Any document headed 'strategy' should be torn up, and the UK government's new National Skills Strategy is a case in point. Alarmed that 40% of kids leave school at 16, never to return - among developed countries, only Greece, Turkey, Mexico have lower rates - Whitehall wants to do something about it.

So we're going to have a raft of new initiatives to get people up to 'Level 2' (ie no more than a basic set of 5 GCSE school-leaving exams), create new training qualifications, and to 'join up' education and training agencies.

All garbage. It's just an attempt to correct, in the workplace, what our rotten state education system hasn't done at school. If instead of a failing state monopoly, we had diversity and competition in schools, then maybe educators would give kids what they really need to get on in life - and enthuse them in the process.

And why do we need new government-run vocational qualifications when independent agencies already provide them? We should let employers decide what they need in the market, not force them into something they might regard as no good.

And joining up the agencies is a laugh. England has 9 Regional Development Agencies, 47 Learning and Skills Councils, government departments for skills, education, work, who knows what, plus a zillion other work and training quangos. You couldn't even get them all in the Albert Hall, never mind getting them to agree anything.

No, in this case, government is the problem, not the answer. The way all this costly regulation is going, the only people who're going to need skills anyway are those who work in the unemployment offices.

Instead, we should get to the core problems. Free our schools from centralized state bureaucracy. Free our training market. Sweep away the costly quangos and cut tax and regulation on business.