We had a work experience kid in this week. I know ‘kid’ sounds a bit patronising, but although this guy has just got his A-level results and is about to go off to Warwick (and thus must be about 18), he didn’t look a day over 12. I felt a bit embarrassed talking to him without his Mum in the room. On his first day, bless him, he came in wearing a suit and tie. That looks funny enough at the best of times in this part of Soho (which is full of trendy media types), but for a young lad who still looks like he ought to be wearing short trousers, it was particularly amusing. Fortunately someone told him to ditch the jacket and tie before he was introduced to me, or I’m not sure I would have been able to keep a straight face.

If you’re wondering what he’s doing here, the immediate answer is that he’s someone’s cousin or something. But really, I agreed to it out of guilt. Everyone seems to be talking about how business owners need to be doing more work experience and internship schemes or soon every single young person in the UK will be out of a job (or something). So I felt bad about the fact that we haven’t had anyone in at all for at least two years.

On the other hand, there’s a very good reason for that: I think it’s a total waste of everyone’s time. I know that’s not a very progressive attitude, and I’m all for social responsibility in general. But the thing is, however much willing they show (and not all of them do), there’s virtually no chance of some school leaver being able to do anything useful in the space of a few days. And however much I tell the person in charge of them (and there always is someone, you’ll be pleased to hear) that they should spend the minimum amount of time possible on it, it never works out like that. Arranging the whole thing, showing them round, introducing them to people, setting them up at a desk, keeping an eye on them – all this stuff takes time. And this time could be spent a lot more productively elsewhere.

The girl who’s in charge of this week’s kid is a perfect example. She’s very conscientious and very thoughtful, and I know that she’ll go out of her way to make sure that he has an interesting and edifying week. Which is nice, but I’d much rather she was working (I suppose ideally you’d give them to someone with no interest at all to look after, but then it ends up being even more of a waste of time).

I’m guessing people will tell me that I’m missing the point here; that we have a collective responsibility to try and do something for the next generation – after all, how else are they going to become more employable? And I sympathise with that point of view, I really do. But the thing is, there’s a war on (economically speaking). Times are hard, and I need all my best people working their socks off to get us out the other side. Not sitting around with 18-year-olds talking about who’s on at the Reading Festival. Things may have started looking up a bit lately, but I’m still more worried about the people I currently employ, as opposed to people I may employ in the future. If that’s regressive, so be it.

I spoke to my little cousin this week ahead of her AS-results (or whatever they call them these days), and in light of my moan about young people last week, I thought I'd ask her whether she was learning any useful business stuff at school. The good news is that she's doing Maths and English, so she should at least be able to write and count. But apart from that, the answer was basically: not much.

I suppose this shouldn't have come as a big surprise, given that we did virtually nothing related to the world of work when I was at school. All I remember was one pretty rubbish day of negotiation exercises, which nobody took very seriously (it’s hard to make it realistic when everyone knows there’s nothing at stake). But I did think for some reason that things would have improved by now – that kids would spend a bit more time learning about basic economics and business and finance, so they'd have more chance of getting a decent job when they left school. That’s got to be good for the league tables, right?

I'm not one of those hand-wringers who think the education system is hopeless; that's it's a waste of time learning about stuff like History or Art because it has no practical application once you leave. Learning new stuff is fun, and besides, you have the rest of your life to be a capitalist pig-dog - why not spend your time at school finding out about other interesting stuff?

I just think that schools could be doing more to get people interested in (and knowledgeable about) the business world. Now I know some are better at it than others: they enter kids in these business and entrepreneurship competitions every year, and hold careers days when people come in and talk to the classes about what they do for a living. But judging by the youth employment figures at the moment, and judging by the fact that most business owners I know think school leavers are getting less and less employable, I think we need to come up with some better ideas.

So here’s one for a start. My cousin tells me that people are a bit sniffy about General Studies these days, and I can understand why – it was basically like a free A-level in my day (since the exam was easy and required no revision). But I remember loving the lessons we had – they didn’t bear any relation to the final exam, but we covered stuff like music and politics that was outside the normal curriculum. So why not make the General Studies course a bit more practical? You could have a section on current affairs, another on personal finance, another on basic economics, another on constructing an argument – the kind of stuff businesses look for in a well-rounded candidate.

Anyway, as you’ll have noticed, I’m not an education expert. So I’m going to try and do my bit this year by going to a careers day at my old school, to tell the kids about life as an entrepreneur. I suppose I'm not necessarily the ideal role for life in the corporate world, since I basically jacked it in to do my own thing. But I reckon that if you're looking for some classic entrepreneurial traits - a contrary attitude, an appetite for risk, a sense that anything is possible - a room full of teenagers is probably a great place to start.

Like most people, I was shocked to see the figures on youth unemployment this week (apparently one in six are now out of a job). And based on my experiences of the last week, there’s more to this problem than the recession.

On Monday, I put up a job advert for someone to replace that idiot analyst of mine who’s decided to go back to university. It’s a decent role but a fairly junior one – I just want a smart grad with a bit of initiative who can turn his/ her hand to different things and develop fast. So nothing too complicated. And since everyone keeps telling me that graduates are finding it impossible to get jobs at the moment, I figured I’d be drowning in brilliant applications. Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t quite worked out like that (maybe all the good ones are still out in Ayia Napa or something, if that’s not a contradiction in terms). We’ve had about 50 people apply, and most of them have been rubbish.

But I don’t mind that so much – that’s par for the course when you run an ad like this. What particularly shocked me was how illiterate some of these people were. I’m not sure I’ve had a single application without some kind of glaring spelling or grammar mistake – normally just after they tell you how brilliant they are at spelling and grammar. (I even had one student journalist boasting about her skills at ‘profreading’, which wasn’t very bright.)

I’m conscious that I’m starting to sound like your Gran now, and I’m really not the kind of person who likes to moan about how feckless young people are. I was one quite recently, after all, as were most of the people that work for me. And when you see these kids in enterprise and business competitions, coming up with all these great new ideas, you know the future isn’t quite as bleak as the Daily Express and co would have us believe.

But one thing I’ve definitely found, even in my very short experience, is that the standard of applications seems to get worse every year. I don’t know why – whether it’s the schools, texts and emails, reality TV – but I swear that people are finding it harder and harder to string a sentence together. I’m not expecting Hemingway, but I’d never dream of sending off a job application that’s riddled with typos and mistakes.

And I think the problem’s actually bigger than that. Most graduates these days seem totally ill-equipped for the world of work. We almost always have a three-month period where they’re just absolutely hopeless, until they finally settle down and start getting the hang of it.  So if the Government had any sense (a big if, I know), they’d be spending their money helping schools and universities make kids more employable – CV classes, financial literacy, business competitions, negotiation training, that kind of thing. Otherwise I don’t think the problem is going to go away when the recession does.

You won’t believe what happened this week. One of my analysts told me he wants to quit. At a time of soaring unemployment, this young bloke wants to give up a perfectly good job to go back to university to do a Masters (in something that sounds like Economics, but isn’t). I just don't get it.

I remember reading somewhere that business school applications tend to go up in a recession – either because people are out of a job, or because they see it as a good time to steer well clear of the front line. So it would have been less surprising if he’d decided to do this a year ago, when things were starting to get really hairy. But he claims he’s going now precisely because the economy appears to be picking up. To future employers, it’ll seem like he left after helping his employer through the worst, as opposed to getting out of the kitchen because he couldn’t stand the heat.

Ordinarily I’d be sympathetic to this argument. I know I would say this, but I do think your staff have a responsibility to knuckle down and help you through the worst. You’re keeping them in a job through the worst recession in a generation, so it’s only fair that they work their socks off until we’re out the other side. The problem is, we’re clearly not out the other side yet. I know the papers seem to be a bit more optimistic these days, and for reasons I can’t understand, people seem to be buying shares again. But for small firms like ours, the good times are still a long way off.

My other issue with his decision is that I just don’t see the point. He seems to think that once he’s got this additional qualification, he’ll be able to get a much better job paying twice as much money. But I’m not convinced. In a year’s time, I reckon I’m much more likely to hire someone who’s had experience of working through the downturn, as opposed to someone who’s spent the last year going to a few lectures and getting some extra letters after his name. It seems to me that you learn more from one year working in this kind of climate than you would in five years working in happier times – let alone a year spent in a classroom.

That’s not to say that I think doing extra study is a bad idea in itself. Personally, I’d love to go to business school one day, if only because it gives you a chance to meet some interesting people from different backgrounds, to spend some time thinking about how you do business, and to have a lot more lie-ins than I currently do. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect to get a better job as a result. And for the time being, I think the current school of hard knocks will teach me a lot more.