Three weeks ago I asked whether his plan would survive contact with power. Here is the answer.

On 7 July I wrote that the man most likely to be Prime Minister within a fortnight was building a plan around the future of work, and that whether it survived contact with power was another matter. That was a prediction, and this paper is supposed to go back to those.

So: it survived. Technical routes from fourteen, employer contact, mayors and colleges designing them together. It is recognisably the thing he was building in Manchester, made national.

On 29 June I wrote something else, less kindly. His ten-year economic vision moved power around the country and never once mentioned the force moving the floor beneath the work itself. Yesterday's announcement is the first time those two maps have touched. The sectors named include artificial intelligence and digital technology. A young person choosing a route at fourteen is being asked, implicitly, to guess which work will still be there.

Half a mark, then, on both counts. I would rather record that than pretend I called it.

Now the part I want to be careful about, because on 24 July I wrote that Britain had finished its biggest rethink of school in a generation without asking what school is now for. This is not that piece. That was about what is taught. This is about something narrower and, I think, more damning.

We now have a plan whose first cohort reaches a workplace in 2028. We have a foundation apprenticeship, built for young people, launched last August, whose take-up James sets out below and which nobody had promised to report at all. We have a participation duty that says every sixteen-year-old in England must be in education or training until eighteen, with an enforcement chapter Parliament wrote and never switched on. We have a work experience power sitting unused since 1998.

Every one of those was announced. Not one of them has a published account of what happened next.

That is the thread. Not that the ideas are bad. Several are good, and the country that sorts young people into skilled work at fourteen and means it is a country with better numbers than ours. It is that Britain has built an enormous machine for announcing things and almost none for finding out.

Here is the test I would set, and it is small enough that nobody could call it unreasonable. In September 2028, when the first cohort walks into a workplace under this scheme, somebody should be able to say how many of them there were. Not a target. A count.

If that number does not exist, we will know what this was.