Michael Gove gets it right for once!

Over the last few years there has been a steady increase in the perception that education and examinations are less important than they really are. This has been driven by the relentless increase in visibility of ill-educated sports people and celebrities of all sorts – some of who are famous simply for being famous. Reality TV has a lot to answer for ... The corrosive effect of all this is that, for far too many young people, their ambition is to achieve fame without anything at all backing it up.

Of course, the doziest footballer has to put in a huge amount of graft before they approach the heights of the Premier League, as well as being lucky in not being injured, and in the first place possessing a physique which is capable of developing with high levels of intense training, And typically a Premier League footballer will have started to excel at primary school. And for every Jessica Ennis-Hill and every Mo Farrah – and for every Lewis Hamilton or Jensen Button – there are hundreds and hundreds of athletes who are nearly as good, but not quite good enough to win. It's a very, very sharp point on the mountain on which very few people can stand. The problem is that it's not presented like this.

It's also true that some people succeed in life with the flimsiest qualifications – but again these are few and far between, and these exceptional cases prove the rule that generally education helps!

So I'm delighted that Michael Gove has come out strongly against Simon Cowell who made one of the most crass public comments I have heard for a long time, to the effect that education doesn't matter, you just need to get lucky. The problem here of course is that more young people listen to Simon Cowell that to the Secretary of State ... And I'm reminded of what Arnold Palmer, the golfer, said about being lucky: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

Success requires hard work, whether you are a footballer, a model, an actor, and in these jobs hard work is not enough, you need luck as well – and most people are not lucky in that way. If everyone had their Warhol “fifteen minutes of fame” the outcome would be predictable – no-one would be famous.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant