During a period in history in which young people's lives are apparently increasingly tenuous, the balance to be drawn between the training needs of the economy and those of young people themselves is particularly delicate. By evaluating three performing arts training programmes based in Mannheim (Germany), Liverpool (UK) and Lisbon (Portugal), this chapter aims to outline the benefits to be had from what will be referred to as ‘secondary learning effects’. In what follows, it will be argued that mainstream youth training can benefit immensely by learning from alternative programmes that put young people's freedom and self-belief at their core. Above and beyond the ability to perform, the suggestion here is that these training programmes give young people the confidence to be themselves and hence to be the authors of their own training.

The European context

This research, which was funded by the Youth for Europe programme in the period 1997-2000, was concerned with the extent to which formal education and training prepare young people appropriately for the demands associated with entering the labour market1. In particular, the research group was interested in the extent to which training provides young people with the necessary raw materials with which they can develop their own personal biographies in an assured and self-confident fashion. Many commentators have pointed out that young people's transitions into adulthood are less secure and less easily defined than they may have been in the past, and in this context various commentators have described the ‘yo-yoing’ nature of contemporary youth transitions (see Chapter Two of this volume; EGRIS, 2001). The suggestion here is that young people's transitions have become destandardised and fragmented. In this sense, there is not a single transition, but a whole raft of transitions through which a young person has to navigate, notably in the context of family and intergenerational relationships, sexual and gender relations, education and training and the labour market, in local and regional, as well as in cultural, contexts. Perhaps the most important characteristic of youth transitions is that young people are obliged to develop appropriate and complementary coping strategies that are sophisticated enough to cope with the contradictory nature of their own experiences: