Ensuring Young People Are Work-Ready: The Importance of Communication Skills

I had the opportunity to listen to Shadow Education Minister Laura Trott speak at the Policy Exchange this week about business, skills, and apprenticeships. The discussion centered around an important question: how do we ensure that young people leave education ready for employment?

The Focus on Post-16 Education

The conversation focused heavily on post-16 education, apprenticeships, lifelong learning, and the skills needed to succeed in the workplace. These are undoubtedly important priorities. However, as I listened, I found myself wondering whether we are starting the conversation too late.

If we want young people to be work-ready at 18, shouldn't we be paying equal attention to whether they are communication-ready at five?

Just last week, the Open University published findings highlighting a growing mismatch between employers' expectations and their perceptions of young people entering the workforce. Around half of employers reported that young people are not work-ready, while 82% felt stronger soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving were needed. These findings raise an important question: where do these skills begin?

The Foundation of Communication Skills

Communication is often discussed as a workplace competency, yet it is fundamentally a developmental skill. Long before a young person attends a job interview, collaborates with colleagues, or presents ideas in a meeting, they must first learn how to understand language, express themselves clearly, listen effectively, and engage in meaningful interactions with others.

The challenge is that many children are arriving at school already behind in these areas. This concern is not new. Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley followed 42 families and recorded parent-child language interactions over time. Their work led to the widely cited idea of the “30 million word gap”: the estimate that, by the age of four, children in more language-rich homes may have heard tens of millions more words than children in homes with fewer opportunities for sustained adult-child talk.

The Current Crisis in Communication Skills

Recent estimates suggest that as many as 1.9 million children in the UK are struggling with talking and understanding words. Professionals across education increasingly describe this as a national speech, language, and communication crisis. Teachers report growing numbers of children starting school without the vocabulary, conversational skills, or language comprehension expected for their age.

In our forthcoming book, ‘Every Child, Every Future,’ we explore this in much greater depth, focusing on skills for life and vocabulary, to name a couple of areas. When we look at education policy as a whole, it seems to be divided into distinct age phases. But is this where we are going wrong? Most of the focus seems to be on post-16, or we talk about early years. However, we need to join the dots and have a complete strategy that focuses on communication as a whole.

The Ripple Effect of Delayed Communication Skills

This matters because communication is not simply another area of learning; it is the foundation upon which all learning is built. Children use language to understand instructions, build friendships, regulate emotions, solve problems, and access the curriculum. When communication skills are delayed, the impact can ripple through every aspect of education. Difficulties with language can affect reading, writing, confidence, behavior, and ultimately attainment.

Fast forward ten or fifteen years, and we find employers asking for stronger communication, teamwork, and interpersonal skills. Perhaps the question is not why young people lack these skills, but whether we have invested enough in developing them from the earliest years.

The Need for Early Intervention

There is often a tendency in policy discussions to focus on interventions at the point where problems become visible: employability programs, skills boot camps, apprenticeships, and workplace training. Yet prevention is almost always more effective than remediation.

If we are serious about creating a workforce equipped for the future, we must think beyond post-16 pathways. We need greater investment in early language development, speech and language support, family engagement, and communication-rich educational environments from the earliest years onwards.

Lifelong Learning Begins Early

Lifelong learning is important. But lifelong learning starts long before college, university, or apprenticeships. It starts with a child's first conversations, first stories, and first opportunities to make sense of the world through language. We must help to foster in children a love of learning so that they can go on to become lifelong learners.

The skills employers are calling for today are not born in the workplace. They are nurtured in homes, nurseries, and classrooms years before a young person submits their first job application. Perhaps the most important employability strategy we have is ensuring that every child develops the communication skills they need from the very beginning. Because being work-ready at 18 starts with being word-ready at 5.

Link to the 'OU 2026 Business Barometer'

Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (1995) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

https://amzn.eu/d/0gDNPo0r 'Every Child, Every Future'.