy 1,000 pairs of £1 reading glasses, which they just kept in a box in the prison. And when someone came in and didn't have their reading glasses, they give them Now that sounds tiny, but that made a huge difference to those people's lives. Like, going to prison is one of the most stressful times of your life. One of the other things that, that she's been involved in, in that prison is prison holds a lot of people with neurodiversity. A lot of people on the autistic spectrum will end up in prison. And prison is very noisy, it's very overwhelming, and they can often lash out, their behaviour becomes problematic. But it's actually in response to this environment that's really triggering and really difficult for them. And she was part of a group who set up a specialist wing in that prison just for people who were struggling to cope with neurodiversity issues, which is all kind of set up so that it's, it's very kind of safe and secure. Inclusive. Very inclusive for people on the autistic spectrum. So that's You know, being able to do that in like the first year of your graduate job.

She did that in the first year when she joined.

Yeah.

And these were her own initiatives. She also came up with those initiatives.

So the glasses one was her own initiative. The neurodiversity one, there was a group of them. They did it, lots of other people on Unlocked and other Prison Up because you don't want just people on the graduate scheme to do this. So they did it with other officers. You know, it was a collaborative approach. So cool. But we have a participant who finished a programme and joined a well-known consultancy at the end of the programme. And actually they put her working on quite a lot of their public sector Peter Wood work. But so she works with government still, but from the consultancy. One of the things that she did though was said, hey, you don't recruit anyone with a criminal record. People coming out of prison struggle to get jobs, struggle to get housing. If you— why don't we recruit more people with criminal records? Because sure, you don't want to recruit someone with a criminal record for fraud and put them in the accounts department. But, you know, if someone's you know, dangerous driving, for example, you know, accidentally hit someone driving too fast, went to prison, and then they've come out. Well, there's no reason why they would be less safe than anyone else. So she set up a project and they're now recruiting ex-prisoners into that consultancy. And they're kind of so proud of it that they're sharing it with other consultancies who are now really interested in learning from how they're doing that. So those are the kinds of things that we have partnered with. Participants working on.

And the scheme used to be less popular than it is today. I think nowadays you get over 100 applications per spot.

Yeah, so we have become hugely oversubscribed, and that's been really exciting. And I think that speaks, like, it kind of gets to that point, it speaks to people wanting to do a job which is meaningful as well as, I mean, but We're not like altruistic, you know, people aren't fully altruistic. They aren't like, I'll take no salary and nothing for me just to make the world a better place. I mean, some people are, but lots of people—

It's not really mainstream.

Yeah, it's not that mainstream. But, you know, it's a £40,000 salary. It's a fully funded master's in leadership.

You don't have to be altruistic.

You don't have to be altruistic. I mean, it probably helps that you have compassion towards the issue.

Yeah, but it's great to find models where your egoistic tendencies can actually become, contribute to the greater good.

Exactly. And my experience of public service, and we see it with people on our programme all the time, is Actually, there's loads of space for entrepreneurialism and there's loads of space to innovate, and it's a sector that desperately needs some of that coming through. But I think the stereotype of it, which is basically what almost stopped me signing up to teach for us in the first place, is you think, oh God, you know, it's going to be like badly paid, bureaucratic, bit embarrassing. Definitely. Like, I remember speaking to people at these kind of top consultancies and they'd say, At parties they'd say, "Oh, what do you do?" When I was straight out of uni and I'd say, "Oh, I'm a teacher," and they'd kind of speak a bit slower and say, "Oh, I'm in a consultancy." Oh wow. Okay. All right. Yeah, exactly. I know what that means. So there was a bit of a, but, you know, then 20 years on, you're, you know, doing a career.

They're listening to this podcast and they feel pretty stupid about that.

I hope so. Yeah. I hope so. But, you know, 20 years on, you're doing the most interesting work and you I've been able to do all the startup stuff I would've wanted to do. We are really interested in some of the stuff the unicorns are doing, the top kind of tech firms are doing. And we try to really build that culture within our organisation. Because like, sure, getting rich for some people is really important, but you know what's really important is helping people who've lacked opportunity to have a better life. You know, it's like, sure, like you probably need to be quite good to work in public sector. You know where you need to be absolutely incredible Sorry, in private sector, you probably need to be quite good, but you need to be incredible to work with people who, like, their whole lives, interventions, they've struggled to be reached by these interventions. And like, for you to be the person to find the innovations that begin to make this system work for them, like, that's where the best people need to be.

This has been amazing, Natasha. Thanks. I wish the listeners could feel the energy that you radiate. I'm really, really motivated by that. Is there anything else you'd like our listeners to know about Unlocked Grads or anything else you'd like to say?

I think, so I think there's so much pressure to feel like you're doing something that makes your degree worthwhile, that like your parents won't be embarrassed to tell their friends about, to do like, there's so much pressure just to get a job because you think, what will I do next year? And I, well, maybe some people don't have that pressure. Maybe this tells you more about me than about anything else. And I think huge imposter syndrome, huge kind of sense of I need the world to see that I'm good enough through my work. And I just wish when I was 21, I'd have, I wished I'd have backed myself in just doing something you really enjoy. And, you know, if you love talking to people, you love building relationships, and you really want to make the world a better place, public services is a great place to do that. And it's not boring, bureaucratic. I mean, it can be, I'm sure, if you want it to be, but it's a really broad sector and there is space for you if you are hugely entrepreneurial. And frankly, if you're really good at solving difficult problems, you're really good at coming up with smart solutions, like, we need you to make our country better and to make it more fair. So, like, you know, and frankly, if you're really good at solving difficult problems, there's no more difficult problems than the ones facing our public sector at the moment. So, you know, Unlocked, I think, is the best way in because I designed it to try and be, you know, literally the best way in. And I've designed it to try and be the most entrepreneurial, the most interesting, and the most developmental graduate scheme possible because I've tried to create the scheme that I you know, that I was desperate for at the end of university. But I just like, follow your heart and don't get swayed by what you think you should do. Do what you love and it'll just work out.

Amazing. We'll leave it at that. Follow your heart, and if your heart follows you to UnlockGrads, then we'll leave a link in the description to apply for your roles. Thanks so much, Natasha. It was lovely having you here.

Great to meet you. Thank you.