With the credit crisis causing thousands of job losses in white-collar professions, ministers are engaged in crisis talks with major employers in a bid to find posts for the 400,000 students due to graduate from universities this summer.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, John Denham, the Skills Secretary, discloses that four well-known companies - including Barclays and Microsoft - have already agreed to take part in the scheme, provisionally called the National Internship Scheme.
He also refuses to rule out bringing forward plans to raise the school leaving age to 18 as an emergency measure to prevent this year’s crop of GCSE pupils adding to the ranks of the jobless.
With unemployment already approaching two million, some experts predict that three million people - one in 10 of the workforce - could be out of work by 2010. Another 550 posts were lost yesterday [fri] as Southeastern trains, the Newcastle Building Society and Bovis Homes, the house builders, added to the grim toll of job cuts since the start of the year.
Also this week, 1,200 jobs have been cut at Nissan’s plant in Sunderland, another 1,200 people have been made redundant at Marks