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Boris Johnson speech at Exeter College; ENGLAND: Devon: Exeter College:INTBoris Johnson MP (Prime Minister) speech SOT part 1 of 4.- And there are many, many reasons for me, I should say, to come here to Exeter College, the outstanding further education college in Devon. You have a total 462 courses, some of which I’ve tried this morning, from particle physics to cake decorating. And you offer your students an extraordinary chance to skill themselves in everything from football coaching to specialist Devon cookery, industrial robotics, heavy vehicle manufacture and design. And I’m thrilled that you offer philosophy and languages and even classical civilization, but this is the home of the practical, the hands-on, disciplines that are not only academically and intellectually challenging, but which are also of immediate practical usefulness and relevance to the world we live in.And I don’t just mean useful for individual jobs and livelihoods. All of us in this country need you to have those practical skills. We need those practical skills collectively as a society and as an economy more than ever. And so today, I want to set out how this government will offer a Lifetime Skills Guarantee to help people train and retrain at any stage in their lives and enable us not just to come through this crisis, but to come back stronger and build back better.Our economy has been shaken by COVID. And in the hand-to-mouth scrabblings of the pandemic, the shortcomings of our labour market and our educational system have been painfully apparent. In the last few months, I’ve been touring labs where people, many of them young, are working flat out on testing samples, testing for the disease, testing for the efficacy of potential vaccines, testing the tests. And it’s hard work. It requires endless patience and good hand-eye coordination. It also requires an excellent grounding in lab techniques and in the science. And every time, I’ve been fascinated to find that a size...