Christopher Price: Let's offer chances to both 'sheep' and 'goats'

A year ago Alan Johnson said he wanted to raise the school leaving age to 18; almost immediately both Gordon Brown and all but one of the teaching unions embraced this catchy slogan. Others were more wary. The British Youth Council was against the idea because it removed an element of choice from young people's lives.

Then John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, suggested the policy should properly be entitled "keeping young people in some kind of education or training until they are 18". In his first week as education minister, Ed Balls altered the slogan once more. In response to a Tory MP, he said: "We are not raising the school leaving age to 18; we are raising the education leaving age to 18".

This new turn of phrase is muddled, meaningless and menacing. Muddled and meaningless because sensible people go on learning all their lives, and menacing because legislation is being prepared to impose a second-class curricular diet on unwilling recipients.

Simply offering a choice of imaginative courses to anyone under the age of 19 who wanted to come on them would not need legislation. But it is now clear that civil servants in the new Department for Children, Schools and Families (in a bill that will have nothing to do with children, schools or families) are already wrestling with a legislative enterprise beset by contradictions.

Where will the skilled staff be found to teach and train hundreds of thousands of extra young people? Who will force these youngsters into college? Policemen? School bobbies? Parents? What will the sanctions for non-compliance be? Asbos? In reality, the only credible sanction will be a financial one – a strategy which has worked well in getting adults off benefits and into jobs. But will financial penalties work on young people taking an adolescent break, when there is a raft of financial opportunities in the semi-legal black economies of our cities? How much compulsion will be tolerated? Do we bring back national service?

At the heart of these dilemmas is the failure to implement Tomlinson (a decision imposed by Tony Blair's Downing Street) and to block the new credentials and qualifications he recommended.

Two years ago Ruth Kelly's statement rejecting Tomlinson said, limply, that "steps would be taken to ensure that less gifted 16-year-olds stayed on at school, college or in a workplace-based learning role and be offered vocational training." The heavy implication was that "gifted" young people could choose their courses but less gifted ones would be force-fed compulsory training. The policy is chillingly reminiscent of Biblical divisions between sheep and goats, with the goats being instructed in the hewing of wood and the drawing of water. Since then this divide has been annually deepened by Treasury insistence that the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) – the frailest and least gutsy of all our educational quangos – should restrict its courses to "skills"; and that employers should decide what these skills should be.

The CBI has a long record of whingeing about standards in schools; and their representatives on LSC committees, seldom the brightest and best in British industry, deserve no monopoly in prescribing a training agenda for our workforce. Trade unions, arts organisations and ordinary folk should also contribute to the needs of the 14-19 curriculum.

The coming legislation should make space for a more diverse set of educational training opportunities and try to remove the outdated (and uniquely English) divide between further and higher education.

The whole concept of any statutory leaving age beyond 16 should be ditched, as stopping education and training at 18 lies uneasily with the Government's aspiration of lifelong learning; the Tomlinson report should be implemented in full, whatever the Daily Mail says; and any new arrangements should offer a package of skills and opportunities for educational progression, whether to "gifted" sheep or "ungifted" goats – some of whom, like Richard Branson, might well turn out to be surprisingly gifted.

Most important, credible credentials should be available to all 14-19-year-olds with employers and higher education gatekeepers leant on by government to take them seriously; and the whole education and training system should become less obsessed with the exact ages appropriate to each stage of education and training.

After the Second World War, universities took students of all ages, often on the basis of experience rather than qualifications; and now we have laws prohibiting any sort of age discrimination. If Ed Balls is determined to implement an education leaving age, he should raise it to 99.

The writer is a former Labour MP