Young People's Perspectives on Education, Training and Employment

Realising Their Potential

Lorna Unwin, Jerry Wellington

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135374853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on interviews with over 150 young people in education and training, this volume reflects on their perspectives on the issues and challenges that education and training have to offer.

1

Young people and post-16 education and training policy

Introduction

Each generation of young people faces, in some ways, a different future from their predecessors. Young people today, in the developed world at least, are bombarded with prophetic claims about the end of manual labour and the rise of the knowledge economy, the need for everyone to be lifelong learners, the domination of technology, the globalization of capital, and even the end of work. Ashton and Green (1996, p 70) point out that ‘The remarkable thing about these claims is that they are typically presented with relatively little theoretical grounding and even less of a basis in solid empirical evidence.’ Such problems do not appear, however, to concern policymakers who chant the litany of change in a mantra-like fashion at every opportunity. Thus, in its 1999 White Paper proposing changes to the structure and funding of post-16 education and training, the UK’s Labour government declared:

The challenge we face to equip individuals, employers and the country to meet the demands of the 21st century is immense and immediate. In the information and knowledge-based economy, investment in human capital – in the intellect and creativity of people – is replacing past patterns of investment in plant, machinery and physical labour. To continue to compete, we must equip ourselves for this new world with new and better skills. We must improve levels of knowledge and understanding and develop the adaptability to respond to change.

(DfEE, 1999a, p 12)

Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a foreword to a report on social exclusion, spelt out the message for young people: ‘A few decades ago only a minority stayed in education until 18 or 21. But as we move into an economy based more on knowledge, there will be ever fewer unskilled jobs. For this generation, and for young people in the future, staying at school or in training until 18 is no longer a luxury. It is becoming a necessity.’ (SEU, 1999, p 8).

In addition to hammering out the mantra of a changing world, both the above statements bind together the individual and the nation state in accepting a shared responsibility to meet the challenge ahead. This follows in the footsteps of policy documents since the early 1980s, which have linked together young people’s so-called lack of employability skills and the nation’s poor economic performance. For example, in his critique of the 1986 White Paper, Working Together – Education and Training, which said that young people lacked sufficient motivation and awareness of the realities of working life and so were unattractive to employers, Stronach (1989; p 12) noted that:

...the White Paper is typical in that it offers an intense personification of the problem, both at individual and national level. The direct mediation of the problem between individual attributes and national destinies sets up a simple logic locating responsibility in the attributes of an aggregate of individuals – a highly voluntarist and individualistic theory of development, in which groups are no more than the aggregate of individuals.

Fourteen years on, young people are still being told that they need to improve their employability skills (despite the fact that many UK teenagers are well acquainted with the world of work a long time before they leave school – see Chapter 2) in order to help UK pic become more profitable. Such exhortation is never tempered, however, with information that young people might find useful and interesting. For example, the policy documents do not inform young people about the fragility of the youth labour market, which is particularly vulnerable to the cyclical problems of economic recession and expansion, and to occupational restructuring (see Ashton, Maguire and Spillsbury, 1989, and Roberts, 1995). Nor do they speak about the stubborn inequalities in a youth labour market that is still, in many sectors, stratified along class, gender and race faultlines.

In this chapter, we explore the education, training and employment options open to young people in one part of the UK, England, and the real challenges they face as they attempt to make the transition to adulthood. This chapter is intended, therefore, to paint a picture of the landscape inhabited by the young people whose voices we hear throughout the rest of the book.

One of the problems that educational researchers face in England is knowing when to draw the line with regard to being ‘up to date’. As we write this book, the education and training landscape is changing, just as it has been doing year by year for the past two decades. By the time this book is published, 14 year olds will be once again able to choose vocational as well as academic subjects to study in school. Some pupils, as young as 12, will be spending part of the week outside school in work experience or community-based projects in an attempt to prevent them from becoming ‘disaffected’. The names of a range of courses and programmes will be changed in order to give them more status; for example, general national vocational qualifications (GNVQs) will become vocational A-levels and the modern apprenticeship will be split into a foundation and an advanced programme. These changes could be said to indicate a growing awareness from government that the country needs to reform its education and training provision for young people. On the other hand, it could be a further reflection of government failure to tackle deep-seated problems that any amount of re-branding of courses and special measures will do little to solve.

As Hodgson and Spours (1999) point out, the New Labour government, elected in 1997, inherited an education and training system that excluded large sections of young people and in which participation rates beyond the age of 16 had ceased to expand. Three years on, many initiatives have been introduced to tackle social exclusion, to raise standards in schools, to expand further and higher education, and to help unemployed people gain access to education and training. The emphasis throughout has been on full-time education.

The post-16 landscape

Each summer, schools, colleges, training providers and employers compete to capture the 16 and 17 year olds on offer. The origins of this annual market have been well documented (see, inter alia, Ball et al, 1999; Unwin, 1999; Felstead and Unwin, 1999; Huddleston and Unwin, 1997; Ainley and Bailey, 1997; Gleeson et al, 1996). Brown (1997, p 745) has shown how, at school level, marketization has meant a surge away from the ‘ideology of meritocracy’ to the ‘ideology of parentocracy’ in which educational selection is based on ‘the wealth and wishes of parents rather than the individual abilities and efforts of pupils’. For young people, the knowledge that they will have to enter this market place probably has a serious impact from the age of 14 onwards. Between 14 and 16, young people will engage in a period of work experience (for one or two weeks) with a local employer, and will receive advice and guidance about their post-16 options from a representative of the Careers Service. They will also receive advice from their teachers, parents and friends.

Unwin (1999, p 16) has described the English post-16 landscape as ‘jungle-like’ and Evans et al (1997, p 5) bemoaned the fact that ‘despite numerous attempts at reform over the past 15 years, provision for young people remains fragmented and incoherent, with a number of competing pathways of varying status and value’. The young people whose voices we hear in this book describe, in Chapter 3, how they chose to follow one of the pathways and confirm the view of Evans et al (1997) that school leavers find they are faced with anything but a level playing field.

Successive governments since 1991, when the White Paper, Education and Training for the 21st Century (DES/DOE, 1991) laid out a triple-track qualifications system based on A-levels, GNVQs and NVQs, have tried to place young people within one of three pathways: academic; general vocational; and work based. The 1996 Dearing Review of 16–19 Qualifications recommended that these pathways be maintained, albeit within one national framework, and, furthermore, that their ‘distinguishing characteristics’ be accentuated. (Dearing, 1996, p 15). Campaigners for a more unified approach to educational provision for 16–19 year olds were disappointed with Dearing and clutched at the straw of the national framework in the hope that the report had not closed the door completely on a merging of the pathways (see Hodgson and Spours, 1997, for a detailed critique of the unification debate). To some extent their optimism has been rewarded as, from September 2000, structural changes to A-levels and GNVQs mark, according to Hodgson and Spours (1999, p 111) ‘a small first step in the direction of the more flexible, coherent and inclusive 14–19 qualifications system’ that New Labour had outlined in its pre-election report, Aiming Higher. It should be remembered, however, that the Labour government has confirmed its commitment to academic A-levels as the ‘gold standard’. The education minister, Baroness Blackstone, when announcing the Curriculum 2000 changes, said, ‘In encouraging greater breadth of study, we are in no way compromising on depth. I have made clear from day one that A level standards must be maintained – and, where necessary, enhanced’ (DfEE, 1999b). Students in post-16 full-time education should, therefore, have more opportunity for building a broader portfolio of courses and qualifications.

Full-time education is, however, only one of five pathways down which young people might walk after the age of 16:

1. Continue in full-time education in school, sixth form college or further education college to study for academic and/or vocational qualifications.
2. Seek employment (full-time or part-time).
3. Enter a government-supported training programme.
4. Enter part-time education or part-time work, or combine the two.
5. Become a ‘non-participant’ in the education, training and employment system.

In Chapter 3, we discuss the way in which young people react to this landscape. We are particularly concerned in this book with the positioning of pathway one (full-time education) in relation to pathways two and three (employment; and government-supported training).

Part of the complexity of the UK’s post-16 landscape comes from the fact that each pathway splits into a number of tracks. In 1999, 70.7 per cent of 16 year olds followed the first pathway (full-time education), of whom 28.5 per cent did so in state schools, 6.2 per cent in independent schools, and 36.1 per cent in further education colleges (DfEE, 2000a). The majority of these students (36.9 per cent) were taking academic A-levels, whereas the rest studied for general national vocational qualifications (GNVQs) (15.8 per cent), and national vocational qualifications (NVQs) and other equivalent vocational qualifications (14.6 per cent). A tiny proportion (2.9 per cent) were studying for or re-sitting general certificate of secondary education (GGSE) courses, which are normally completed before the end of compulsory schooling. As we saw from Baroness Blackstone’s comments above, A-levels still top the hierarchical structure in post-16 full-time education.

The 8.2 per cent of 16 year olds who entered government-supported training are split into three programmes: modern apprenticeship; national traineeship; and what the government currently terms ‘other training’, which embraces work experience and/or workshop based provision for young people who cannot find places with employers, and the remains of the youth training (YT) scheme. Just as with the academic pathways above, there is a clear hierarchy here led by the modern apprenticeship.

Even the pathway that takes young people straight from school into employment splits into two. In 1999, 3.1 per cent of 16 year olds went into jobs with training funded by their employer (as opposed to the government-supported pathway described above) and some 8 per cent went into jobs where no formal training was recorded. Many young people are, of course, working part-time before they reach school leaving age. Figures for 1999 estimate that 50 per cent of 16 year olds in full-time education were in employment. A rather obscure pathway (4.8 per cent in 1999) covers young people attending private colleges and training centres (for example, specialists in secretarial or language courses), and those attending any sort of college (independent or public sector) to study part-time, some of whom may be employed.

The final pathway covers young people who are not engaged in any form of education or formal training, and who are officially deemed to be economically inactive. This is a difficult category from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Pearce and Hillman (1998) remind us that estimating the true numbers in this category is highly problematic as the relevant agencies (DfEE, Careers Service, Labour Force Survey, Youth Cohort Study) collect their data in different ways. The generally accepted figure for non-participation is estimated to be around 9 per cent for 16 year olds in England (SEU, 1999). Regionally, however, the figure can be much higher, for example in parts of north-west and north-east England. In their ground-breaking study of the group that they called ‘status zero’ in South Wales, Instance et al (1994) found that between 16 and 23 per cent of 16 and 17 year olds could be found to be disengaged from education, training and employment. Increasing numbers of young people experience non-participation well beyond school leaving age through being permanently or temporarily excluded from school (see Smith, 1998).

The statistics are important in exposing the spatial differences behind a national snapshot but they tell us little about the nature of the ‘non-participation’. Some of these young people could, of course, be economically active in the informal labour market working, for example, on building sites and with family businesses where their presence is not officially recorded. Some may be prevented from engaging in the activity of their choice or excluded in other ways through a physical or mental disability. Some may be suffering ill health, some may have been made homeless, and, given the significant number of teenage pregnancies in England, there will be young women whose participation is halted by caring for children. There will also be some young people who have purposefully chosen to disengage from the system.

The route to non-participation lies in social class, ethnic background, gender, educational attainment, and geographical location. Drawing on data from the Youth Cohort Study, Pearce and Hillman (1998) argue that the best predictor of participation in education and/or employment is attainment of high grades at GCSE. Children from the higher socio-economic groups are more likely to be in full-time education than those with parents in manual jobs and young people with learning difficulties and/or physical disabilities are over-represented in the non-participation group. Ethnicity has an impact in that there is high unemployment among Afro-Caribbean youths, although black and Asian young people are more likely than their white peers to stay in full-time education. The impact of gender is complex. More young women stay in full-time education at 16 (74.5 per cent in 1999, compared to 67.2 per cent of males), but slightly more of them make up the non-participation group where over half of the women are engaged as parents or caring for a relative (SEU, 1999). Deprived areas of the country account for much higher levels of non-participation. In some parts of England, more than 50 per cent of 16 year olds achieve five or more higher grade GCSE passes, whereas in others less than 30 per cent do so.

In 1999, the government’s Social Exclusion Unit published a report to address non-participation and in which it acknowledged that ^c16 is a critical point when, for some, problems that have been brewing for years reach a crisis, and for others, problems begin that could have been avoided’ (SEU, 1999, p 8). The report’s solutions were to:

• introduce the concept of ‘graduation’ on the lines of the American high school tradition;
• improve the coherence of post-16 provision by offering three pathways -full-time general education in school or college, vocational education (in college or the workplace) and part-time education for those in jobs without training;
• introduce financial support to encourage young people from low-income families to stay in full-time education after 16;
• establish a new advice and guidance support service (Connexions) which brings together all the agencies that work with young people.

We will return to these strategies in the concluding chapter and examine the extent to which they would bring about the changes demanded by the young people we interviewed for our research.

A further important factor that needs to be remembered ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• 1. Young people and post-16 education and training policy
• 2. Listening to and talking with young people
• 3. Young people discuss the academic/vocational divide
• 4. Learning on a work-based route
• 5. Making sense of key skills
• 6. Mentors and mentoring, supervisors and supervision, assessors and assessment in the workplace
• 7. Building on young people’s perspectives
• Appendix
• References
• Index