The impending demise of the Learning and Skills Council is due, as much as anything, to the failure of much of idle yoof to find work or something useful to do instead of modelling faux sports wear on street corners.
The Government's answer to this is to compel 16 to 18 year olds to stay on at school or similar and keep themselves occupied learning something of use. The money for this has to come from somewhere - and that somewhere is the budget that pays for the LSC.
We should have guessed that when the Government outlined its plans to raise the school leaving age to 18 that it would be gain for some and pain for someone else. The latter is the Learning & Skills Council.
To that extent the LSC is the victim of Chavs and their like who are NEETing about the place. NEET stands for Not in Employment, Education or Training. There are said to be about 200,000 of them but how this figure is calculated is a mystery.
Perhaps Ed Balls and Gordon Brown stuck their collective fingers in the air and counted to 100,000.
Whatever - the drive to sweep Chavsters off the streets could also indicate that Train to Gain will not be renewed once its current budget - set till 2011 - runs out. Of course by then Brown, Balls and Darling could be history or, as it's now called in many schools, topic. Never mind - no doubt another way of spending taxpayers' money on idling yoof will be found
Time for a poem in the style of E J Thribb:
So farwell then LSC,
I guess you were never
meant to be,
except for 10 years,
which is way below average life
expectancy though perhaps,
not in Zimbabwe.
Will we see your like again?
Maybe in a remix of
Train to Gain
