Britain has been allowed to do this since 1998. Nobody has ever asked why it didn't.

Yesterday evening Downing Street released a line I have been turning over since: from today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap. Fourteen-year-olds are to get technical education, time with local employers, real work experience. Mayors and colleges and businesses will design the routes together. Ofsted will be told to notice.

I want this to work. I should say that first, because what follows is not a case against it.

But here is the thing that stopped me. Britain has been legally able to do this since 1998.

Section 560 of the Education Act 1996, as Parliament rewrote it in 1998, says that the laws restricting the employment of children do not apply to a child in the last two years of compulsory schooling, where a council or a school arranges the placement as part of that child's education. The last two years of compulsory schooling begin in Year 10. That is fourteen. The provision sits under a heading about extending educational opportunities for Key Stage 4 pupils, and its predecessor, covering the final year, goes back to 1973.

So the power is not new. It is older than the pupils it applies to. What was announced yesterday is a plan to start using it, with an ambition to begin rolling out from September 2028, designed by a process that has not started yet, paid for out of budgets the department already has.

Twenty-eight years. Four governments, of three different colours, each of which could have done this on any Tuesday it liked. I have not found anyone asking why none of them did.

Then, while I was writing this, I went and got the international figures myself, because I had taken it on trust that Germany proves the case. Everybody says so. Nine countries, one source, one year, and the answer is more interesting than I expected.

Rank those nine on how well they employ adults and Britain comes third, behind only Germany and the Netherlands. Rank the same nine on how well they employ the young and Britain comes sixth. Every other country moves two places or fewer between the two lists. We move three, the wrong way, and we are the only ones who do.

We are not the worst. Italy does worse by its young people than we do. But Italian unemployment is 6.4 per cent across all ages against our 4.7, so Italy is failing its young inside a labour market that is failing everybody. We are not. We have one of the best adult jobs markets in this group and one of the poorer youth ones, at the same time, in the same country.

In Britain, a young person is about three times as likely to be out of work as an adult. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland it is about twice. Owen has the full table below, and the cautions that go with it.

Because here is what surprised me. Those three countries with the smallest gap are the three with dual apprenticeship systems. It is not that their economies are strong. Austria's is not especially. It is that in those places, being young and new to work does not count against you as heavily.

So yes. The policy is right.

It was also right in 1998, when Parliament passed the power to do it. It was right in 1944, when the Act built county colleges with attendance notices and enforcement attached, and they were never opened. It was right in 1918, when the same idea went into the statute book and was cut to save money. Ines lays out that chronology below and it flatters nobody.

Which is why I will not be joining the applause.

A hundred and eight years of the same good idea. Passed three times, implemented once without teeth, and sitting on the statute book since before these fourteen-year-olds were born. Every party has held this power. Every party has left it alone.

What I object to, then, is the word "today". From today, Britain will value the hard hat. It is not from today. It is from 2028, if it happens, using a power we have held since before most of these fourteen-year-olds' parents left school. Doing the obvious thing at last, with no new money and a start date three summers away, is not a new era. It is a late payment.

And the thing being paid for is not currently working. On 16 July the Department for Education published its apprenticeship figures. Starts are up 8.7 per cent, which is the number that will get quoted. Underneath it, starts by under-nineteens fell by 5.4 per cent, while starts by the over-twenty-fives rose 17.5 and now make up more than half of all apprenticeships in this country. Foundation apprenticeships, the route built last August specifically for young people, recorded 160 starts. James has the detail and the caveats, and they matter. But the shape of it is not in dispute. The apprenticeship system is growing, and it is growing away from the young.

I would take the announcement gladly and I would not thank anyone for it. What I would like is the question nobody asked this week.

We are not short of jobs. We employ our adults better than almost anywhere in that group of nine. Something in this country makes being nineteen much harder than being forty, far more so than it does elsewhere, and nobody has explained what. Not the Prime Minister, not the Education Secretary, not the people who put the questions to them.

So I am not asking for a bigger number or a better slogan. I am asking why it is three here and two there, and I would like somebody to have to answer it out loud.

That is all The Ledger is: writing down what people said they would do, and going back to it. It is not adversarial and it is not clever. It is just the thing nobody does.

— M.

*This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.*