Gordon Brown has made much play about putting education, children and families at the top of his political agenda; he even made his closest political ally, Ed Balls, the new children’s secretary at a reformed education department.

However, Balls’s first announcement last week, that all primary and secondary school children will have lessons in social and emotional skills by 2011, was something of a damp squib. Our troop of already overinstructed teachers – battling terrible literacy rates for school leavers – might think they have better things to do.

Balls is promising more money: an extra £13m to encourage pupils to understand themselves, manage their feelings and promote social skills. This sounds disappointingly vague. Tony Blair tended to favour a schools-based approach to teaching emotional skills (alongside Asbos for those who fail to toe the line) but Brown promised something rather more rigorous.

Were we wrong to think change was afoot? No. By the end of 2008 the government has certain targets it must meet: to ensure the delivery of 2,500 children’s centres, for example, and to provide half of all families with access to school-based care for 5 to 11-year-olds. This latest announcement represents nothing more than the national launch of Blair’s social and emotional aspects of learning (Seal) programme, already in operation in 60% of primary schools Behind the scenes in the policy laboratories of the Brown government there is an appetite for an overhaul of policy directed at older children and teenagers. The Brownite approach will match schools reform with radically different extracurricular offerings for young people.

Brown has already hinted that we may see legislation to introduce voting at 16, a bigger role for youth mayors and more involvement of young people in policy making – which fits with his ethos of responsible citizenship. But this is just the beginning.

The long-awaited youth review has been delayed until the end of the summer to make space for new content. The fact that the new Department for Children, Schools and Families also includes the Respect Unit (formerly in the Home Office) means that youth justice and youth policy have been fused for the first time, with potentially massive implications.

It is difficult to overemphasise the significance of Balls’s appointment as children, schools and families minister. While Alan Johnson, the former education secretary, was famed for his “people skills” and conciliatory approach, Balls is a cool economist by trade. He is clever, strategic and logical.

Balls’s ability to sniff out “spare” cash is well known. On top of the new money for Seal, he also produced some £128m during his time at the Treasury to support families with disabled children and has already signalled his desire to invest some £150m (with more to come) taken from defunct bank accounts in activities for young people, making plans for “a good youth centre” in every neighbourhood.

Recent research by the Institute for Public Policy Research supports the hypothesis that attending youth clubs – different from youth centres in that clubs often do not offer proper (as in structured) activities such as sport, art or drama – can have a detrimental impact on young people’s lives, making it more likely that they will smoke, drink and become teenage parents. Well, what would you do, aged 14, in a big room with a pool table at one end and a condom machine at the other?

Blair’s government has been accused of being too tough on youth crime, sentencing a generation of cheeky teens to Asbos. But on young people’s extracurricular activities he was too soft: building youth clubs and “places for young people to go” rather than providing proper, constructive options for those in disadvantaged areas.

Brown – who has already indicated an interest in overhauling extracurricular provision – is different. His politics of responsible citizenship means that he expects responsible behaviour from British teenagers in return for more say in politics.

He is scouting around for ways to engage disenfranchised youth and to stamp out antisocial behaviour. He is said to be impressed by research showing that extracurricular youth activities that take place in a group setting, with a clear hierarchy and structure, clear and well defined aims (eg building a camp, working towards a final performance, learning a skill) and consistent meetings help children to develop better social and emotional skills. This is particularly helpful for those who might lack structure at home.

Wearing a uniform helps, as it signals order and discipline. This should be of little surprise: children need discipline and structure in their lives as well as fun. Youth worker Shaun Bailey, among others, has long argued for more investment in organisations such as the forces cadets, Girl Guides and Scouts, which offer all three.

These kinds of activities not only educate children in particular skills more effectively than an English lesson, and teach authority and teamwork better than school PE, but also allow children to be children – to get muddy, climb trees and build things: a welcome addition to lives spent in dark bedrooms logging on or hanging out on street corners being intimidating. For many of our inner-city “Asbo-teens”, such experiences might just change their lives.

There are no doubt measurable benefits of Seal, but children disenfranchised from the school community (the bullied, unpopular, nonacademic and low in confidence, or the many who simply see school as a chore) will not benefit as much from these lessons, crammed into a bulging curriculum, as they would from out-of-school activities run by youth workers and others who do not have the negative connotations of teachers.

To be fair, the agenda on youth has been evolving towards a more out-of-school structure for teenagers, especially with the introduction of the Youth Matters agenda which emphasised the importance of providing proper activities for all young people and the launch of extended schools. But initiatives have often missed the point that it is the purposeful nature of activities that makes them beneficial: the occasional kick-about in a park is fun, but weekly practice for a team football match once a month is a learning curve in teamwork and discipline.

To ensure that there is adequate provision of such activities will require some more money shifting by Balls. There is plenty of evidence that provision of out-of-school activities is pretty poor and that the most beneficial activities completely pass by the most disadvantaged children. For instance, nationally there are about 950,000 places available at the Girl Guides and Scouts, yet there are still 50,000 girls on the national waiting list – one for every 10 existing members.

Although there is no breakdown of these figures, anecdotal evidence suggests it is overwhelmingly the most affluent young people who are taking up these places (for the usual reasons: parental interest, time and money, local availability).

Despite a groundswell of cross-party support, there are only 88,000 young cadets in the Sea Cadet Corps, Army Cadet Force and the Air Training Corps across the whole country. In addition there are 40,000 children in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF), which is based in schools. However, these tend to be overwhelmingly based in independent schools: of the 253 CCF units, only 52 are in state schools. So the vast majority of the £80m a year Ministry of Defence funding for the CCF goes to funding provision for young people in independent schools – far from the most disadvantaged.

Balls will almost certainly note and act on this irregularity in a way that his predecessor did not: he is a firm believer in equal access and social justice. He is also a structures man, used to navigating the economy and European monetary policy: the ordered, sensible and constructive fun of cadet forces and Scouts will be intuitively attractive to him and the economist in him will note the cost-effectiveness of such interventions.

Investing in activities that have been shown to teach behavioural and social skills to children in a fun and relatively cheap way before they fall into antisocial behaviour and truancy is certainly more appealing than sloughing further resources into the youth justice system to catch them at the other end. And it would make teachers’ jobs easier if some of this were done outside schools, leaving teachers to focus on the essential-to-the-economy skills of literacy and numeracy.

Julia Margo is senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research and co-editor of Politics for a New Generation: The Progressive Moment (Palgrave Macmillan) www.ippr.org

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