Royal Mail has 6,500 postal workers off sick every day, out of a total of about 130,000 employees, its chief executive has warned.

Martin Seidenberg, the chief executive of International Distribution Services (IDS), the Royal Mail owner, told The Times CEO Summit that the business wanted to be at the “vanguard” of efforts to tackle the nation’s economic inactivity problems. The absences at the Royal Mail cost the organisation £200 million a year, he said.

“It has a cost to us, and of course an impact to you, to society, because of the quality that we can deliver or not deliver,” Seidenberg said, adding that was “super important for us to fix”.

In response to its issues with sickness absence, IDS has given all of its 130,000 staff 24-hour access to an online GP.

“We’ve been very surprised how heavily this is being used,” Seidenberg said. “We like it, because quite frankly, we believe that the sooner we can take care of our people and they have access to medical support, the sooner they’re likely to return to the job.”

Seidenberg also warned that the UK’s education system was failing to equip children with the technology skills needed when they move into work.

He spoke alongside Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former chairman of John Lewis who led the government’s Keep Britain Working review. Mayfield said it was no surprise that school leavers were generally unprepared for employment because “we’ve created a system where education and employment have never been more separate”.

In addition to what is being taught in the classroom, Mayfield pointed to work experience as an example of how the UK was failing to ready young people for their careers. “People basically don’t do work experience anymore [because] we’ve made it so difficult for people to do it,” he said. He gave an example of a plumber who might be open to having a young person still at school shadow him for a few hours, but cannot because he does not have employers’ liability insurance. “It’s madness and yet it is also fixable. We need to sort out the whole pathways into work.”

One of the traditional ways from school to work is apprenticeships – paid jobs that allow young people to work and gain hands-on experience, while also studying for a formal qualification.

“The easiest and most valuable person to recruit is the one you’ve already got in the business,” Mayfield said. “There are very few opportunities to drive growth that actually benefit employers, benefit individuals, save on welfare, don’t cost a tonne of money and don’t have to take a long time, and these are all right in front of us.”

Also speaking at the summit was Jennie Daly, the chief executive of housebuilder Taylor Wimpey. She told delegates that many employers in the construction industry had scaled back their apprenticeship programmes in response to higher employment costs.

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