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eighteen - Youth employment, racialised gendering and school–work transitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2022

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Summary

Since the 1980s, government policy has aimed to increase the participation of young people in education and training, in parallel with the withdrawal of welfare support to those not in education and training or employment. This trend has continued under New Labour. Education, training and integration of young people into the world of work have been central to policies addressing social exclusion and social cohesion with high-profile programmes, such as the New Deal, helping young people combine paid work with education and training (DfEE, 2001). The expansion of places in further and higher education and encouragement to stay on into the sixth form means that less than 10% of young people now enter the labour market full-time at 16. More than 30% of all 18 year olds now participate in higher education and the aim is to increase this to 50%. These policy transformations are bound up with major changes in the structure of the UK youth labour market, which has become increasingly part-time, casualised and driven in most localities by the growth of urban service economies (Roberts, 1995; McDowell, 2002). Not surprisingly, with social exclusion high on the agenda, policy research has tended to focus on disadvantaged and socially excluded youth in depressed urban economies (Armstrong, 1997; Williamson, 1997, 1998; Johnston et al, 2000). A focus on gender, ethnicity and discrimination and on inadequate demand for labour have been central to analyses of the multifaceted problems that groups of excluded youth face in such depressed labour markets (Britton et al, 2002).

Less attention has been paid to understanding the school and labour market experiences of more ‘included’ or ‘ordinary’ youth from different ethnic and class backgrounds in localities that are seen to be ‘on the up’. How does the policy environment work for these young people? In such buoyant labour markets, do problems of racial and gender inequality in employment become insignificant? Do such labour markets offer all young people a realistic chance of secure and adequately paid employment?

This chapter explores the school–work transitions of young men and women, aged 16-25, from different ethnic and class backgrounds in the two prosperous towns of Reading and Slough at the end of the 1990s.

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City Matters
Competitiveness, Cohesion and Urban Governance
, pp. 323 - 346
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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