Ministers have scaled back plans to teach teenagers essential life skills, despite warnings from employers that too many school leavers are poorly prepared for work.
Schools minister Jim Knight has halted moves to embed "personal, learning and thinking skills" within all GCSEs and A-levels.
The CBI has warned that many youngsters are not equipped for working life and has called on schools to teach teenagers vital social skills.
Ministers wanted the skills - including communication, personal presentation, creative thinking, teamwork and reliability - to be embedded across the school curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds.
But after receiving advice from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Mr Knight said he did not want to force these skills to sit "unnaturally" within GCSEs.
The original plan for teaching children these personal, learning and thinking skills first appeared in a Government White Paper published last year. It stressed that young people need "a range of learning and social skills".
The proposals came after years of complaints from employers that school leavers lack the soft skills required for work. Employers warned in a more recent CBI report that many new recruits turned up looking scruffy, "grunting" and ill-prepared for working life.
A spokesman for the CBI said: "As globalisation takes hold, it is increasingly vital to the economy that young people are equipped with the learning and thinking skills needed by rapidly changing workplaces. Yet too many currently leave school without them.
"If it is not possible in practice to test these abilities in every single subject then the schools system must, at minimum, ensure students' education as a whole provides much more opportunity to develop these essential life skills."
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