ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits and builds on work that Stephen Ball did with one of us (Meg) and Sheila Macrae on youth transitions in the 1990s. That work, funded by the ESRC and published as a book entitled, Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16, followed a group of young Londoners for four years as they moved through and beyond their last year of compulsory schooling. The work illuminated how young people differently positioned by class, ‘race’, and gender exercised their agency and the ways in which the post-16 education system of the time functioned to marginalise and exclude many young people. In this chapter, we reflect on what is the same and what has changed since those studies, and what continues to make London distinctive. We also consider the adequacy of the theoretical model that underpinned the studies for making sense of the regional specificities of contemporary youth transitions and for informing the development of alternative, more equitable post-16 policies and practices. The chapter draws on ideas we are developing as part of an ESRC study we have recently embarked on with colleagues at King's College London and the Edge Foundation that is investigating how England's current post-16 education system can better support the transitions of young people not intending to go to university.
