It is widely recognised that there are too many youngsters in this age group who are not in work, education or an apprenticeship.
If there are indeed 200,000 of them, then this indicates a serious problem that has to be tackled. But the one certain guarantee of failure is to get off on the wrong foot by talking tough, threatening fines for teenagers who don’t participate and drop out of school.
What income would these young people have if they don’t have a job? Would their parents be expected to cover the fines? What a brilliant way of alienating entire families.
Instead of threatening teenagers and their families, the government should be examining why youngsters don’t get qualifications and why many are unable or unwilling to undergo vocational training.
Not all of these will be pupils who struggle with academic subjects.
There may be many who see no point in continuing their education to secure high enough grades to go to university because they don’t fancy starting their post-college working lives with a massive amount of debt on their backs.
If high-quality education really is, as ministers say, the key to this country’s future economic development, the government ought look again at its divisive and destructive policies of tuition fees and student loans rather than the free tuition and student subsistence grants that they enjoyed.
The government ought also to take up the matter of training provision with employers.
Too many companies in Britain are loath to provide their own training schemes, preferring to indulge in their permanent whingefest about how the schools are supposed to have let them down by turning out illiterate or innumerate school-leavers.
Employers have to take responsibility too for overcoming this problem. Two decades of a variety of government-sponsored “training” schemes have been successful only in terms of keeping down the officially unemployed figures and providing profitable opportunities for private-sector training agencies.
Young people rapidly lose any enthusiasm for short-term apologies for training schemes that merely punctuate periods of unemployment.
The government insists that the current number of 3 million low-skilled jobs that are open at present to school-leavers is likely to fall to a fifth of that in 2020.
But low-skilled jobs are not necessarily what school-leavers would prefer to do. It’s not long ago that youngsters leaving school could train for skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector and heavy industry.
The government’s lack of an industrial strategy, which has seen well over a million manufacturing jobs exported overseas, has contributed to the depair and cynicism that many young people feel.
Offering 16 and 17-year-olds grants to enable them to make ends meet while they are studying or training is a constructive approach, as is a more flexible academic year, allowing youngsters to change courses in January.
But the key elements to making this new approach successful are that the government should not try to bring it in on the cheap and that it should seek to generate worthwhile employment rather than the same old depressing assortment of McJobs.
It is widely recognised that there are too many youngsters in this age group who are not in work, education or an apprenticeship.
If there are indeed 200,000 of them, then this indicates a serious problem that has to be tackled. But the one certain guarantee of failure is to get off on the wrong foot by talking tough, threatening fines for teenagers who don’t participate and drop out of school.
What income would these young people have if they don’t have a job? Would their parents be expected to cover the fines? What a brilliant way of alienating entire families.
Instead of threatening teenagers and their families, the government should be examining why youngsters don’t get qualifications and why many are unable or unwilling to undergo vocational training.
Not all of these will be pupils who struggle with academic subjects.
There may be many who see no point in continuing their education to secure high enough grades to go to university because they don’t fancy starting their post-college working lives with a massive amount of debt on their backs.
If high-quality education really is, as ministers say, the key to this country’s future economic development, the government ought look again at its divisive and destructive policies of tuition fees and student loans rather than the free tuition and student subsistence grants that they enjoyed.
The government ought also to take up the matter of training provision with employers.
Too many companies in Britain are loath to provide their own training schemes, preferring to indulge in their permanent whingefest about how the schools are supposed to have let them down by turning out illiterate or innumerate school-leavers.
Employers have to take responsibility too for overcoming this problem. Two decades of a variety of government-sponsored “training” schemes have been successful only in terms of keeping down the officially unemployed figures and providing profitable opportunities for private-sector training agencies.
Young people rapidly lose any enthusiasm for short-term apologies for training schemes that merely punctuate periods of unemployment.
The government insists that the current number of 3 million low-skilled jobs that are open at present to school-leavers is likely to fall to a fifth of that in 2020.
But low-skilled jobs are not necessarily what school-leavers would prefer to do. It’s not long ago that youngsters leaving school could train for skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector and heavy industry.
The government’s lack of an industrial strategy, which has seen well over a million manufacturing jobs exported overseas, has contributed to the depair and cynicism that many young people feel.
Offering 16 and 17-year-olds grants to enable them to make ends meet while they are studying or training is a constructive approach, as is a more flexible academic year, allowing youngsters to change courses in January.
But the key elements to making this new approach successful are that the government should not try to bring it in on the cheap and that it should seek to generate worthwhile employment rather than the same old depressing assortment of McJobs.