More than 450,000 young adults who should be building careers lack the skills they need to do it, particularly in communication, team-working, and customer service. Entry-level jobs used to teach these skills. The job market having shifted in the last decade, however, those jobs are no longer there. The Work Foundation warns of a long-term problem if too many young people fail to join the workforce. Plenty of jobs do exist, points out the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But because of a mismatch betyween the aims of education authorities and employers, many of these jobs go unfilled — in spite of the growing surplus of unemployed young people. Read about this important paradox here.

The European Commission is considering an online age-authentication system to make cyberspace safer for children. Details are to be released at the end of this month. The plan involves self-regulation, new technology, and changes in the law. Read more about the plan here.

There is a School Food Trust, whose recent research suggests that pupils get a quarter of their recommended daily food intake at lunch, rather than the third that they ought. Why is this? Probably a distractingly complex social and organisational environment. Gratifyingly, there is evidence that students are at least choosing healthier meals for themselves than they did 8 years ago, when antecendent research examined their culinary lives.

Read everything the nutritionists behind the Food Trust’s research are saying here.

More than half of parents in England admit to having taken a school-age child on holiday during term time instead of during break, according to a recent travel industry poll. One in five respondents said they had sought their schools’ permission and been denied it; one in eight admitted to having lied in order to make their trip. Cost of break-time travel was the factor for half of those surveyed; work restrictions on their own travel time was the issue for a quarter. The DfE do ask schools to fine parents who holiday during term, but these fines do not appear to deter.

Read about the wider issues here.

Children’s Minister Tim Loughton has said that children under the age of 13 are setting up profiles on Facebook, currently forbidden by Facebook’s rules of use, and are thus getting involved in social media at worryingly young ages; worse, he says, parents are helping them set up these profiles. Facebook has the current age limit, and strict security settings for youngsters between 13 and 17, to comply with international regulations on children in social media, but a spokeswoman for the service concedes that age limits are impossible to enforce.

Read more about the problem here.