Triumphs and Tears

Young People, Markets, and the Transition from School to Work

Phil Hodkinson, Heather Hodkinson, Andrew C. Sparkes

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134093335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1996. The transition from school to work has always been a crucial time in the lives of young people. How and when this transition is made can have a major impact upon the sense of identity they develop, the importance they feel they have in the eyes of others, the kind of person they want to be and their view of the world in general. This book is about the nature of that transition for one small group of young people, making the journey in the new policy environment of post-Thatcherite Britain.

1
Training Credits and the Transition to Work in Post-Thatcherite Britain

Structural Inequalities in the Transition to Work

There are consistent differences between the career paths of young people from different backgrounds in many societies. In Britain, possibly to a greater extent than elsewhere in the world, these differences are partly class related. 20 years ago, Ashton and Field (1976) identified three broadly different types of work. These they called 'long-term career jobs', which were dominated by the middle classes; 'working-class career jobs' which included technical, clerical and skilled manual occupations; and 'low-skill' jobs including unskilled manual and shop work.

Since they wrote, there have been major changes to the British educational system, to the labour market and to the entry to work. Yet despite these changes, recent research — for example the ESRC 16–19 Initiative, the Employment Department Youth Cohort Study and the Scottish Young People's Surveys—still confirms the general validity of the Ashton and Field classification (Furlong, 1992; Roberts, 1993). In Britain in the late 1980s, there was a stratified youth labour market, so that Ashton and Field's three categories could be further sub-divided. For example, Roberts and Parsell (1992) identify three different types of Youth Training Scheme (YTS) experience, based predominantly on the chances of acquiring a job at the end of training. Contributors in Bates and Riseborough (1993) describe considerable differences between experiences, attitudes and background of young people across a range of post-16 education and training provision. These studies confirm deep-seated inequalities in the British labour market and that entry into the different career trajectories was largely dependent on levels of qualification gained at 16+. This, in turn, was strongly influenced by social class, which was itself a major independent factor in explaining career route. Gender still marked out strongly the type of occupational area likely to be entered (Griffin, 1985) and ethnic origin further restricted opportunities for some groups (Blackman, 1987; Cross and Wrench, 1991). Finally, Banks et al. (1992) show that geographical location was a significant factor, owing to variations in unemployment and job opportunities.

Such analyses often imply a determinist viewpoint that we claim underestimates the contested nature of social reproduction and the degree of choice that faces many individuals. For example, Furlong (1992) explores such career patterns but although he acknowledges the importance of what he calls the 'subjective realities' of young people in making career decisions, the nature of his work makes it difficult for these to be examined. Consequently, his and other similar large-scale survey studies, though they provide rich and valuable descriptive data, do relatively little to help us understand how and why such patterns persist. Contributors in Bates and Riseborough (1993) provide snapshot insights into the widely differing experiences of different groups of young people, and show how, once on a chosen route, they are socialised into a narrow, focused set of goals and ambitions, for some groups significantly different from those with which courses were begun (Bates, 1990, 1993). They do not, however, explore the processes by which the original choices were made.

Some studies in other national contexts lay more emphasis on the processes through which such different pathways are stratified. Gaskell (1992) explores the ways in which gender influences career progression in Canada. Okano (1993) shows how, in Japan, young people's location in a hierarchical career structure is influenced by their cultural resources, influenced by a stratified pattern of schooling. Frykholm and Nitzler (1993) describe a situation in Sweden that is reminiscent of what Bates and Riseborough (1993) describe in Britain, but focus on the process whereby educational pathways are reinforced. Drawing from such overseas studies and a process-oriented analysis in Britain by Brown (1987), we present an analysis of the social processes by which such patterns of inequality, and the degree of individual variation within such patterns, are produced out of the life courses and decision making of young people and others. Whereas the prime focal point in these studies is schooling, our analysis focuses directly on career decision making, the transition into work and experiences beyond full-time education.

There is a sharp contrast between the implicit determinism of much contemporary research on the transition to work in Britain and the bold assertions that British policy should be based on assumptions of individual free choice and markets derived, in turn, from an increasingly dominant belief in a new 'post-Fordist' world. It is the tensions and space between these perspectives that this book explores.

Post-Fordism and the Low-Skills Equilibrium

There is a widespread belief that the nature of employment and industrial organisation are in the process of rapid and radical transformation. Piore and Sabel (1984) distinguished between traditional manufacturing, based on Fordist mass production techniques supporting a hierarchical bureaucracy, and the 'new way' of flexible specialisation. For other writers, such as Murray (1991), 'post-Fordism' is the term used, to describe changes which included flexible specialisation. Brown and Lauder (1992) present one of many accounts of the differences between Fordism and post-Fordism. The latter is seen as located in global markets rather than protected national markets, to be based on flexible production systems, with flatter and flexible organisational structures. The workforce has to be multi-skilled and flexible, with high trust and shared responsibility in teams. There are many accounts of such practices spreading into large 'leading edge' employers, often based on Japanese styles of management.

What drives all this is the need for continual change in order to remain competitive in widely fluctuating markets. Such endemic change can be either supply or demand led, either based on new technologies or responding to new markets. The present is future-directed, as firms continually rethink their place in the market and constantly search for higher quality, through approaches such as Total Quality Management.

Post-Fordism brings an accentuated division between core and periphery workers (Atkinson and Meager, 1991). Those in the core have relatively secure jobs but must constantly re-skill. They are likely to be (relatively) well paid. Peripheral workers lack job security. They are employed on temporary or part-time contracts or are sub-contractors to the main firm.

It is widely believed that future employment will be increasingly restricted to well-educated and trained workers. Both core and periphery workers need high levels of education to adapt continually to new and more demanding work opportunities. Those lacking such qualities will be increasingly unable to get employment, whilst firms will survive only if there is a pool of highly educated 'knowledge workers' (Reich, 1991) for them to draw on.

Whilst this post-Fordist model is global in its vision, it has had a particular impact in the British context. For example, in one influential article, Finegold and Soskice (1991) argue that Britain faces an industrial crisis. British industry is trapped in a low skills equilibrium of low pay, low levels of education and training, short term financial costings and poor quality output. They argue that this low skills equilibrium is potentially disastrous, and Finegold (1991) goes on to claim that major policy shifts are necessary to break into the alternative high skills equilibrium. Some, but only some, of those shifts must be to VET policy.

Such post-Fordist beliefs are widely accepted as the contextual imperative for new VET policy in Britain, by policy makers and pressure groups as different as the Conservative Government, the Labour opposition, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC). This view is sometimes over-simplified into the two virtuous circles that many believe should be the focus of VET policy. Firstly, high skills leads to high productivity which leads to high wages. Secondly, high investment in training leads to high standards which leads to high aspirations (Ball, 1991). This is a far cry from the complexity of the original Finegold and Soskice analysis. Similarly, many enthusiasts for the post-Fordist future oversimplify the nature and extent of the changes, overlooking Harvey's (1989:338) warning that neither Fordism nor post-Fordism are homogeneous, and that 'the oppositions [between them] ... are never so clear cut, and the "structure of feeling" in any society is always a synthetic movement between the two'. There are ongoing debates about the nature and extent of post-Fordism and its implications for education and training (for example, contrast Brown and Lauder, 1992 and Young, 1993 with Jones and Hatcher, 1994 and Avis et al., 1996). Maguire (1995) argues that a significant and continuing proportion of youth employment will be into relatively low skill jobs, and that many firms will carry on operating in ways far removed from post-Fordism. The stories told in this book support his position, and challenge the extent to which post-Fordist approaches have influenced many small employers and at least some medium-sized firms in Britain. Marsh (1988), Roberts (1991) and Petersen and Mortimer (1994) remind us of the now all-pervading mass unemployment, which could be seen as creating a further category of non-worker, beyond the periphery. Our main concern is not with the reality or otherwise of such employment changes, but with the effect of a belief in post-Fordism on evolving VET policy and practice.

Recent Changes in Vet Policy in Britain

Ever since the mid-1970s, VET has had a high political profile in Britain. There has been almost universal agreement that not only was British VET largely inadequate, but also that its dramatic improvement was a necessary condition for the country's future economic prosperity. The first major policy of the Conservative government on this issue was the New Training Initiative (NTI) in 1981 (ED/DES, 1981). This set the ambitious agenda of improving the competitiveness of British industry through improvements to VET. The NTI was integral to the rapid rise of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC). The history of the policy period, and the ways in which the broad objectives of the NTI were gradually undermined by the more pressing political need to reduce rapidly rising youth unemployment, has been well documented elsewhere (Ainley and Corney, 1990; Evans, 1992; Skilbeck et al., 1994). In essence, the activity and budget of the MSC became dominated by the provision of the YTS, a training programme for 16+ school leavers.

Evans (1992) suggests that the decade of MSC and YTS was an anomalous centralist, interventionist period in British VET policy. Lee et al. (1990) disagree, suggesting that YTS always retained strong voluntarist principles. Both agree that the post-MSC and YTS period marked a dramatic increase in voluntarism as, towards the end of the 1980s, the Thatcher government introduced major changes to British VET policy that were more consistent with their individualist market principles. These included the end of the MSC, transmogrified and emasculated, eventually, into the Training, Enterprise and Employment Directorate (TEED) of the Employment Department [2], Day-to-day provision of VET was devolved to 82 TECs in England and Wales and to 22 Local Enterprise Companies in Scotland. Evans (1992) discusses the policy imperatives behind their creation and Bennett et al. (1994) analyse their successes and failures in action. The latter demonstrate tensions between the principle of devolved responsibility and decision-making, upon which the TECs were supposedly founded, and the pressures from the Civil Service culture and the needs of Treasury accountability which led to increasingly stultifying economic control by TEED.

One unsolved problem of the 1980s had been the means of ensuring that training provided on YTS was of high quality. For Lee et al. (1992) strong central regulation was required, which would curtail the freedom of employers to train as they liked. Such approaches were opposed by the employers themselves and were anathema to a government bent on reducing red tape and public expenditure. Within this post-MSC policy climate, one of the leading British employers' organisations, the CBI, came up with a seductively simple solution. Training quality was to be ensured through a customer driven training market (CBI, 1989, 1993). This thinking proved highly influential on government policy.

The New Vet Policy Paradigm: Individualism and the Training Market

The recent changes in VET policy and the ideological climate within which they have been introduced have resulted in a new paradigm for VET in Britain, based on individualism, choice and market forces (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1995b). By paradigm, we mean a belief system about VET that is widely subscribed to and which, in the way Kuhn (1970) described for science, limits the understanding of those who accept it, so that questionable and problematic issues become self-evident truths, whilst other possible viewpoints are obscured. For the CBI, the central, organising idea of this paradigm was 'careership', but they do not use the term in the same way we do.

Careership gives pride of place to the individual and his or her responsibility for self-development in a market environment. It bridges the long-standing academic-vocational divide through four key elements:

– Relevant qualifications and the transferable core skills needed by employers and employees alike....

– An individual focus through personal profiles incorporating records of achievement and individual action clans, in education and training.

– High class professional and independent careers advice and guidance.

– Incentives for all young people through financial credits, to empower and motivate them and arm them with real influence and buying power in a new education and training market.

(CBI, 1993: 13)

The assumption was that if each young person took responsibility for their own education and training and were given a voucher, or Training Credit, to buy education or training of their own choice, their individual purchases would drive a market in training provision. This would ensure the most efficient use of training resources and force training providers to raise the quality of their courses to attract customers for their services. Because young people who are making choices about education or training are surrounded by others with vested interests, such as teachers who may want them to stay on to make sixth form courses viable, neutral careers guidance was seen as essential. To help young people take responsibility and choose, individual action planning procedures were to be used. These would form a lifelong record, showing past achievements and identifying future goals.

These CBI proposals were not adopted in totality. Early effects were mainly upon Youth Training (YT), the successor to YTS. A pilot scheme for Training Credits [3] was introduced in 11 areas from 1991, with a further 9 areas in a second pilot phase from 1993. In 1991 the decision was made that Training Credits should cover the whole of England, Scotland and Wales by 1996, eventually brought forward to 1995. In expanding the original pilot into national training policy, the Employment Department made explicit the the intention to change the locus of control of training from providers to individuals and employers:

In particular, public funding is routed through the individual young person rather than through a training provider. This aims:

– to increase young people's motivation to train, by giving them choice and control, and making obvious to them the scale of investment available to support their training;

– to enhance the market in training provision. Providers will be paid according to their ability to attract trainees holding credits;

– to enhance employer involvement. Where a young person with a credit is in a job, the employer can agree to organise the training.

(ED/DES, 1991:35)

A recent White Paper (1994) on VET and industrial performance took this individualist agenda further: 'A fulfilled workforce meeting individual targets, driven by the will to perform to their individual best, will be a world class workforce' (p. 30). It went on to commit the Government to 'better careers education and guidance to help young people choose the best paths to their future' and 'greater responsiveness by providers to the needs of their customers — learners and employers—including closer examination of the learning credits approach to education and training' (p. 49). Learning credits were described as an extension of the Training Credit idea, to cover all education and training provision post-16. These policy imperatives are sustained a year later (White Paper, 1995), although the government still held back from a firm commitment to a voucher based approach for the whole of post-16 education and training.

Changes to VET funding also emphasise the individualist, market-forces approach. Funding for post-16 education or training in Britain is increasingly based on two principles. The first is that funding follows recruitment, so that the amo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue The Purpose and Structure of the Book
• 1 Training Credits and the Transition to Work in Post-Thatcherite Britain
• 2 Stakeholders and Training Credits
• 3 Anticipations and Forced Change: Helen's Story
• 4 Victim, Fool or Rebel?: Laura's Story
• 5 Choice, Empowerment and Unsatisfactory Training:Elaine and Alison
• 6 NVQs and On- and Off-the-Job Training: Clive and Becky
• 7 General Satisfaction and Untroubled Progress: David, Peter, Sam and Frances
• 8 Markets, Vouchers and Training Policy
• 9 Career Decision Making and Careership in the Transition from School to Work
• Epilogue The Problem with Endings
• Appendix Glossary of acronyms
• Notes
• References
• Index