The training of the young in useful occupation hath ever been among the first duties of a well-ordered commonwealth. In my own time, a boy who was not bound for the university or the church was apprenticed to a trade — placed under the care of a master who taught him, housed him, and bore responsibility for his conduct and his skill. The arrangement was imperfect, as all human arrangements are, but it possessed one virtue that the present system entirely lacketh: it made honest account of the young. It assumed that a boy of fourteen had a future worth preparing for, and it placed upon his master a duty of care that could not be evaded without disgrace.
England hath tried two ways of sorting its children since the last great war, and both have failed. The first sorted them early and sharply, by a single examination, and then starved the lower paths of money and of honour until they became bywords for failure. The second, recoiling from the cruelty of the first, abolished sorting altogether and pretended that all children are the same — a falsehood so evident that no parent believeth it, though no politician dare say so. The consequence is a Kingdom in which above a million of its young people are neither learning nor working nor training for any useful purpose. They are idle, and idleness in the young is the seedbed of every misery that followeth.
The peoples of the Low Countries have ordered this matter better. They sort their children — not once and finally, but provisionally and with provision for those who are sorted wrongly. They maintain three paths: one for scholars, one for the professions, and one for the trades. No path is a dead end. A child placed upon the trade path may, if his abilities develop, move to the professional path and thence to the scholarly one. The sorting determineth where a child beginneth, not where he may end. And because every path is funded, every path is honoured, and every path leadeth to qualified employment, the idleness that afflicteth English youth is all but unknown among theirs.
Your servant doth not propose the restoration of the grammar schools, which cannot be separated from the system of cruelty that attended them, nor the perpetuation of the comprehensive school, which was built upon a well-meaning untruth. He proposeth a third way, drawn from the practice of the Low Countries and adapted to English circumstance, and he setteth it down alongside the proposals for schools in Item IX and for the universities in Item XI, with which it formeth a single settlement for the learning of the Realm.
I. The Crisis of Youth Worklessness
A structural failure, not a cyclical downturn.
The proportion of 16-to-24-year-olds classified as Neet — not in education, employment or training — has risen by roughly 35 per cent since the pandemic to a 12-year high. The figure now exceeds one million. This is not a temporary phenomenon attributable to the disruption of 2020. The rate was already elevated before the pandemic and has continued to rise as other economic indicators have recovered. The problem is structural.
The Netherlands, by contrast, records a Neet rate of 4.1 per cent among the same age group — the lowest in Europe. The difference is not explained by economic conditions, which are broadly comparable between the two countries. It is explained by the fact that the Netherlands operates a system that sorts young people into pathways suited to their abilities and then invests seriously in every pathway, including the vocational one. England operates a system that funnels roughly half its young people toward university — many of whom derive limited benefit from the experience — and offers the other half a patchwork of underfunded alternatives, short-lived apprenticeship schemes, and the faint hope that something will turn up.
The political response to youth worklessness has followed a depressingly familiar pattern. Each government announces a new programme — New Deal, Future Jobs Fund, Kickstart, T-levels — and each programme is quietly wound down or redesigned by its successor before it has had time to produce results. What none of these programmes has done is address the fundamental structural question: what happens to the young people who are not suited to, or not interested in, an academic education? Until that question is answered honestly, the Neet rate will not come down in any lasting way.
II. The Three Tracks
Named by destination, not by perceived ability.
The proposal is for a system of three tracks, available to every child from the point of sorting onwards. Each track is defined by the kind of work and further learning it leads to, not by a hierarchy of intelligence or worth. The names matter. The language of grammar, comprehensive, and secondary modern carried within it a ranking that could never be escaped, however much the policy documents insisted otherwise. These tracks are named by where they go.
The Scholar Track
The Scholar Track is the academic pathway, equivalent to the Dutch VWO (Voorbereidend Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs). It prepares students for university education and for careers that require sustained academic study. Its curriculum is knowledge-rich, rigorous and demanding. It leads to internationally benchmarked qualifications — the iGCSE and the International Baccalaureate — as proposed in Item IX. This is the track that currently serves the majority of grammar school and independent school pupils. Under this proposal, it would serve roughly the same proportion of the cohort — perhaps a third — but would be available on merit across the whole country rather than concentrated in the handful of local authorities that still maintain grammar schools.
The Practitioner Track
The Practitioner Track is the professional and applied pathway, equivalent to the Dutch HAVO (Hoger Algemeen Voortgezet Onderwijs). It prepares students for higher professional education — nursing, engineering, accountancy, business, applied science, design — through a curriculum that combines academic rigour with practical application. This is the track that the polytechnics were designed to serve at the higher level before the 1992 Act abolished the distinction. Its graduates would typically progress to higher technical qualifications or to the kinds of degree programme that the reformed universities, as proposed in Item XI, would continue to offer at institutions with a professional rather than research focus.
The Trade Track
The Trade Track is the vocational pathway, equivalent to the Dutch VMBO (Voorbereidend Middelbaar Beroepsonderwijs) and the MBO (Middelbaar Beroepsonderwijs) that follows it. It prepares students for skilled employment in construction, manufacturing, electrical and mechanical trades, catering, agriculture, logistics, healthcare support and the full range of occupations that require trained competence rather than academic qualification. This is the track that the technical schools of the 1944 Act were supposed to serve — and would have served, had they been funded and honoured as the grammar schools were.
The Trade Track is not a consolation prize. It is a route to qualified, well-paid work in occupations that the country demonstrably needs. The average plumber earns more than the average graduate in the humanities. The average electrician earns more than the average graduate in the social sciences. The difference is that the plumber and the electrician began earning at 18, carry no student debt and have spent the years between 18 and 22 accumulating experience and income rather than accumulating liabilities. A system that treats these outcomes as inferior to a degree in media studies is a system that has lost contact with reality.
III. Sorting & Reversibility
The age of first sorting matters less than the ability to move between tracks.
The question of when to sort is politically charged and empirically contested. The cross-country research — drawing principally on PISA and TIMSS data, and on a natural experiment in Bavaria where the age of tracking was changed — fairly consistently finds that early tracking increases inequality of outcome without reliably raising average performance. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are disproportionately likely to be sorted into lower tracks, and the earlier the sort takes place, the stronger this effect. The OECD's equity research reinforces the point: systems that track early tend to amplify the effect of parental background on educational outcome.
This evidence should be taken seriously. But it does not settle the question as cleanly as its advocates sometimes claim. The Netherlands tracks at 12 and yet records lower youth worklessness, stronger vocational outcomes and broadly comparable social mobility to countries that do not track at all. Germany tracks in most Länder between ten and 12 — earlier than nearly any other European country — and yet produces a vocational education system that is the envy of the continent. The relationship between tracking age and outcome is mediated by factors that the headline research tends to understate: the quality and funding of each track, the ease of movement between tracks, the social prestige attached to vocational routes, and the degree to which the initial sort is treated as final.
This item does not argue for a fixed age of sorting. The evidence suggests that the exact age matters less than two other design features: first, that no sort is irreversible; and second, that every track is properly funded and leads to a genuine destination. The Dutch concept of stacking — stapelen — is the critical mechanism. A pupil sorted into VMBO at 12 can progress to MBO, then to HBO (university of applied sciences), and from there to a research university. The route is longer but it exists, and a meaningful number of Dutch students use it. In Germany, a similar principle operates through the Fachabitur and Berufsoberschule, which allow vocational students to qualify for university entry after completing their initial training.
England's system must incorporate this principle as a non-negotiable feature. Bridge years — the Dutch brugklas — should be available at the point of sorting for pupils whose abilities are unclear. Movement between tracks should be possible at defined transition points, not merely in theory but in funded, practical reality. And the stacking principle should be built into the qualification framework so that no track is a dead end: a student who completes a Trade Track qualification should have a clear, funded route into the Practitioner Track and from there, if their abilities warrant it, into the Scholar Track. The initial sort determines the starting point, not the ceiling.
IV. The Trade Path
What the employer owes the apprentice, and what the state owes both.
The Dutch system works because employers invest in it. BAM, one of the Netherlands' largest construction firms, pays its apprentices full wages from the outset, assigns each apprentice both a craft trainer responsible for technical instruction and a personal mentor responsible for welfare and development, and treats the cost as a normal part of doing business. This is not philanthropy. It is a rational response to a system that makes young workers available at a cost that justifies the investment.
English employers have been more reluctant to invest in apprenticeships, for reasons that are partly cultural and partly economic. The Apprenticeship Levy, introduced in 2017 at 0.5% of payroll for larger employers, was supposed to address this. In practice it has been widely criticised for its complexity, for the diversion of funds toward management training for existing employees rather than genuine apprenticeships for the young, and for the low completion rates of the programmes it funds. A levy that is spent mainly on leadership courses for middle managers is not an apprenticeship system. It is a training budget with the wrong name.
The reformed system should place clear obligations on employers who take on Trade Track students. Each apprentice should have a named craft trainer and a personal mentor — separate roles, as in the Dutch model, so that the person responsible for technical instruction is not the same person responsible for pastoral support. Off-the-job training should be mandatory, structured and externally verified, not a box-ticking exercise. Progression should be recorded against defined standards and reviewed at regular intervals. These are not onerous requirements. They are the basic conditions under which an employer can be trusted with the education of a young person.
The deeper challenge is one of status. The vocational path in England has been the subject of parity-of-esteem rhetoric for as long as anyone can remember, and the rhetoric has achieved almost nothing. T-levels, the latest attempt, launched in 2020 with the stated ambition of being a vocational equivalent to A-levels. Take-up has been modest and the qualification is not yet widely recognised by employers. The lesson is that status cannot be conferred by rhetoric alone. It must be earned through structure: serious funding, genuine employer engagement, visible progression routes and — critically — outcomes that are demonstrably good. A Trade Track graduate who is earning well, qualified and valued by employers will do more for the status of vocational education than any number of ministerial speeches.
V. The Youth Wage
A wider gap between youth and adult wages, conditional on genuine training.
A 16-year-old in the Netherlands can be employed at roughly 37 per cent of the adult minimum wage. In England, the equivalent figure is around 63 per cent. The Dutch gap is wider by a significant margin, and the effect is visible in the data: Dutch employers hire and train young people in numbers that English employers do not. The youth unemployment rate in the Netherlands is roughly half the English rate, and the quality of the training young Dutch workers receive — measured by completion rates, qualification levels and subsequent earnings — is materially higher.
The argument for a wider youth-adult wage gap is straightforward. A young person entering the labour market for the first time is, by definition, unproductive relative to an experienced worker. If the cost of employing that young person is set close to the cost of employing an experienced adult, the rational employer will hire the experienced adult. The higher the youth minimum wage relative to the adult rate, the stronger this incentive. A lower youth wage does not impoverish young workers — it gets them into work in the first place, and it gives employers a financial reason to invest in their training.
This argument is only defensible, however, if the lower wage is accompanied by genuine training. A wider wage gap without training obligations is a licence for cheap labour. A wider wage gap with mandatory off-the-job training, mentor ratios, recorded progression and external verification is an apprenticeship subsidy — a mechanism by which the cost of training a young person is shared between the employer, who pays wages at a reduced rate, and the young person, who accepts a lower starting wage in exchange for skills and qualifications that will raise their earnings for the rest of their working life.
The conditions should be precise and enforceable. An employer paying the youth rate must provide a minimum number of hours of off-the-job training per week, supervised by a qualified trainer. The training must be directed toward a recognised qualification. The apprentice must have a personal mentor. Progression must be reviewed at defined intervals against published standards. An employer who fails to meet these conditions should lose the right to pay the youth rate. The system should be administered locally, with powers of inspection and sanction vested in the same unitary authorities proposed in Item V.
VI. Outreach
Finding the disengaged before they are lost.
The Dutch system does not wait for young people to present themselves. Municipal youth outreach workers — employed by every local authority — spend their days tracking down young people who have fallen out of the system: those who have left school without a qualification, dropped out of training, or simply disappeared from the registers. They operate from Jongerenpunten — "youth points" — drop-in hubs where disengaged young people can get help with employment, training, housing, mental health and the accumulated practical difficulties that attend a life without structure or purpose. These officers have legal authority to pursue cases up to the age of 28, and they use it.
England has nothing comparable. The Connexions service, which was supposed to provide advice and tracking for young people, was abolished in 2012, and its responsibilities transferred to local authorities, most of which lack the resources to discharge them. The result is that a young person who leaves school at 16 without a plan is, in practice, on their own. The system that is supposed to catch them does not know they exist until they appear on the unemployment register — if they appear at all. A significant proportion of the Neet population is not claiming benefits, not registered with any service and not visible to any authority. They are simply missing.
Each unitary authority should be required to employ youth outreach officers with a defined caseload and legal responsibility for every young person aged 16 to 28 who is not in education, employment or training. These officers should operate from fixed premises — youth points, modelled on the Dutch Jongerenpunten — offering practical help with job search, training applications, housing, financial management and referral to specialist services. The obligation should be statutory: not a discretionary service that can be cut when budgets are tight, but a legal duty to find and support every young person who has fallen through the gaps.
The cost is modest relative to the alternative. A young person who is Neet at 18 and remains so at 25 will cost the public purse — through benefits, lost tax revenue, health costs and, in some cases, the criminal justice system — far more than the salary of the outreach worker who might have reached them at 19. The Dutch understand this arithmetic. The English, so far, have not.
VII. The Companion Argument
Why this item cannot stand alone.
This item is one of three that together constitute a settlement for the education of the Realm. Item IX sets out the case for autonomous schools, parental choice and a knowledge-based curriculum — the framework within which all three tracks would operate. Item XI argues for a smaller, more rigorous university sector, concentrated in fewer institutions and freed from the obligation to absorb students who would be better served elsewhere. This item supplies the piece that makes the other two defensible.
The argument for shrinking university participation — which Item XI makes at length — is only honest if the alternative is genuinely good. To tell a young person that university is not for them, and to offer nothing but a youth training scheme with a six-month shelf life, is not reform. It is abandonment with better manners. The three-track system, properly funded and staffed, with reversible sorting and genuine progression routes, is what makes a smaller university sector morally defensible. It is the answer to the question that every critic of university expansion has so far failed to answer convincingly: if not university, then what?
The answer is: the Practitioner Track and the Trade Track, leading to qualified professional and skilled employment, funded at a level comparable to the academic route, staffed by employers who have a duty of care to their apprentices, supported by outreach workers who find the disengaged before they are lost, and connected — through stacking and progression — to the academic route for those whose abilities develop late. That is the settlement. It will not be achieved by any one of these three items in isolation. It requires all three.