Only three out of ten British teenagers who left school by ages 16 to 17 are now in work, and the remainder are at risk of never finding a job. Nearly one in four families in Scotland don’t include a working person; for the UK as a whole, the figure is one in five.

The statistics were revealed by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, last Thursday as he addressed a youth unemployment seminar in Scotland. “[W]e know that almost 200,000 young people left school between 2002 and 2006 and have still never held regular work since,” he stated. “[I]f we lose young people early we risk losing them for good. … This is the lost generation” (emphasis mine throughout).

He continued, “There are swathes of young people who have seen their whole family—and many in their wider community—go for generations without sustaining anybody in work. … Many find themselves trapped by a crippling welfare dependency, unable to see the point of working when they are better off on benefits.”

In December 2010, 20.3 percent of under-25-year-olds were unemployed—the highest level since British records began. This contrasts with the 1999 unemployment rate for 18-to-24-year-olds of 12.5 percent.

Older workers, on the other hand, are in great demand, with pensioner employment increasing by 100,000 over the past year, according to Mr. Duncan Smith.

The reason for the dire state of youth unemployment comes down to young people’s unemployability. The problem is largely an educational system that is churning out young people with neither the abilities nor the drive to survive in the competitive international environment.

Duncan Smith explains: “Even where they want to work, many have found that they don’t have the skills or experience to compete in an increasingly globalized labor market.”

A study published this month by Sheffield University researchers shows that a fifth of British school leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate: “People at this level can handle only simple tests and straightforward questions on them where no distracting information is adjacent or nearby. Making inferences and understanding forms of indirect meaning, e.g. allusion and irony, are likely to be difficult or impossible. This is less than the functional literacy needed to partake fully in employment, family life and citizenship ….”

The study adds that these school leavers have “very basic competence in maths, mainly limited to arithmetical computations and some ability to comprehend and use other forms of mathematical information. While this is valuable, it is clearly not enough to deal confidently with many of the mathematical challenges of contemporary life.”

Sir Michael Rake, chairman of British Telecom, branded educational standards “a disgrace,” while the Confederation of British Industry says a fifth of firms claim they are required to “pick up the pieces” of a failing system.

In a brave and shocking speech at last year’s Conservative Party Conference, deputy head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh denounced the current skills deficit. She was utterly exasperated by her experience of trying to educate teenagers in one of London’s inner-city state schools and felt she had a duty to speak out about a system that is rendering young people unemployable:

My experience of teaching for over a decade in five different schools has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the system is broken because it keeps poor children poor. …[S]tandards have been so dumbed down that even the children themselves know it. When I give them past exam papers to do from 1998, they groan and beg for one from 2006 because they know it will be easier.The idea of benchmarking children and letting them know how they compare to their peers is considered so poisonous that we don’t ever do it, and we let children live in darkness ….

Commenting on her speech in his Express column in October 2010, journalist and author Leo McKinstry had this to say:

[H]er job opened her eyes to the disaster of left-wing ideology, with its toleration of dismal standards and its eagerness to explain away low achievement by reference to social factors like deprivation. …This catastrophe has come about not through “lack of resources,” that favorite bleat of teaching unions and Whitehall bureaucrats, but through the leftist ideology that has predominated in state education since the late 1960s.The victory of this dogma has obliterated all robustness from the classroom. In a world where the maintenance of children’s “self-esteem” is seen as all-important, mistakes go uncorrected. Narrative history has disappeared.Geography is now a branch of green evangelism. So powerful is the leftist stranglehold that serious attempts at reform in recent years have been thwarted. And when a report from Sheffield University came out in May, showing that a fifth of school leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate, the National Union of Teachers, instead of showing any shame at this failure, said with bizarre illogicality, “the message is that government deconstructs what is already there at its peril.”

And, as if to prove the point, Birbalsingh was suspended from her job after her speech, her teaching bosses rebuking her for “insulting” her colleagues and exploiting her pupils!

To find out what’s truly wrong with education today and, more importantly, what is true education, read our free booklet Education With Vision.