Warnings about benefits will not solve the interlinked problems of worklessness and worsening mental health

Older people used to be more likely than younger ones to be unemployed for health reasons and it is unnerving that this no longer applies – with more people in their early 20s now workless due to illness than those in their early 40s. As last week’s report from the Resolution Foundation notes, the transition to adulthood can be “tumultuous”. But youth should also be a time of health and high spirits. While the overall rise in the number of long-term sick to 2.8 million people is concerning, it is particularly dismaying that the number of under-24s in that cohort has doubled in a decade.

Psychological problems are not the only reasons for this, but they are important ones. The proportion of 11-16s with a common mental disorder has risen from 17% to 23% in six years, while the number of new personal independence payment (Pip) claims from 18- to 24-year-olds with a psychiatric condition almost trebled to 23,000. The crisis in student mental health is well documented, as are problems linked to teenagers’ social media use. In recent years a number of families of young people who have taken their own lives have become active campaigners for changes including a new duty of care for universities.

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Children became unhappier in the past decade, according to the annual Good Childhood report . The number of eight to 16-year-olds with mental health problems rose sharply . It wasn’t their parents’ fault: children were happier with their families, but their distress coincided with a school life relentlessly concentrated on exams . Meanwhile, art, music, drama, sport, and design and technology are vanishing – they are unaffordable in schools with cut budgets that knew they would be judged on that harsh English baccalaureate regime: English , maths, two sciences, history or geography and a language. Nothing else.

As 40% fewer took arts subjects , PE hours were also cut, while 215 school playing fields were sold off and fun was squeezed out of the curriculum. Half of secondary pupils failed the Ebacc, without alternative activities to shine in. Ofsted, as stern enforcer, helped cause a flight of headteachers intimidated by those one-word judgments: lose a “good” rating and you might lose your career.

Bernard Clarke tries to imagine a better education system, while Rosalind Harrison reveals how Ofsted impacts apprenticeship providers. Plus letters from Dan Willis and Simon Clements

At long last, a consensus seems to be emerging that Ofsted is not fit for purpose and needs reform ( Ofsted’s ‘simplistic judgments’ no longer fit for purpose, schools experts warn, 4 November ).

Just suppose the English education system had at its heart a national curriculum based not on an arbitrary list of prescribed subjects and parcels of information but on the real needs of young people and the society of which they will become members.