Primary schools told to identify children at risk of future unemployment

Primary schools are to be instructed to identify children at risk of future unemployment, the Guardian reports. The guidance represents an extension of the school system's remit from education into long-range economic forecasting at the individual pupil level.

The policy assumes that teachers can predict, years in advance, which children will struggle to find work as adults - and that early identification will lead to interventions that alter the outcome. Both assumptions are contestable. Employment outcomes depend on economic conditions, policy decisions, technological change and individual choices made over decades. The variables a seven-year-old faces are not the variables they will face at twenty-five.

The instruction also shifts the school's function. Schools have historically been asked to teach a curriculum and maintain order. They are now also attendance officers, safeguarding agencies, mental health providers, and - with this - labour market actuaries. Each addition arrives with its own reporting requirements and its own claim on staff time. The question is not whether any individual task is worthwhile, but whether the sum of them leaves time for the thing the institution was built to do.

Watch for the metrics. If schools are to identify children at risk of unemployment, someone will define what 'at risk' means - and schools will be measured against it. The incentive will be to flag more children, not fewer, because missing one carries more institutional risk than over-identifying many.