Jane Marsh

Missing School Educational Engagement, Youth Transitions, and Social Exclusion

Qualitative research with socially excluded young people in a prime underclass locale is the basis for this examination of experiences of schooling in the shaping of youth transitions. Young people’s accounts of school disaffection were depressingly familiar. Explanations for persistent truancy—for missing school—related, in part, to powerful, (sub)cultural critiques of orthodox claims about the instrumental relevance of education. Paradoxically, in retrospect the majority missed school, in the sense that they wished they were still there, and many came to hold more instrumental views about education. This research suggests, however, that qualifications appeared to play a minor role in the shaping of overall transitions. The authors conclude that we cannot understand these contradictory, shifting orientations to the value of schooling without understanding the changing structures of opportunity that prevail for young people in different places and their fit with localized, class-cultural tastes and aspirations.

Young People, Transitions and Social Change: Researching Disconnected Youth

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a favourable period for youth research in the UK, in terms of the amount of academic research funded by research councils and charities and the apparent willingness of government to support applied, youth research (Jones, 2002).1 This interest in youth studies can be explained, at least in part, by a long-standing, ideological representation of youth ‘as/in trouble’ (Hebdige, 1988). The twin discourses of ‘care’ and ‘control’ have shaped popular, political and academic representations of youth and informed the governance of this social category through successive waves of state intervention (Griffin, 1993). Since the emergence of youth as a recognised age category in the early industrial era, social commentators have constructed young people as a vulnerable group in need of special treatment and care in a hostile adult world and, simultaneously, as an uncivilised, threatening presence requiring discipline and control (Gillis, 1974). Geoff Pearson (1983), for instance, sees societal reactions to the perceived disorderliness of working-class young men in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a long-running ‘history of respectable fears’. For Stan Cohen (1980), popular reactions to the Mods and Rockers sub-cultures of the 1960s can be understood as media-fuelled moral panics about these new, young ‘folk devils’.

Disconnected Youth? Conclusions

What have we learned about youth transitions in some of Britain’s poorest neighbourhoods? How closely do the experiences described here connect with popular and influential theories of the excluded, underclass? The first half of this chapter considers these questions in the light of our findings. The second locates the answers we give in a more panoramic discussion of the socio-economic, historical and geographical contexts that help us comprehend more fully the biographical narratives that have formed the basis of this book. We conclude with a brief, critical foray into contemporary policy debates about the social exclusion of youth in poor neighbourhoods.

Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers and Social Exclusion

We now turn our attention away from young people’s differential engagement with school to consider their leisure lives and social networks and how these relate to wider process of inclusion and exclusion. As we described in chapter 2, more holistic youth research has striven to understand young people’s housing and family careers as well as their school-to-work experiences (Coles, 2000a). Relatively few studies simultaneously consider criminal and drug-using careers (see chapter 9), and fewer still incorporate an investigation of youth leisure as part of the task of charting and understanding transitions. Although young people’s leisure lives were not imagined by us to be significant in this respect, they certainly became so in the course of fieldwork and analysis. In this chapter, we discuss young people’s accounts of their changing free-time associations, peer networks and leisure activities and their significance in explaining their current life situations. We use the concept of ‘leisure career’, which has had some airing in the leisure studies literature (Rapoport and Rapoport, 1975) but which has been discussed rarely in youth research (Roberts et al., 1990; Roberts, 1999).

Missing School: Educational Engagement and Youth Transitions in Poor Neighbourhoods

We now turn more concertedly to our own study. This is the first of seven chapters that draw on our research to explore the experiences that one set of young people had of growing up in poor neighbourhoods. Here we examine the important role of schooling in the shaping of ‘inclusionary’ and ‘exclusionary’ transitions. Education has long been recognised as a key social institution that does much to reinforce social inequalities as well as providing opportunities for some for social mobility. One of the central dilemmas for the contemporary sociology of education remains ‘whether education is really concerned with cultural reproduction (maintenance of the cultural status quo and inculcation of “societal values”) or cultural interruption (changing the social order; providing the means to new identities and challenging the conventional outcomes of education)’ (Coffey, 2001: 72). And whilst this research is not a study in the sociology of education as conventionally understood, questions about young people’s schooling are crucial to our attempt to comprehend youth transitions in this context.

Getting Jobs: The Status of Work in Poor Neighbourhoods

Thus far we have described the cyclical, non-progressive and fluid school-to-work careers followed by young people in these poor neighbourhoods. We have hinted that we can make sense of these complicated twists and turns through post-sixteen college courses and government programmes only by reference to the significance of employment for this group. Whilst in sympathy with those that decry New Labour’s narrow fixation with regular employment as the route to becoming/being ‘socially included’ (e.g. Levitas, 1998), the imperative to work was highly resonant with these informants’ lived experiences and motives as they struggled to make headway in their post-school transitions. The value interviewees placed upon getting jobs — even where they fell short of what they hoped for — speeded their disengagement from further education, shaped their affective assessments of YT and NDYP and drove their day-to-day decision-making about the next steps to be taken. In this chapter, we attempt to understand interviewees’ relationship with employment, in terms of their subjective engagement with it and the structured opportunities that prevail for young people in this context.

Housing Careers and the Significance of Place

The movement from the parental home (or living in care1) to independent living is one of the key dimensions of the transition to adulthood (Jones and Wallace, 1992; Coles, 1995; Jones, 2002). ‘Independent living’ does not imply complete financial and emotional independence. As noted in chapter 7, for instance, many young parents continued to rely on support from their families and friends, and from the state through welfare benefits, after they had left home. As we will see, connections to family networks and to place emerged as particularly important in understanding the housing careers of these informants. Housing decisions and moves articulated with individuals’ varied and changing perceptions of their home locales and, before suggesting some conclusions, we review informant’s complicated, sometimes contradictory feelings about the poor neighbourhoods in which they had grown up.

Journeys to the Margins: Drug and Criminal Careers

The alleged anti-social behaviour and crime of young people is a common feature of arguments about the socially excluded underclass. Reflecting their general theoretical take on these debates, some commentators see youthful deviance as emblematic of the rise of a ‘demoralised’, dangerous class (Murray, 1990; 1994; Dennis, 1994) whilst others prefer to understand it as cultural adaptation to restricted socio-economic circumstances; a ‘delinquent solution’ to blocked opportunities (Wilson, 1996; Craine, 1997).

Becoming and Being a Young Parent: Family Careers in Poor Neighbourhoods

Processes of family formation hold a particularly important, contested place in debates about the underclass and policies on social exclusion (Murray, 1994, 2000; Social Exclusion Unit, 1998b; Duncan and Edwards, 1999). Whilst underclass perspectives point to the alleged cultural reproduction of troublesome, benefit-dependent families, government policy targeting of, for instance, teenage mothers emphasises the social inequalities said to accrue to them and, later, to their offspring (Hobcraft,1998; Hobcraft and Kiernan, 1999; Arai, 2003; ISER, 2004).

Social Exclusion and the Underclass: Debates and Issues

In this chapter and chapter 2 we set out some of the main theoretical and policy questions in which our book is interested. We begin by reviewing two key perspectives on the underclass as an introduction to a fuller critique of these ideas and a discussion of their relationship to more recent thinking about social exclusion.