Employability skills are fast becoming the new literacy and numeracy. "I don't so much care if my recruits can read and write well," employers seem to be saying, "as long as they are good team players, can self-manage, are emotionally resilient and can take the initiative".
This collection of work-place-social traits are yet to find a single term, but "employability skills" seems to cover it.
And this new focus on "employability skills" has sparked an enormous amount of work: The new diplomas are to embed employability skills into the curriculum, the CBI have set out seven "employability essentials" and organisations like the Young Foundation are doing groundbreaking work on how to teach young people the essentials they need to flourish at work - or even get a job in the first place. As a sixth-form college teacher told me: "Qualifications are just not enough".
This is all essential if young people are to be able to "cash in" their qualifications and work. But I worry that we're missing a trick: While enormous amounts of money and energy is being directed at furnishing pupils and school-leavers with vital employability skills, the government risks taking a wrecking-ball to instilling employability skills at the stage when it is most crucial - early years.
Research by academics such as Leon Feinstein shows how much of what we would term "employability skills" are laid down in early years, and how valuable full non-cognitive development is for a child.
Montessori and Steiner schools follow a much less rigid curriculum at early years, focus on whole-child development and argue that allowing children to "learn through constructive play" lays down the foundation for not only understanding numbers and letters, but a wide range of other development, including what we would later call "employability skills".
But the early years foundation stage framework will force all early years providers to follow a rigid test-based curriculum, with little room for the vital non-cognitive development that young children need.
European counterparts begin formal education much later, but with absolutely no detriment to literacy and numeracy skills later on. And it is often these foreign "employable" workers that companies are tempted to recruit over home-grown school leavers.
If the government really is concerned about the employability of our future generations and is to avoid a mad rush to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted, it should be concentrating it's employability skills push on early years - and look again at its Under-5s curriculum.
Post Office stamped out
Fighting a losing battle: our doomed campaign to save a local post office
On Thursday we lost our battle to save our local post offices - despite thousands of signatures, protest marches and one post office in question being highly busy and, one would have imagined, profitable.
Today the business select committee launches an attack on Royal Mail - the state owned parent company of the Post Office network on its lack of financial transparency.
Not only must questions be asked about financial management, but also of the hold Post Office Ltd exerts over its sub-postmasters. One sub-postmaster told of the measures he had wanted to take to make his post office more commercially viable. He had not been able to because he said such attempts were stamped upon by Post Office Ltd.
We can't even begin to assess the commercial viablity of our post office network until sub-postmasters are given the entrepreneurial freedom to meet the demands of the 21st century.
The "enterprise agenda" is becoming more and more prominent in education. But beyond that? If the government is looking for high-profile entrepreneurship causes to champion, hundreds of communities across the country say it could do worse than start here.
