Lord Puttnam's interest in education has been both enduring and extensive. The need to broaden the opportunities afforded by education has been a constant goal, as is the necessity for every child to have a quality of educational experience that allows them an equal chance to succeed.

A key driver behind these objectives is Lord Puttnam's own memory of school - his experience in the classrooms of the 1950s was almost wholly negative, having been taught to see himself as incompetent and unlikely to go anywhere in life.

The realisation that his experience must have been mirrored by those of thousands, possibly millions, of other students has encouraged Lord Puttnam to work ceaselessly for improvements in education and teaching practice.

Lord Puttnam has previously said:

Education has allowed me the opportunity to engage with people who, every day of their working lives, are attempting to mould the ‘building blocks’, the quality of which will determine our ability to secure the future. These ‘building blocks’ are, of course, our children; and the people I find myself working with are their teachers. Children and young people are our single most precious asset and I want to help to achieve a more secure and imaginative future for them. That requires that we become significantly more imaginative - most particularly in respect of the way in which we work with our young people.

He believes we have no choice but to embrace the immense power of the most recent digital technologies in teaching and learning at every level. Such technology - mobile telephony and the internet in particular - has fundamentally reshaped the way in which people of every age connect with, make sense of, and engage with the world. As Lord Puttnam argues "we need the world of education and learning to embrace these technologies in ways that make the present rate of progress look exactly what it is - woefully inadequate."