ABSTRACT
The complex relations between youth, work, and education have been a recurring focus of moral panic in England since the beginning of state education in the mid-19th century. Neither schools nor industry have ever sought to address the needs for education and training of all young people, and yet at the same time young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs) have been consistently constituted as a social problem requiring policy attention. The way that policy conceptualizes the “problem” of young people moving between education, employment, and training is currently rendered as “school-to-work transitions.” In this short essay, drawing on a series of funded research projects which “followed” a diverse cohort of young people from one part of London from age 15 to 19 years, we want to make problematic some of the policy “rationalities”—the normative logics and assumptions—that are embedded in school-to-work transitions.
