The historic rise in the education leaving age will be a massive missed opportunity for young people

The great Labour Education Secretary Tony Crosland wrote in 1956 that to create an education system which achieves equal opportunity “the most important step… would be the raising of the school leaving age to 16”. This ambition became a commitment in Labour’s 1964 election manifesto and was eventually introduced by Edward Heath in 1972.

In 2008 Labour legislated to take another step along that road. But again it falls to Conservative Ministers to implement this Labour reform when next month the age at which young people can leave education or training rises from 16 to 17, and then to 18 in two years’ time.

This is an historic moment and a huge opportunity. A third of 18 year-olds are not in any education or training, and the proportion is rising. Research from the National Foundation for Educational Research found that helping these young people into education and training brings an immediate improvement in their knowledge and skills, and a long-term benefit to their earnings and employability.

But this will be a massive missed opportunity because Tory Ministers have ripped up the foundations that Labour laid for this generational change.

Careers advice to help all young people make good choices about their future has been broken up and shifted from councils to schools and colleges but with no funding, no specifications and no evident accountability.

Our Labour Connexions services were area-wide and universal, often with extra help for more vulnerable teenagers. Only highly selective and patchy provision has replaced them. Professor Tony Watts from Derby University describes the changes as precipitating a “crisis”, and MPs on the education select committee recently found “a worrying deterioration in the overall level of provision for young people”.

Financial support was also dismantled in 2010 when Michael Gove scrapped Education Maintenance Allowances and replaced them with a largely discretionary fund and a budget a third of the size. This was perhaps the single most regressive policy action the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition has taken. All the evidence showed that as the take-up of EMAs grew, participation in learning rose and the number of young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) fell. Now some of the poorest teenagers in the country are no longer entitled to any financial support to help them in post-16 education or training, and of course they won’t go to college if they can’t afford food, books and transport.

Research from Banardo’s found that the new bursary system is failing to support disadvantaged 16-19 year-olds, with the result that young people were considering dropping out of education or training altogether due to financial hardship.

And finally any real duties on employers have been demolished. Many young people work fewer than 20 hours a week or less than 8 weeks in a row so their employer will have no obligation to their training at all. Others will only have to check the young person is enrolled in part time training before they hire them and agree reasonable hours of work. No employer will have responsibility for monitoring attendance, funding the learning or paying wages while the young person is training. And the powers to fine employers who don’t allow time for training remain dormant on the statute book.

Labour councils around the country are doing great work to try to fill these gaps but local action won’t be enough to get the gains from this great educational change next month. Unlike Heath before him, Cameron’s education reforms reinforce opportunity for the fortunate few and deny Crosland’s dream of a country where opportunities are widely and fairly shared, and all young people have the chance to flourish.

That’s why we’ve heard nothing from Ministers or the national media on the eve of this historic change in our education system.