ABSTRACT
Policy responses to youth unemployment have rarely adopted a one-dimensional approach. In the 1970s and early 1980s state policy responses were clearly about committing public resources to containing the expected rapid growth in youth unemployment. In order to further assist young people into work, a variety of subsidy schemes were introduced, designed to encourage employers to recruit young people. Throughout the 1980s, state policy reduced and then eradicated the role of the Industrial Training Boards, arguing that employers were best placed to determine the content and depth of training provision. State policy has proved an abject failure in securing the consent of young people to participate in what was claimed to be ‘quality training’. Socially-oriented training schemes in the past were often viewed as the dustbin of training provision, to which more disadvantaged, ‘disabled’, troubled and troublesome young people were consigned and within which they were contained.
