Young people from working-class backgrounds are being let down at every stage of their lives, but mentoring – good support and guidance from an adult who doesn’t judge them – can be the key to turning things around for them, argues FRAN ABRAMS
Learning to fail
W
hen I was a sociology undergraduate back in the early 1980s, one of the texts I had to study was a book by Paul Willis
called Learning to Labour. It asked why, despite decades of free compulsory education and plentiful careers advice, so many young people went into occupations similar to their parents’ rather than striving for something better-qualified and better-paid. As I set out on a two-year investigation into the causes of educational failure and disengagement in the early twenty-first century, Willis’s work came to mind often. It was subtitled: ‘Why working class kids get working class jobs’, and that struck me as significant. Back in 1977, when that book was published, we still had the luxury of worrying about the types of jobs to which young working-class teenagers could aspire. Now, it seemed, the key question was why so many didn’t get jobs at all.
12 ADULTS LEARNING NOVEMBER 2009
The first decade of the current Labour Government had been characterised by a whole raft of education reforms aimed at driving up standards – a focus on early literacy and numeracy, standards funds to push up exam results, the much greater use of technology to track individual pupils’ progress and to ensure a growing number achieved the benchmark leaving standard of five good GCSEs. Yet despite all that, and despite 10 years of economic prosperity, the numbers who became ‘NEET,’ or not in education, employment or training, remained stubbornly high. In 2007, when I began my research under a fellowship from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the proportion of young people disengaged in the autumn after they reached the school leaving age was around 10 per cent, and had been for years. It struck me that the reasons for this had very little to do with standards in schools – indeed, research
from the London School of Economics had estimated that just one seventh of the causes of educational failure could be placed at the door of the secondary education system. The real causes of underachievement and disengagement, I felt, went much deeper. With this in mind, I chose three areas of the country in which to focus my research – Manchester, Barnsley and the East End of London. In each, I identified a group of young drop-outs or potential drop-outs. Then I visited them regularly to talk about their backgrounds, their aspirations and their attempts to find a place in the world. Through these conversations, and through others with local educators, employers and voluntary organisations, I hoped to build a clearer picture of the situation in which they found themselves.
It very quickly became clear that the world in which all these young people were growing up was radically different from the one their
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