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UNEQUAL BRITAIN


parents had experienced, even though, in most cases, their families had not moved far geographically. One family I met in Barnsley seemed to exemplify a pattern. Claire, 16 and living with her father and grandparents, was unsure what she wanted from life and was about to leave school with no good GCSEs and no clear route forward. Her Dad, Mark, had left school in the 1980s expecting to walk into manual work, but had been hit by unemployment and then, after years on government schemes and programmes, had had an accident which had led to a lifetime on benefits. Her grandparents, Vic and Pat, had both left school at 15 without qualifications but both got well-paid jobs – Pat in a woollen mill, Vic in a glassworks – which enabled them to buy a house and raise a family.


At a first glance, it seemed the labour


market change, which had swept away Barnsley’s pits and glassworks, London’s


docks and Manchester’s factories and mills, had had a disproportionate effect on boys. The jobless statistics, for example, showed young men on job seekers’ allowance outnumbered young women by a factor of two to one. It seemed that in the areas I visited – just before the recession hit – there was not so much a shortage of jobs as a severe shortage of traditional ‘male’ jobs. In South Yorkshire’s Dearne Valley, regeneration programmes had put warehouses and call centres on the sites of steelworks and coking plants. The call centres, in particular, looked to young and middle-aged women to fill their often part- time jobs. So while the sewing factories that used to dot the area, mopping up all the school leavers they could find to work the machines, had gone, they had been replaced by other unskilled and semi-skilled female- oriented jobs. It was harder to see what young men could now do that would fit with their view of what work should be.


Yet change had hit young women hard, too. Most of the young people I met had quite traditional ideas about how their lives should progress. Boys hoped to get a good, manual trade, while girls hoped to settle down and start a family. Yet while boys were thwarted by the decline in ‘male’ jobs, girls were equally thwarted by changes in the structure of families. While labour market change and its effect on young men had been well documented, the effect of family fragmentation on the life chances of young women was less so. Reading post-war studies of family life, some written as late as the 1980s, what struck me was that they rarely discussed lone parenthood or household wordlessness as major issues for young women. It seemed that, even 25 years ago, early motherhood – and girls from poorer families had long become mothers earlier – usually came in a package with a husband and a wage. Not any more. In the


NOVEMBER 2009 ADULTS LEARNING 13


John Birdsall/Press Association Images


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