Young people's changing routes to independence

Key takeaways

content: "@bynnerYoungPeopleChanging2002" -file:@bynnerYoungPeopleChanging2002

Reading notes

Imported on 2024-05-07 21:32

⭐ Important

• & Compared with their counterparts in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, a much higher proportion pursues their education for a longer period, frequently now to degree level. Unemployment among young people appears to have been declining, assisted by a sustained period of economic growth through the mid- and late 1990s. In other areas of their lives, young people now behave differently. Marriage has become less popular as young men and women choose to live alone or with other single friends. The average age of women at the time of their first birth continues to rise as family formation plans are postponed or scaled back while women opt instead to pursue employment. (p. xii)
• & In achieving adult status, most young people have to make transitions in two domains of their lives. The first involves the move from education to the labour market, in which continuing beneficial fulltime employment is, for most, the ultimate goal. The second is in relation to family life, where young people have to achieve one major transition and possibly a further one: moving from the status of dependent child in the family of origin to establishing independence; including leaving the parental home and frequently becoming a parent themselves. (p. 1)
• & Up to 25 years ago, such status transitions were relatively straightforward for the majority of young people. Transition to the labour market, for those not continuing to higher education (HE), comprised leaving school and getting a job, which on the most valued route from school to work would involve apprenticeship, at least for boys. Transition to independent living comprised getting engaged, getting married and setting up a home of one’s own. As recentl (p. 1)
• & s the mid-1970s these two types of transition pattern were the experience of the majority of young people (Ferri, 1993), although cracks in the traditional framework for transition were beginning to show. By the end of the 1970s entry to jobs directly from school was becoming more difficult as large areas of British industry changed or collapsed under the pressure of technological change. The Youth Opportunities Scheme (YOPS) was the first of a series of initiatives brought in by the government at the time in an attempt to make up for the lack of employment opportunities for young people. In the early 1980s, a major world-wide recession compounded the problem and brought large-scale unemployment in its wak (p. 1)
• & For those attempting to leave school in the 1980s, employment was becoming an increasingly difficult option for minimum-age school leavers, at least in the old industrial heartlands (Banks et al., 1992). In place of it was the government’s national Youth Training Scheme (YTS, later abbreviated to YT), in which all young leavers were expected to engage after leaving school. The scheme began as one year’s training, subsequently (from 1986) extended to two, and was intended to replace all other forms of pre-vocational training. Even the previously prestigious apprenticeship, which was part of an employment contract and paid a wage rather than a training allowance, was absorbed into it. But the lack of jobs, and the difficulty of getting continuing employment, meant for many an extended period of training schemes and shortterm jobs before finding a niche in the labour market: a ‘navigation’ into adult employment, as Evans and Furlong (1997) described it. (p. 1)
• & Available evidence on the causes and consequences of these changing pathways to employment and adult life is often fragmentary and partial. Comparisons between the pathways exhibited by young people 20 years ago and nowadays are notoriously difficult to interpret because of the entwined effects of external changes on them (for example changes in economic conditions and social and cultural norms) and the impacts of intergenerational influences. (p. 2)
• & Combining the effects of rising educational participation with the declining cohort size, the number of young people (16–24-year-olds) working or available for work on a full-time basis is estimated to have dropped from approximately 6.5 million in 1984 to less than 4.0 million by 1998, a fall of more than one-third.1 In the immediate future, further declines will be driven both by continued demographic trends and by a likely continuation of increases in the participation of young people in full-time education. (p. 4)
• & Driven by the structural shifts in the industrial structure of the economy and the rapid technological advancements, the British labour market has been characterised in recent years by an acceleration of the trend away from traditional craft and operative occupations and towards managerial, technical, administrative and service jobs (Wilson, 2000). Clerical occupations, once the mainstay of employment for young women, have also commenced a downward trend, assumed to be associated with the productivity gains of information technology and office automation. While these trends have been well documented across the national labour market and for all age groups, few studies have focused particularly upon the situation of young people as they enter the labour market. (p. 5)
• & This transition may comprise direct entry into employment or the intermediate status of training: the government’s YTS for the 1970 cohort or apprenticeship for the 1958 cohort. (p. 13)
• & It should be noted that apprenticeship and youth training are only very weakly equivalent. Apprenticeship, which took up to five years to complete, was a high-prestige route to skilled work with employee status attached, whereas YTS was a ‘catch all’ form of vocational preparation for school leavers, who had not moved directly into jobs. (p. 13)
• & Apprenticeship at age 17 led to full-time employment by age 26 for 92 per cent of the men in the 1958 cohort, and training led to this status for 87 per cent of the men in the 1970 cohort. For women the comparable figures were lower: 46 per cent, 1958 cohort, and 59 per cent, 1970 cohort (Figure 12a) (p. 15)
• & or those in full-time education at age 17 the full-time employment outcome at age 26 was the same between cohorts for men but significantly more likely for the 1970 cohort women: 68 per cent, 1958 cohort, and 77 per cent, 1970 cohort (Figure 12b). (p. 15)
• & Those men who had gained entry to full-time employment at age 17 in the 1958 cohort were likely to be in the same status at 26: 92 per cent, 1958 cohort, and 86 per cent, 1970 cohort. For women the comparable percentages were much the same as for the outcome of training: 47 per cent, 1958 cohort, and 57 per cent, 1970 cohort (Figure 12c). (p. 16)
• & These figures point to some elements of stability between cohorts and some evidence of a shift. Most notably those men who gained employment after leaving school tended to be employed later in both cohorts. In other words, despite all the government claims at the time that youth training would replace youth jobs on German lines (Bynner and Roberts, 1992), the best form of vocational preparation continued to be work itself. (p. 17)
• & By age 26 the male statuses were similar, i.e. most of the young men were in full-time employment, but earlier a much bigger divergence was apparent in the transition histories leading to them, pointing to the greater risk surrounding those of the 1970 cohort. (p. 17)