The anger inside Debbie Coslett had been brewing for an hour.

“Everything that they have said is wrong,” said the chief executive of Brook Learning Trust, which runs Ebbsfleet Academy in Swanscombe, High Weald Academy in Cranbrook and Hayesbrook School in Tonbridge.

The outburst was directed at the panel assembled by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), which was discussing the needs of companies trying to benefit from construction of Ebbsfleet garden city, a 15,000-home town between Gravesend and Dartford announced by George Osborne in last year’s budget.

The panel had not pulled any punches, suggesting the qualification-laden young people produced by schools today are ill-equipped for business.

FSB Kent policy leader Neville Gaunt said: “Businesses have to take young people out of university and make them work-ready because schools are not doing what they were 20 years ago.”

Professor Victor Newman, of the University of Greenwich, declared: “People with good qualifications are good at getting qualifications but not necessarily people who can be used in business.”

When the panel put the debate to the floor, Mrs Coslett could not hold back.

“Careers guidance is woeful in schools, I understand that,” she said. “However, schools are doing a lot of good work.

“We need to bust misconceptions about what businesses think happens in school and what schools think happens in business. We are not experts on each other.”

The consensus in the room was that each side did not know much about the other but both felt unhappy.

Dartford council leader Jeremy Kite said: “There is a gap between what the state believe business needs and what businesses know they need.

“Also there is not enough equality of status between vocational and academic activities. At the moment, everything is built on academic achivement first, with vocational tuition bolted on.”

South East Local Enterprise Partnership (SELEP), a non-governmental body charged with improving growth in the region, has been given £82.5 million from the government to spend on getting people into work.

However, its goals to “improve the talent pool for priority sectors” and “increase the participation of young people in work” were given a lukewarm reception at the Ebbsfleet conference on Friday, June 19.

Paul Andrews, chief executive of Jobs in Kent, said: “Another £80 million spent by SELEP reinventing the wheel is not money well spent. We need to spend that money with schools and tell them to meet entrepreneurs.

“The world is changing drastically and we are trying to fix everything top down. It’s got to be bottom up.

“Back in the day, people left school for a career. That was a 20th-century phenomenon.

“Today people go into business and their job changes within a few years.”

One body taking the bottom-up approach is Medway University Technical College (UTC), which will have 200 young people starting vocational courses when it opens in September.

The college has partnered with BAE, Delphi, BAM Construct, Bouygues UK and the Royal School of Military Engineering in a bid to produce the type of young person they need.

Dr Karon Buck said: “No one has mentioned how education is changing to help young people.

“We recognise the needs of employers. Ask any employer to come and speak to me and we will have them in and welcome them with open arms.”

Businesses looking for vocationally-trained pupils may not be able to access the best talent because schools are clinging on to top pupils, according to school-leaver Ben Towers, who runs his own business.

Mr Towers, 16, a former pupil at Rainham Mark Grammar School, runs Towers Design, a website-building company he launched from his bedroom aged 11.

He said schools held back information about vocational education in a bid to keep the best students who will boost their grades.

He said: “Schools aren’t advertising Medway UTC because they don’t want people to go to it.

“My school told us not to go there and to go to university. They want us to get a big job up in London.

“The problems start when you join secondary school and the teaching is academic. Work experience and apprenticeships are not advertised as they are not what schools are judged by.”