TEENAGERS who refuse to work, attend training or go to school are to be issued with on the spot fines under government proposals. Any who still fail to comply would then be taken to court where they could face further penalties.

The measures are designed to enforce a new law which will be outlined in this week’s Queen’s speech. It will say that all teenagers must remain in education, training or employment until they are 18.

The change will be phased in by raising the age to 17 in 2013 and to 18 in 2015. Details of the new “age of participation” will be outlined by Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, in a television interview today and in a speech tomorrow.

The new law will effectively outlaw “Neets”, teenagers and young people who are “not in education, employment or training”. In a speech to the Fabian Society tomorrow, Balls will put the proportion of Neets at about 10% of 16 to 18-year-olds.

On today’s Sunday Programme on GMTV, he will argue that the change is “the biggest educational reform in the last 50 years”.

Balls will admit that Britain performs poorly in terms of the numbers of teenagers who drop out of the system at the age of 16. In international league tables, he will say, Britain is “pretty much at the bottom, despite the rise in participation we’ve seen . . . the vast majority of countries have more people staying on [after 16] than we do”.

The first group to be affected will be today’s 10 and 11-year-olds and the change is likely to provoke strong arguments. When Brown first put it forward in July, a senior union figure, Geraldine Everett, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, said that the move was a “potential mine-field” that would “compel the disaffected to, in their perception, prolong the agony”.

Frank Field, the Labour MP and former minister, wrote in last week’s Sunday Times that a group of teenagers in his Birkenhead constituency “rolled around laughing at the idea that any government could try to lock them up in school until they became 18”.

To provide places for the teenagers, Balls will announce the creation of an extra 90,000 apprenticeships by 2013 for 16 to 18-year-olds to add to the current 150,000. There will also be 44,000 new places at further education colleges.

Tomorrow he will also issue a pamphlet detailing how the changes will be put into practice: “These new rights must be matched by new responsibilities . . . young people are responsible for their participation and this can be enforced if necessary.”

If someone drops out of education or training, their local authority will try to find them a place.

According to Balls’s department, if they refuse to attend, they will be given a formal warning, in which the “local authority will clearly explain their duty to participate and the consequences of not doing so”.

The next step will be to issue a formal notice, followed by a fixed penalty ticket. The Neet could then be taken to a youth court and fined, but the sanction will not go as far as imposing a custodial sentence.

Balls’s proposal to give children the opportunity either to train or stay at school reflects the policy of both him and Brown to blur the distinction between vocational and academic education in the hope that the skills of the whole workforce can be improved.

Last month, the schools secretary announced that the government’s new diplomas, to be introduced in 2011, would include not just practical subjects such as travel and tourism but also academic topics.

Critics have accused Labour of diluting the rigour of A-levels and GCSEs to ensure more young people gain qualifications.

But Balls will say today: “For decades we’ve been bedevilled by a two-tier view, which was that getting a skill, going to university, was for the few, and that for most young people excellence wasn’t for them, that they would end up with a second-class route into either vocational learning or an unskilled job.” Balls says today. “We’ve got to put that view behind us.”

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