ABSTRACT
The Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) is a diverse programme enveloping, amongst other things, college-based courses of varying content and duration, project and placement schemes, training workshops, and work experience with employers. The formal rationale of YOP was to develop an integrated system of training, education and work for young people out of work. Since the beginning of the YOP, there has been a requirement for trainees to undertake ‘social and life skills’ training, either off the job at a college or on the job, but in a classroom setting. Social and life skills training has rapidly become institutionalised and professionalised; little account has been taken to trainees’ hostility to ‘more school’ or the possibility of building social learning into the rapport that clearly develops between many trainees and their ‘working class’ supervisors.
