There are few state-controlled institutions that are not involved in the government’s mission to sharpen up the nation’s workforce. Schools, the national curriculum, universities, businesses, prisons and central government departments have all been touched by the skills agenda. And the state may yet make significant incursions into the private realm, by accrediting some of the informal training currently done by business and making it compulsory for companies to offer staff basic training.

From next year, schools will start piloting new “diplomas” which will run in parallel with GCSEs and A-levels, offering a slightly more vocational option for young people who do not fancy the traditional routes of higher education. The government hopes the diplomas will provide something to do for all the extra people who will have to stay on in education or work-based training until 18 – a major addition to the state’s claim over the individual.

Local businesses are also being encouraged to see their local prisons as a source of tailor-made skills. Employers can now ask prison governors to train up their inmates in skills that their businesses may lack.

After a major review last year, further education colleges have been told to concentrate on “economically valuable” courses that will appeal to businesses. The government has duly cut back the public subsidy for holiday Spanish and basket-weaving classes to focus resources on skills and work-related training that will help people find jobs.

Universities have started to think about how they can crack into the lucrative continuing professional education market, prompted by the government which sees higher education as crucial for improving the advanced skills which are most important in the knowledge economy. They will soon be bidding for funding for an additional 5,000 places that will be co-funded by business. And one of Gordon Brown’s first acts as prime minister was to give skills a sharper focus by creating the new Department for Universities, Innovation and Skills out of the old DfES.

These are but a few recent examples of a flow of schemes that is set to increase sharply under Mr Brown. More details of how the system will be tweaked and changed will be revealed tomorrow, when the government unveils its plan for implementing the proposals of the Leitch Review on Skills. But it is already clear that those changes will be based around a couple of key ideas, one of which is the idea that the education system does a poor job of preparing people for work.

As Lord Leitch himself acknowledged in his report, this is by no means new: in 1776, Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, that “the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities... does not seem to be the proper preparation for that of business”.

The 2007 solution to this age-old problem is to make the whole system more “demand-led”, jargon for taking away the power to decide what should be taught from education bureaucrats who previously tried to predict what industry collectively wanted and then provide it through further education colleges.

Instead, students will be given direct purchasing power over their courses through new learner accounts that will force training providers to offer students what they want – or lose out on public funding.

The brokers are also going to have a big role in pushing one of Lord Leitch’s recommendations that has already been launched: the so-called “skills pledge”. The attempt to get every employer in the country to voluntarily promise to provide training to staff who lack Level 2 skills marks the extent to which the state is prepared to tell businesses what to do. If, by 2010, uptake has been poor, the government says it might turn the pledge into an “entitlement”, forcing business to offer training.

The plan has not met with universal enthusiasm from business. London First, an employer organisation in the capital, has attacked the idea because, it says, businesses should train their staff when it makes commercial sense and the development of employees can be tailored to the individual.

Moreover, the organisation argues that the government’s proposed threat of introducing legislation to make such training compulsory if there are insufficient volunteers would have the perverse effect of encouraging them to save on training costs by only recruiting people who already have Level 2 skills.

It is still far from clear that business will sign up. When the review was launched in June, the government proudly unveiled just over 150 organisations that had signed up. But on closer examination it became clear that more than half of those organisations were either government departments or one of the plethora of quangos, agencies and bodies involved in promoting or delivering skills. Most of the remaining companies were corporate giants such as McDonald’s and BT who can most easily afford such training. Convincing small and medium-sized businesses could be a much bigger task.

A recent survey by the Institute for Personnel Development and KPMG found that one of the latest schemes to exhort companies to take skills training seriously is proving unpopular. Nearly half of the companies surveyed said they were unlikely to sign the new “skills pledge” where they promise to train staff who lack basic Level 2 qualifications. About half of those businesses unwilling to make the pledge said that they were concerned about the costs involved and some 30 per cent were not convinced by the business case.

The scheme has also lost its most boisterous cheerleader in Lord Jones, the former director-general of the Confederation of Business Industry. He was originally drafted in by the government to be the country’s “skills tsar”, with a brief to tour the UK extolling the merits of training and warning companies that they face the threat of legislation forcing them to lay on Level 2 training if take up is insufficient.

But ever since he was elevated to the House of Lords in order to serve in Mr Brown’s government of “all the talents”, he has had to drop his original brief. The government, however, says the new Commission for Skills and Business will pick up where Lord Jones left off.

There are high hopes that putting business in the driving seat will help to cut down the number of officially accredited courses which some business organisations complain are too complex and divorced from employers’ actual needs.

London First has singled out a number of apparently superfluous qualifications including the Level 2 VRQ Certificate in News and Magazine Retail Management Skills, and the Level 2 City & Guilds Certificate for Parking Attendants.

In a recent House of Lords debate Baroness Jo Valentine, chief executive of London First, said such credentials “are not passports to jobs…. If we are to build the employability of people currently without work, we don’t need strings of letters after their names, we need real-life skills – communication and ‘get-up-and-out-to-work’ skills.”

The government’s answer to this is to give extra teeth to the Sector Skills Councils, the bodies that represent particular segments of the economy, such as motor manufacturers, the IT and financial services sectors. They will have to start quickly if they are to make by 2008 the “very significant reduction” in the 22,000 qualifications currently accredited, as Lord Leitch recommended in his report.

But the suitability of the Sector Skills Councils for the task of winnowing out worthless qualifications has been questioned by some. David Frost, director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, is particularly scathing and claims that he has yet to find any of his members, mostly small and medium-sized businesses, who have even heard of SSCs.

John Denham, Secretary of State for Universities, Innovation and Skills, conceded that the record of the SSCs has been “patchy” – but, he insists, they will improve through a process of “relicensing and renewal… We have to simplify the system so a particular employer can find what they want when they want it. And we want to see the confidence that employers have in qualifications meaning something to them going up over time.”

Even if the SSCs succeed in cutting back the thicket of diplomas and credentials, the effort to improve the nation’s skills will, to the disappointment of some, continue to be measured in terms of qualifications. Critics, however, argue that measuring success by bits of paper confuses qualifications with actual skills.

As Mr Frost puts it: “What employers actually say is they want someone who does the job, and if necessary they will train them to do a particular task or give them one-to-one training, but they not interested in all this box ticking stuff. Qualifications actually come pretty low down the agenda.”

But even those informal bits of training currently performed by companies might be brought within the national qualification system. Recently, Ken Boston of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority suggested that in-house training provided by businesses such as British Airways, Lloyds TSB bank and Boots, the chemist, should be eligible for official accreditation.

The role of the state in tackling the UK’s skills problem looks set to grow and grow.