ABSTRACT
In some ways, the educational experiences of young people like Ricky were not so different from those of their parents. Ricky’s mother, Sarah, told me she hated school, started skipping lessons in her early teens and left at the earliest opportunity. Her attitude to Ricky’s school was largely negative: they never did anything to help him, they weren’t there for him when he was struggling. And that surely must have reflected her own – and possibly her parents’ – feeling that what she did at school was largely irrelevant to the future she saw for herself.
