FOURTEEN-year-olds should be the centre of educational attention to ensure the country has the necessary skills for the future, according to former Education Secretary Estelle Morris.

Speaking to staff and students at Darlington College, the Arts Minister said educationalists needed to look at children around that age and consider where they would be when they are 21.

"We live at a time when we need all our citizens to have high levels of skill," said Ms Morris, who has just been appointed pro vice-chancellor of the University of Sunderland.

"It has always been said that if you don't work at school, then you will never get on in life. But that has not necessarily been true until now.

"It is now the right thing to do to challenge the education system to ensure that every child gets the best skills."

She said she believed standards of teaching and education were the best they had ever been.

"Eighty per cent of what we now know about the brain we have discovered in the past 20 years," she said. "We are in a time of great change and the challenge is how to manage that change."

She said vocational training needed to play a bigger part and this could involve children opting into it at 14.

"The plan is to be more seamless. We have got to look at them at 14 and think where they might be at 21 and provide them with some continuity - it's the last bit of education we have got to get right," she said.