Simon Cowell says he’ll encourage Eric to leave school at 16

Who needs A’ levels when your dad’s Simon Cowell, eh?

The X Factor boss has revealed that he’s going to actively encourage little Eric to leave school as soon as he can at 16.

We’d imagine there are one or two vacant positions for him at SyCo, right?

“I’d say to Eric, ‘Leave at 16 if you want to work’ - 100 per cent I would encourage him,” he said in a Radio 2 interview. “I don’t understand why you want to torture someone to be somewhere where they don’t want to be.”

Of course, Simon speaks from experience, having ditched education is quickly as possible himself in order to plot his unstoppable world domination of the TV schedules. Oh, and make some Teletubbies records along the way.

“I wasn’t particularly academic,” he continued. “I found the whole process tedious, monotonous, too many rules, and I made up my mind then, when I’m 16, I’m out.”

Instead of burying his head in boring old text books, the 57-year-old X Factor judge quit education and worked his way up the ladder in a series of menial, low-paid jobs – including being a runner on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining.

He went on to land a job in A&R with BMG Records, then made a fortune foisting records by the Teletubbies, Power Rangers and Robson and Jerome onto the unsuspecting public. Booo!

It was the latter duo that helped Simon on his way to his first million. And they don’t teach you how to do THAT in school, do they?