ABSTRACT
This book set out to consider how lower attainers are currently defi ned in developed countries, what is happening to the young people in terms of their education and training post-14, what sort of courses and programmes are in place for them, and how they fi t into a ‘knowledge economy’. Historically, lower attainers in education systems, whether as recipients of minimal education, special education, mainstream or inclusive education, have also been the recipients of denigration, paternalistic or punitive benevolence, dominated by fear of their disruptive potential. From the late nineteenth century efforts were made to make sure that all who were potential lower attainers in education, or were likely to be a burden on the State through their disabilities, were prepared if possible for some kind of low-level work, and the social control of potentially disruptive young people was crucial. Currently it has become part of a more intense ideology that all young people should become economically productive in some way, and not reliant on unemployment or welfare benefi ts. While engaging in a rhetoric of a knowledge economy in which those with higher levels of knowledge are privileged, governments have also insisted that all young people, whatever their diffi culties, disability or disengagement, should participate in more and more education and training and gain some sort of qualifi cation. The rationale for this is that higher levels of education and skills training for all are necessary for successful national competition in a global economy, and there are increasing anxieties that many of the young people will become part of a ‘surplus population’ in knowledge economies. There is less focus on restructuring economies or producing policies that will create jobs and thus prevent unemployment. Yet it is predominantly through social and economic policies rather than individual defi cits, that young people come to be unemployed or placed at lower levels with low wages in the labour market. High levels of ‘knowledge’ may be required to join the knowledge economy, although it may be the case, as Brown and colleagues (2011) have pointed out, that Western countries have yet to realise that their assumed superior position in the global knowledge economy is threatened. Ha-Joon Chang has also suggested that in rich countries ‘their obsession with higher education has to be tamed’ as the link between higher education and national productivity is tenuous and distorts the rest of the economy (Ha-Joon Chang 2011: 188). But the
current political assumption is that all must aim to join this knowledge economy and there is a persistent punitive and paternalistic view of social groups who are unlikely to attain higher levels of knowledge. Although there is little evidence that young lower attainers are the ‘ignorant yobs’ portrayed in some sections of the media and in government policy in Britain1 or that they are unwilling to work, the young people are subject to, at the very least, a lack of serious attention and at worst, constant denigration. This particularly applies to black and some other minority young people. This chapter draws some conclusions to this study of those dealing with the young people in fi ve countries, and suggests a model in which lower attainers might fi t into labour markets in developed countries.
