• READ MORE: Burnham benefits 'bribe' to choose work
• See more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred Source

Youth unemployment is at its highest level in more than a decade.

Over a million young people aged 16-24 fall into the Neet category – not in education, employment or training. This is a crisis.

Too many businesses have stopped hiring young people because Labour have piled extra costs on to employers through their Employment Rights Act, increasing the minimum wage and hiking employers’ national insurance contributions.

At the same time, a welfare system that too often rewards inactivity has become ever harder to challenge.

But what are Labour doing to fix it? Perhaps by making it cheaper to hire young people? Or stopping the incentives for young people to go on welfare rather than work? No, they are choosing to sabotage the part of the state that is working well: Schools.

Yesterday Andy Burnham proposed to offer technical subjects to pupils from the age of 14. Subjects such as manufacturing and AI would be available from Year 10 and linked to local industries.

Yet what Labour is presenting will result in a move away from high standards in schools. Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, has argued that an ‘over-focus on academic outcomes has left behind too many young people’.

But that fails to acknowledge how academic standards do not hold children back – they lift them up.

Young people at schools like the one I went to, my local comprehensive, were written off at the age of 14. It is a tragedy of lost opportunities that I don’t want to see unfold again.

Shadow education secretary Laura Trott says this Government has made hiring more expensive while leaving welfare unreformed

Britain’s greatest success story in recent years has been proving that children from ordinary backgrounds can achieve world-class qualifications at state schools. That should be celebrated.

The purpose of education is not to limit a child’s ambitions to whatever jobs happen to exist nearby. It is to equip them with the qualifications to succeed in any path they choose to pursue.

There is another danger. Successful schools with highly academic intakes will still focus on high achievers, while schools serving more disadvantaged communities will come under pressure to steer pupils into technical routes far earlier. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations dressed up as progressive reform.

Labour’s 2005 14-19 reforms were meant to strengthen vocational education, but too often children from poorer backgrounds were channelled away from rigorous academic subjects. Instead of raising aspirations, they lowered expectations.

But Conservative policies – such as the 2010 Academies Act and curriculum overhauls that prioritised knowledge in subjects such as maths and English – have challenged that culture. They proved that disadvantaged children could thrive in academic schools.

It would be a mistake to return to a system that too readily decided some children would never achieve academically.

None of this is an argument against technical education: Quite the opposite. Britain needs more high-quality apprenticeships. But all young people deserve the benefit of a strong academic education.

The Conservatives have a plan to boost employment for young people. By stopping dead-end degrees, doubling apprenticeships and raising the bar for welfare claims, we can help the next generation into work. Labour’s approach pulls in precisely the opposite direction.

This Government has made hiring more expensive, left welfare unreformed and is blaming schools for the consequences.

Laura Trott MP is the shadow education secretary.