Creating more equitable school-to-work transitions for young people not taking the university route: an ‘equalities-ecologies’ framework

ABSTRACT

This article proposes and illustrates a framework for thinking about how the school-to-work transitions of young people not intending to go to university can be made more equitable. This framework seeks to enrich sociological readings of VET by building on the considerable strengths of existing research on ecologies of VET provision and the life-worlds of young people navigating transitions, and bringing them together with concerns about the theoretical and practical complexity of equality that have tended to be relatively neglected in VET research to date. Its organising principle is that, in order to make young people’s transitions more equitable, we need to systematically combine analytic attention to: the multidimensional and intersectional nature of inequality; how local learning ecologies are produced at different system-levels; and how these ecologies interact with young people’s life-worlds, values and agency. We argue that identifying which aspects of local learning ecologies underpin or undermine which kinds of equality for differently resourced young people represents an important first step towards formulating a strategy for how local learning ecologies can be stimulated to become both more opportunity-rich and more equitable, and for understanding the policy and practice challenges and dilemmas that have to be negotiated in the process.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• post-16 transitions
• equality
• learning ecologies

Introduction

How can young people’s post-16 transitions into further education and the labour market be better supported? And what can be done to ensure more equitable access to high quality educational and training opportunities for young people in ways that are responsive to their voices, choices and values about worthwhile life courses and their diverse social and economic positions and experiences?

In this article we propose a new framework for addressing these questions and illustrate it using the story of Damian, a young man we have interviewed as part of ‘Young Lives, Young Futures’, a mixed-methods longitudinal study that is investigating the school-to-work transitions of young people in England not intending to take the university path.¹ While we believe that this framework could be applied to different national contexts and different kinds of educational settings, in this article we use it to unpack some of the conceptual, ethical and material complexities of equality-oriented policy and practice in the English VET context.

Taking equality realisation in education seriously, we suggest, requires an attentiveness to the challenges for policy and practice of simultaneously addressing different dimensions of inequality (Fraser 1996) – i.e. inequalities of distribution (who gets access to what), recognition (whose aspirations, choices and conceptions of quality are valued) and participation (whose voices count in decisions about education systems and practices). It also requires an attentiveness to the specificities of young people’s experiences and how they are shaped by the ways young people are differently positioned in relation to intersecting axes of inequality. Alongside inequalities relating to class, ‘race’, gender and dis/ability, this includes inequalities less often considered in the VET literature such as those relating to sexuality, health, academic attainment and place.

Our framework seeks to enrich sociological readings of VET by bringing these concerns about the theoretical and practical complexity of equality in education into conversation with perspectives drawn from two existing currents of VET research: research on the effectiveness of VET provision, in particular, Hodgson and Spours (2013, 2015, 2018) ecological perspective; and research that seeks to illuminate the experiences of young people navigating transitions. Its organising principle is that, in order to make transitions more equitable, we need to fully engage with: 1) different dimensions and intersecting axes of social inequality and the challenges of realising equality in practice; 2) the multi-level constellation of factors that combine to shape the opportunities available to young people in the ‘local learning ecologies’ they traverse; and 3) how these ecologies interact with young people’s life-worlds, values and agency.

One upshot of approaching young people’s school-to-work transitions from an ecological perspective is the understanding that policy in this area cannot solely be focused on VET routes and qualifications and careers support for young people. Rather a ‘whole-system’ approach is needed, which takes into account the fact that VET policy and practice are nested within a whole nexus of other processes operating at different system-levels. This means that VET policy and practice interventions are likely to be fairly limited in what they can achieve if problems emanating from macro-level social and economic policies, and from education policies and practices beyond the VET system, are not addressed. Indeed, in the English context, a failure to take a whole-system approach may help to explain why the history of VET policy is littered with the remains of previously failed policies.² However, we would not wish to present a counsel of despair. Indeed our framework is offered to highlight possibilities for constructive equality-oriented action at different levels of intervention that can make a positive difference to the lives and futures of at least some young people, even in the absence of root-and-branch system-level change.

In the next section, we will briefly outline the two broad (overlapping) currents of existing work on VET that our approach builds on and integrates with the equality lenses summarised above. We will then introduce Damian’s story before going on to explicate our ‘equalities-ecologies’ framework, using Damian’s experiences to illustrate the analytic work it can do. In doing so, our aim is to prompt and inform wider conversations about how those committed to creating a more equitable transitions landscape for young people moving from school to work can develop policies and practices that are more sensitive to the complexity of the challenges of – and trade-offs involved in – realising equality in real contexts of practice.

‘Effectiveness’ and ‘life-world’ currents in VET research

A broadly ‘effectiveness-oriented’ research current concerned with the outcomes and effectiveness of existing VET provision has been relatively influential in shaping recent and ongoing VET reforms in England. This research has shown: that existing provision reproduces class-based inequalities, in part as a consequence of the strong association between parental resources and post-16 transitions (Green 2017); that young women are far less likely to access the most well-paid apprenticeships (Howlett 2020); that racially minoritised students tend to be over-represented in courses with limited educational or labour market value (Avis, Orr, and Warmington 2017); and that disabled young people achieve fewer qualifications and are more than three times as likely than their non-disabled peers to be classed as ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment or training) (Powell 2018).

Research in this current has also highlighted the limitations of the English VET system in striking contrast to those of continental Europe, which are underpinned by broader models of capability (Brockman, Clarke, and Winch 2011). English VET programmes have been shown to offer poor labour market returns and little in the way of clear progression to higher levels of study, thereby exacerbating the marginalisation of those studying at lower levels. Many of these young people, unable to find either a secure job or a vocational programme which improves their employability, experience a high degree of career and study ‘churn’, moving between employment, unemployment and education and/or between qualification routes, often repeating study at the same level (Thompson 2017). While good careers guidance can help young people exercise more agency over their future education and life choices, a substantial body of work has shown that current provision falls far short of what is needed (see, for example, Moote and Archer 2018).

Of particular relevance to the framework we are proposing here, Hodgson and Spours (2013, 2015, 2018) research highlights the value of an ecological perspective for understanding the underlying conditions that help to explain why some local systems are more effective than others in supporting young people’s transitions into further education and the labour market. Their intervention-oriented model provides a helpful lens for identifying the actions that would need to be taken at different levels of intervention (i.e. supranational, national, regional, local and provider levels) to stimulate more expansive ‘learning ecologies’ that provide young people with the skills, knowledge, attributes, spaces and opportunities to flourish.

In England, Hodgson and Spours’ approach has not yet gained the policy traction it deserves, with 14–19 education policy continuing to be largely determined at national level by the Department for Education, leaving limited scope for the development of local policies that are sensitive to the specificities of local needs and conditions (Maguire et al. 2020). However, other insights from this ‘effectiveness’ current do seem to have informed at least the discourse surrounding recent VET reforms in England, which have been justified on the grounds that they will strengthen the inclusivity, coherence and quality of VET, raise its status, increase its legibility to stakeholders and provide more equitable access to rewarding careers. These reforms include an apprenticeship levy, targets to increase apprenticeship starts by those categorised as Black, Asian or minority ethnic or as having a learning difficulty, T-Levels (a new level 3 technical education qualification), and a new careers strategy, which (in theory) requires schools to provide high quality careers information and guidance, with attention given to equality and diversity considerations.

A second influential, and overlapping, current of research focuses on young people’s values, experiences of and engagement with local VET and employment opportunity structures. Although this work is of scholarly importance, it has arguably had a more diffuse and less clear-cut impact on policy making. Typically ethnographic, this research often takes a Bourdieusian ‘field theory’ perspective, conceptualising VET and employment as competitive, relational ‘fields’ within which young people are differently positioned and resourced (Hodkinson, Sparkes, and Hodkinson 1996). This perspective reminds us that when young people are unable to access opportunities it is less likely to be a product of any individual or family failing or lack of aspiration than of an uneven ‘playing field’ that throws up objective and subjective barriers to accessing meaningful opportunities for working-class and racially minoritised young people.

Research in this current has also illuminated the wide range of aspirations and values underpinning young people’s choices. For example, while Franceschelli and Keating (2018) report that the majority of young people have fairly conventional, career-oriented aspirations, their research and that of others has also highlighted the experiences of those young people who privilege other ends (such as motherhood, ‘making a difference’ and basic economic security) over social mobility and/or who reject dominant norms in more radical ways, including through the pursuit of alternative lifestyles or political or criminal activities (see, for example, Allen and Osgood 2009; Gunter and Watt 2009; Hoskins and Barker 2017). All of this means that analyses of inequality in VET policy and practice, as well as attending to the distribution of inputs and outputs, must attend to young people’s values and agency.

In thinking about how best to theorise the complexity of VET policy and practice and the nexus it sits within, it is clear that no one tradition on its own is sufficient for an analysis that will be capable of capturing: the full complexity of the problems that need to be addressed; the tensions between the different possible remedies that could be applied; the trade-offs that will inevitably need to made by policymakers and practitioners in the making and enactment of policies that are attentive to different dimensions and intersections of equality; and the interrelatedness of different levels of intervention. This is a huge challenge that requires us not only to draw on different theoretical lenses, but also to wrestle with how we can think productively across them in order to say something useful about the dilemmas of policymaking and practice.³ In the rest of this article we want to try and illustrate the value for policy and practice development of combining a focus on equality and learning ecologies, using Damian’s story as an entry point.

Damian’s story

Damian is a slightly built, 16 year-old white working-class young man who attends a boxing club in Bellden, a post-industrial county in the North of England with below average job density and pockets of very high deprivation. Bellden is one of four contrasting local areas in which we are carrying out interviews with policy makers, practitioners and young people to explore and compare how differently positioned young people engage with local VET and employment opportunity structures and how these structures are produced through regional, local and institutional mediations of macro-level reforms.

The boxing club is an alternative provision placement, which provides mental health counselling, employability support and courses in functional skills, construction, sports and food technology for young people aged 11–18 who have been excluded from, or are not able to cope well in, mainstream education. The young people typically spend their mornings studying in the classroom at the front of the building, while their afternoons are spent learning to box in the ring at the back. The club is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company founded in 2019 by the company director, Stefan, who is a life-long Bellden resident with a background in boxing, coaching, teaching and youth work. Working alongside Stefan, who combines his director responsibilities with work as an education tutor and boxing coach at the club, are a team of four colleagues, including a trainee assistant, who helps with coaching and cleaning. Staff members have a diversity of life experiences, which both Stefan and Damian feel make the staff better able to relate to the young people they work with. These include experiences of living with social and economic disadvantage, trauma, neurodiversity and/or mental health conditions, and/or of parenting young people with experience of these things. The club is one of a number of independent (i.e. third and private sector) alternative education providers in Bellden with a vocational education focus, which play a key role in meeting the needs of young people across the authority who are not in mainstream or special education provision. The young people can be referred to the club by pupil referral units (PRUs) and schools in Bellden and neighbouring local authorities, with the commissioning PRU, school or local authority charged a daily fee for each young person referred. Within Bellden, the ultimate decision on which young people are referred to the club (and other alternative providers) is made by one of the local authority’s three area-based ‘Education Inclusion Panels’ in which representatives from schools, PRUs, alternative providers, the local authority and educational psychology and mental health services come together to decide on suitable pathways for young people who have been identified as disengaged from education. The per capita funding paid by referring institutions comprises fifty percent of the club’s income, with the remainder coming from grants from organisations that include a local community foundation, Sport England (a non-departmental government body) and the National Lottery. As Stefan explains: ‘Sometimes it’s very hard to win the funds … so you’re up against it all the time … We do okay, I’m not saying we don’t, but there’s a lot more kids out there who don’t get the help that could get the help.’

The club takes a person-centred approach, with each young person working with a tutor to cocreate a programme tailored to their own particular needs and aspirations. This can take the form of one-to-one and group-based activities and might include accessing opportunities outside of the club, such as work experience and volunteering, drawing on Stefan and his team’s wide network of local contacts in other CICs, community groups, charities and small businesses. The pedagogic work of the centre is underpinned by a holistic conception of wellbeing that pays attention to its physical, social and emotional dimensions. For example, a lot of emphasis is placed on the creation of a friendly, caring and safe environment, in which young people can feel physically, socially and emotionally secure and able to achieve. Boxing is central to the pedagogic vision, viewed as a crucial means of motivating students and helping them to build self-esteem, self-discipline, self-confidence and a self-improving mindset, which they can apply to their learning both inside and outside the boxing ring.

Damian, who is recovering from drug addiction, is studying a combination of functional skills in English and maths, construction skills and sports. He is also receiving mentorship and counselling support. Stefan told us that six months ago Damian was in a worse place and that he is doing well now, about to start work as a mentor for other young people.

Damian spoke powerfully about legacies of poverty, violence and trauma in his life. Two of his brothers are currently in prison, and his father had served a long prison sentence before Damian was born. Damian constantly worries about one of his brothers being in a dangerous jail, panicking every time the phone rings with a no-caller ID in case it is bad news. Damian started smoking cigarettes at the age of nine and cannabis soon after. Smoking cannabis got him into trouble at primary school and resulted in him spending nine months in isolation, locked in a room on his own all day every day. He has been excluded from two secondary schools and banned from youth clubs for swearing. He has sold drugs and participated in burglaries. He talks a lot about poverty, and about his mother having been in care and homeless. He has very little sense of permanence in his life. He talks about having ‘been passed about like a footy’, moving house and school a lot, living in ‘rough little places, not places you’d want to be’, about witnessing extreme physical violence and having reacted violently himself to a teacher who had treated him unfairly. He says he has ‘grown up on some of the roughest estates in the … country’. He alludes to things that have happened to him that are too terrible to speak of. He struggles with his mental health, can’t cope with crowds and was diagnosed with PTSD at the age of 7. He says that all he wants is money and happiness: ‘my family have been torn apart for the past years and it’s torn me apart inside’.

Damian’s experiences of school were mostly traumatic. He describes being bullied by another boy – being ‘tortured’ by him, but too embarrassed to report the bullying to his teachers. He has little respect for most of his teachers who would tell him what to do but not listen or offer encouragement or help. But there were exceptions – two teachers who were kind and helped him to stop taking drugs. And the boxing club seemed to be working well for him. ‘It’s the best thing I’ve ever done’, he tells us. It is freer, less controlling, the teachers are kinder, more respectful and helpful, and the pace of learning is slower and more manageable.

Damian is also positive about the local area: ‘to be honest it is a really nice place, Bellden is a really nice place to grow up in’. As long as you make the right choices: ‘if you’re smart enough, you know what you’re doing. You don’t have to choose that life’. He tells us that this is his home town and he will never leave it.

Damian’s father owns a truck cleaning business and Damian works with him at the weekend washing large vehicle transporters. He describes having to wake up at 6 am and his father having to drag him out of bed by his legs. The work is hard manual labour that involves travelling to different sites around the country and working to a tight schedule, cleaning ten enormous vehicles in an hour. He talks about the importance of dedication and hard graft: ‘if you don’t get your pay, you’re not going to have no food … If you want something you have got to work for it’. In some respects there are echoes here of Paul Willis’s (1977) ‘lads’ and their strong affinity with the masculinist cultures of their fathers’ workplaces, although this is a more individualist version; the idea of, let alone an affinity with, a collective culture of workplace resistance does not feature in Damian’s narrative. Damian has applied for a CSCS⁴ card – certification to work on a construction site that is required by some employers – but has narrowly failed it twice. However, he says he doesn’t really need it as his dad’s the boss.

Damian is not worried about making a living. He believes he could live on his own; he says he has to be able to ‘stand on his own two feet’ because family relationships are fragile and he can’t rely on them. Like the young people in Shildrick, MacDonald, and Furlong’s (2016) study of so-called ‘troubled families’, who were similarly caught up in a ‘complex web of multiple hardship and traumas’ (829), Damian was determined not to replicate the difficult lives of his parents and brothers. For this reason he is taking his studies at the boxing club seriously. He says ‘if things were to go tits up I would need something, hence I’m doing this sports and leisure course’. But he worries about his peers in the boxing club who struggle with motivation, who stay in bed until half twelve in the afternoon and don’t understand the importance of hard work, who have ‘no stamina … no dedication’. ‘You can only get in the ring by doing it yourself … Your coach will be by your side, but it’s you that’s doing it’, he tells us. And ‘it’s not just the boxing side, it’s everything in life: if you want it, you’ve got to do it.’

Damian is by no means typical of the young people we interviewed. Indeed we have deliberately aimed for a maximum diversity sample to enable us to explore the widest possible range of experiences and trajectories through and beyond the post-16 compulsory education phase; so it is questionable whether the label ‘typical’ can be appropriately applied to any of the young people we spoke with. Rather we have selected Damian’s story because it brings into sharp relief some of the complex constellations of factors that can shape young people’s school-to-work transitions and some of the complexities that have to be negotiated in conceptualising and addressing inequalities in the transitions landscape.

Theorising Damian’s story

Our theoretical approach builds on the considerable strengths of existing research on VET and post-16 transitions, summarised above, and brings them together with multidimensional and intersectional equality lenses.

Different dimensions of equality and the challenges of realising equality in practice

In analysing and assessing how equitable the emerging VET landscape is, our framework uses a multidimensional conception of equality that draws on Nancy Fraser’s (1996) distinctions between inequalities of distribution, recognition and participation. Within the VET context, distributional inequalities are the spatial and other kinds of inequalities in the distribution of opportunities and the material, cultural, social and emotional resources that facilitate access to and progression in high quality education, training or work. Such resources might include, for example: financial support that enables a young person to travel longer distances to study or take up an apprenticeship; informal careers guidance or help with job applications from a knowledgeable family friend; or stable friendship groups providing moral support. A focus on distributional inequalities is core to the Bourdieusian perspective on youth transitions and we return to these, with reference to Damian’s story, below.

Recognitional inequalities are those relating to whose choices, aspirations and perspectives on VET quality are valued and respected within VET systems. For example, those who aspire to occupational choices that are constructed as lower status within dominant societal discourses, or who privilege unpaid caring or parenting work or social activism over paid work, can be made to feel that their choices are demeaned or even rendered invisible (see for example, Ellis-Sloan 2014; Ryan and Lőrinc 2018). In Damian’s case, it would appear that his difficulties at school were at least in part a product of a mismatch between his own values and those of the school and of the inability of most teachers, as Damian saw it, to relate to his values and life experiences. These teachers were not, in another research participant’s words, people ‘who had been there and done that’. While Damian does not talk about the content of his education, we know from other participants how alienating the current school curriculum with its narrow academic focus can be for those young people whose interests and passions are orientated to more practical and creative pursuits (McPherson Bayrakdar, and Gewirtz 2023). At the boxing club, in contrast, Damian found more teachers who ‘know how to help’ because they were better able to relate to his values, experiences and preferred routines (for example, as his friend told us, ‘you’re allowed a smoke break when you need it’); and in the curriculum Damian found a better match with his interest in boxing. In other words, the boxing club was attending to the demands of recognitional equality in a way that the schools he attended were mostly not.

Finally, inequalities of participation are inequalities in the opportunities people have to fully participate in the decisions that shape the conditions of their lives, or in the context of VET, the opportunities young people have to be meaningfully involved in shaping the transitions landscape they have to navigate. For example, to what extent are young people invited to ‘sit around the table’ when consultative or partnership models are adopted and, when they are, which young people are or are not invited? While Damian’s voice is recognised and respected at the boxing club, this falls short of participation in terms of him having a meaningful say in the organisation of provision at the club. This is not surprising as, even for young people from more socio-economically privileged backgrounds, opportunities to participate in school governance in meaningful ways are rare in the English state education system.

These different dimensions of equality mean that when we are thinking about resource allocation, we need to consider not only which, and what kinds of, services we fund and how to optimise their accessibility, but also the ways in which these services are organised and their ethos, particularly in terms of how far they allow and encourage respect for young people’s values and the inclusion of young people in agenda setting.

Fraser’s (1996) analysis also reminds that different forms of inequality require different remedies that can be in tension with one another. This makes realising equality a significant challenge for policy and practice. The multidimensional nature of inequality is implicitly acknowledged in much scholarship and policy discourse on VET participation and progression (see, for example, Avis and Atkins 2017; Ball, Maguire, and Macrae 2000; Evans 2019), but the underlying conceptions of inequality are relatively rarely explicated and therefore the challenges of simultaneously addressing different kinds of inequality are not always sufficiently understood and taken into account.

For example, Damian holds politically conservative views. He believes in tougher police and prison services and that young people should be self-sufficient. In Damian’s case, his views on the importance of self-sufficiency are probably compatible with the funding of placements like the one he is benefiting from, because he would see the purpose of the placement as teaching young people the dispositions and skills required for self-sufficiency. But it is possible to imagine other young people who might argue that the kind of provision offered at the boxing club shouldn’t be in place for those who don’t properly use it; and, more generally, that resources should be allocated according to some conception of deservingness rather than need. This would pose a dilemma for equality-oriented policy in terms of which young people’s voices to prioritise and how to decide what the boundary should be between recognising young people’s values and allowing services to always be shaped by them. The example of Damian’s case also highlights equality policy dilemmas relating to how far policies should be defined around the differences between people rather than what they have in common, how to identify which differences to prioritise, and how policy can respond to the multiplicity of minority perspectives and needs that are deemed to be relevant, while, at the same time, using resources effectively.

Multiple and intersecting axes of social inequality

To fully understand how inequalities in access to VET and employment opportunities are reproduced and experienced, as well as attending to different dimensions of equality, we also need to attend to multiple and intersecting axes of social inequality. While there is a substantial literature on how classed-based inequalities play out in youth transitions landscapes and some work on racialised and gendered inequalities and special educational needs and disabilities, other axes of inequality, such as those pertaining to LGBTQ+ identities, health, academic attainment and place, have been given less attention. Moreover, the tendency has often been to focus on single axes of inequality, rather than on how such axes interact to produce very different experiences for those who occupy different intersectional positions. In seeking to address this deficiency, our framework deploys Brah and Phoenix’s (2004, 75) conception of intersectionality as ‘signifying the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts’.

Our argument here is that if we want to find ways of better supporting young people’s transitions, we need to first understand the full range of ‘simultaneously interlocking’ (Combahee River Collective 1997) privileges and disadvantages they are subject to and the ways in which these are experienced and ‘lived together’. For example, Damian’s post-16 transition experience as a low-attaining, slightly built, white working-class young man, struggling with poor mental health and living in one of the most economically deprived wards in one of the most economically deprived regions of the country is likely to be very different from the experience of another white, working-class young man, James, who we interviewed in the more affluent area of Greenvale. James is also interested in sports, but his higher prior attainment, experience of playing for his local rugby team, more extensive support networks and the relative buoyancy of the Greenvale labour market place him in a stronger position to achieve his goal of pursuing a sports-related career in playing or coaching. An intersectional lens, therefore, reminds us of the importance of attending to the specificities of young people’s intersectional experiences and the dangers of homogenisation – in this case homogenising ‘the “white working-class” as a single group’ (Adjogatse and Miedema 2022), as policy discourse in England sometimes risks doing (see, for example, House of Commons Education Committee 2021).

How opportunity structures interact with young people’s life-worlds, values and agency

Our framework brings together the two equality lenses summarised above with two additional complementary perspectives that are more established within the VET literature: Bourdieusian field theory and Hodgson and Spours’ learning ecologies approach. Our purpose in doing so is to: a) shed light on the capacity of young people living in different places and with access to different resources to exercise their agency in ways that enable them to make – and realise – authentic and informed decisions about their future lives; and b) support the identification of policy and professional practice interventions that can contribute to creating more enabling conditions for young people’s authentic and informed decision-making and to addressing disparities in access to high quality VET and employment.

Bourdieusian field theory

Field theory (Bourdieu 1986) foregrounds the socially negotiated nature of young people’s decision-making, and the ways it is shaped by the material, social, cultural and emotional resources made available through family, peer-group and institutional affiliations. The unequal distribution of these resources means that for young people such as Damian, who are among the most marginalised in society, their transitions are most likely to be disrupted, non-linear, extended and fraught with uncertainty (Thompson 2017).

Field theory also illuminates how young people’s decision-making is strongly bounded by their ‘horizons for action’ (Hodkinson, Sparkes, and Hodkinson 1996). These horizons are partly objectively produced by the availability of decent and accessible education, training and employment opportunities. But they are also subjectively created ‘out of perceptions of risk and need and personal efficacy’ (Ball, Maguire, and Macrae 2000, 106), which for young people from working-class and racially minoritised backgrounds can often result in a belief that certain opportunities are just ‘not for me’ (see, for example, Nazir 2023). For instance, for those, like Damian, whose experiences of education may have resulted in ‘damaged’ or ‘fragile’ learner identities, an ‘escape from learning’ is likely to be sought and planning for the future is likely to be ‘subordinated to coping with the vicissitudes of the here and now’; while those with more ‘secure’ learner identities are less likely to have a sense of their horizons for action being limited (Ball, Maguire, and Macrae 2000, 150, 151).

Damian’s educational trajectory has already been severely disrupted by frequent house and school moves and by having spent months in an internal exclusion unit at school. His horizons for action are constrained by a lack of access to material resources, the mental health challenges he is struggling with as a result of childhood trauma and his strongly place-based identity and loyalty to the area where he was ‘born and bred’, which may prevent him from accessing opportunities that would require him to live somewhere else. In some ways, he is privileged through his family social capital in that he has access to work through his father’s business. Working for his father also means that having failed his CSCS matters less to him than it might to someone without such connections. But this access is precarious. His relationship with his father is volatile and Damian isn’t confident he will continue to be able to rely on him for work. Damian’s precarious domestic and financial situation means that, when contemplating his future, he doesn’t share the luxury of his better-off counterparts of being able to weigh up options, think about what he might ideally want to do and plan a pathway to achieve those goals. In this respect Damian is ‘time poor’. He has to focus on the ‘here and now’, work out the quickest route to ‘standing on his own two feet’ and he seems to take for granted that whatever he does is likely to involve ‘hard graft’.

Learning ecologies

So far we have only mentioned place briefly and in passing as a key aspect of identity formation and as one of the range of interlocking axes of inequality that can have a limiting or enabling effect on young people’s horizons for action. But, as is clear from Damian’s story, place and space matter hugely in shaping young people’s school-to-work transitions. Our fourth and final lens – a learning ecologies perspective – foregrounds these spatial dynamics. ‘Local learning ecologies’ are the physical, economic, social, cultural, educational and labour market spaces that young people traverse. Local learning ecologies ‘can be more or less affluent; more or less organised and mediated by professionals and wider stakeholders; [and] offer more or fewer opportunities … for participation in … employment or further study’ (Hodgson and Spours 2015, 29). Hodgson and Spours (2013) conceptualise learning ecologies as located on a continuum ranging from ‘low’ to ‘high’ opportunity ecosystems; the latter constituting nurturing, opportunity-rich environments that enable young people to develop more expansive horizons for action. A learning ecologies perspective enables us to pay attention to, and compare across localities, how local opportunity structures and young people’s horizons for action are shaped by processes occurring at multiple intersecting levels, as summarised in Table 1, below.

Table 1. Levels of the ecological framework (adapted from Hodgson and Spours 2013).

Micro level – learner in their local environment	Learner interaction with family, peers, the classroom and immediate community settings
Meso – the wider institutional context	Learner interaction with a range of education and training professionals in the school/college/institution/work-based learning environment; the curriculum.
Exo 1 – the local beyond the institution	Learner interaction beyond the immediate learning context; local authority policies; local demography, geography and history; community traditions; configurations of different institutions (e.g. school, colleges and work-based learning providers); local transport infrastructure and travel-to-learn/earn patterns; VET partnership arrangements and networks of professionals (e.g. youth workers and teachers) and other social partners (e.g. local employers); local curriculum offer, employment and housing opportunities.
Exo 2 – the wider economic/skills landscape	Learner movement and relationships outside the immediate locality; regional economic landscape; employers, training providers and their organisations; labour market; wider transport infrastructure and travel-to-learn/earn patterns; specialist provision; regional agencies/networks; further and higher education providers.
Macro – national and global levels	National politics, policy-making and policy levers (which can disturb or destabilise local relations); national agencies; the economy; wider society and cultures; global trends (e.g. globalisation, migration).

As we will discuss at greater length in the next section, Damian’s experiences illustrate how different levels are nested within one another. This means that macro-level social and economic policies and education policies and practices beyond the VET system can undermine the efforts of policymakers and practitioners whose work is more specifically focused on trying to create the conditions for young people from historically marginalised communities to develop more expansive horizons for action and access high quality education and/or work opportunities that are meaningful for them. However, we will also suggest that Damian’s story nonetheless contains some seeds of hope, showing how, despite the challenges of working in a hostile macro-policy space, there are still spaces for positive policy and practice interventions that can support young people like Damian to make and enact informed and authentic career and life choices that are in keeping with their values and aspirations.

Bringing it all together

A strength of our overarching ‘equalities-ecologies’ framework is that it can be used to ask both analytic and action-oriented questions. In other words, identifying what aspects of learning ecologies underpin or undermine which kinds of equality for differently positioned and resourced young people represents an important first step a) towards formulating a strategy for how, through interventions by policy actors operating at the different levels, local learning ecologies can be stimulated to become both more opportunity-rich and more equitable, and b) to understanding what kinds of policy and practice challenges and dilemmas have to be negotiated in the process.

It is at the micro and meso levels that local learning ecologies are lived and experienced, but these experiences are also shaped by forces and policies operating at the macro and exo levels of the ecosystem. In her study of Black working-class young people growing up in the Forest Gate area of London, Joy White (2020) writes powerfully of the ways the young people are subjected to and traumatised by three kinds of violence. In different ways these can be seen to entail the reproduction of inequalities of distribution, recognition and participation. White’s first kind of violence is structural – the deep constellations of economic and social structures, laws and disciplinary technologies that ‘make racism and poverty possible’. The second is the symbolic violence that is perpetrated through demeaning representations of the places the young people inhabit. And the third is the ‘slow’ almost imperceptible violence (Nixon 2011) ‘that is not spectacular or explosive, but which happens across time and through space’ (White 2020, 36) as a consequence of the multiple indignities and microaggressions experienced in their day-to-day lives. There are parallels here in Damian’s life experiences – in his first hand experiences of poverty and employment insecurity, of living in and moving between poor quality, stigmatised housing estates, of being drawn into problematic drug use and drug dealing, of witnessing extreme physical violence, of intergenerational trauma from having a mother who has been in care and homeless and close family members caught up in a non-rehabilitative criminal justice system, and of being bullied at, failed by and excluded from school.

All of these experiences can be seen as the direct and/or indirect products of macro-level policies that systematically disadvantage working-class young people in many aspects of their lives, including by constraining their horizons for action in relation to their VET and employment ‘choices’. These policies include: a punitive and discriminatory criminal justice system (Duque and McKnight 2019); deregulatory labour market policies and a lack of state protection of local industries from the effects of economic globalisation in post-industrial localities such as Bellden, which contribute, in turn, to the preponderance of precarious, insecure, low-wage employment in these localities (MacDonald and Shildrick 2018); regressive taxation policies and decades of disinvestment in social housing, health, social care and welfare support (Hernandez 2021); chronic underfunding of schools and colleges (Ofori 2024; Sibieta 2023); school curriculum and qualification reforms that have marginalised practical and creative subjects and produced classrooms experienced by many as exclusionary (McPherson Bayrakdar, and Gewirtz. 2023); and the harsh ‘zero-tolerance’ school behaviour policies that have been actively promoted by successive governments (Perera 2020). One example or how such macro-level policies can bear down on the young people affected by them is the solid nine months Damian spent in isolation in a locked room at primary school and his permanent exclusion from two schools. Unsurprisingly, such practices have been found to be extremely harmful to young people’s mental health and education (Tillson and Oxley 2020). Karen Graham (2014, 834) describes school disciplinary techniques that involve physical separation as the ‘dark, isolated side of schooling’ that is integral to the school-to-prison ‘pipeline’. As a direct consequence of such practices, in his schooling experience Damian is being given a taste of the prisoner experience with which he is already all too familiar from visits to his brother in jail. While arguably inappropriate and damaging for any young person, isolation as a form of punishment at school seems especially so for one diagnosed with PTSD at the age of 7, and with such direct family experience of incarceration.

For Damian, the boxing club constituted a far more opportunity-rich, micro- and meso-level environment than any of the schools he had previously attended. The boxing club is part of a wider policy initiative in Bellden geared towards providing young people excluded from school with opportunities to undertake placements that relate to their specific interests in safe and supportive environments with high staff-to-student ratios. Such exo-level policies have the potential to alleviate inequalities of distribution, recognition and participation. Yet there are limits to the amount of good quality provision of this kind that the local authority can fund because of competing priorities and the effects of policies operating at other levels of the ecosystem. As mentioned above, the boxing club’s financial situation is precarious, dependent on the success of grant applications, through which Stefan has to compete for non-statutory funds with other – potentially equally deserving – organisations. With more stable funding, the club and other alternative education providers would be able to support many more young people like Damian. This situation reflects a broader macro-level shift in the way education and welfare services are funded and provided in England, characterised by a combination of marketising, privatising and outsourcing trends (Miller 2019), which mean that critically needed services are no longer able to rely on guaranteed funding from the state. The corollary of this shift is that service providers are forced to continuously engage in time-consuming, energy-sapping bidding processes which divert precious resources and attention from the core (i.e. in this case, education and welfare) work of the organisation (Power et al. 2021). Other youth and community services and forms of social support that Damian and his family could have benefited from have been subject to similar pressures, which have been intensified in recent years in Bellden, as in other local authorities (Davies 2019; Hernandez 2021), where the overall budget for alternative provision and other support services has been substantially reduced as a consequence of central government austerity policies. This, combined with increased demand for these services,⁵ makes the competition for funding for organisations like the boxing club all the more steep and puts increasing pressure on the local authority to limit the number of referrals it can make. Bellden has, in addition, a history of chronic underinvestment in its critical economic infrastructure, which was badly affected by the 2008 recession and is still reeling from the after-shock of new post-Brexit trading laws and COVID-19 lockdowns. The leisure sector, which Damian is considering working in, has been particularly hard hit, alongside travel and the food industry.⁶

It is all too easy for the kind of multi-faceted, ecological framework we have presented here to be read as a counsel of despair. Such despair could be based on a belief that the inherently dilemmatic and demanding nature of multidimensional and intersectional equality-oriented practice means that equality can never be fully realised in every respect, or that nothing meaningful can be done at the exo and meso levels of the post-16 transitions ecosystem until macro-level policies and processes that systematically disadvantage working-class and racially minoritised young people are tackled. However, these are not readings we want to hold to. Our point in drawing attention to the dilemma-laden and intersectional nature of equality work is not to argue that such work is futile, but rather to support reflective and deliberative practice in this area so that, for example, where one equality dimension is privileged over others, this is done deliberately and with due sensitivity to how the fallout for other equality dimensions can be mitigated. And, while a core purpose of drawing attention to the importance of ecological understandings of school-to-work transitions is to underline the necessity of a whole-system approach if meaningful change is going to materialise at scale, this doesn’t mean that, if the required macro-level reforms aren’t in place, actors operating at other levels of the ecosystem cannot mitigate some of the potential harms created at the macro-level and still do really worthwhile and potentially life-changing work, at least in pockets.

Damian’s experiences and those of many of the other young people we are speaking with include numerous examples of local policies and individual organisations and practitioners engaged in humane, empathetic and creative work with young people, as well as examples of young people supporting one another in ways that seem to be making a really positive difference to their lives. As discussed above, Damian’s life was turned around by two teachers in his secondary school who helped him come off drugs; and the boxing club, part-funded by referrals enabled by a local authority initiative designed to give high quality vocationally-oriented placement opportunities for young people excluded from school, has been another lifeline for him. Thanks to this initiative and the encouragement, support and guidance of Stefan and his colleagues, Damian has been able to develop meaningful relationships with staff and fellow students in a relaxed, caring and friendly environment, with a manageable pace of learning and free from the bullying he had previously experienced at school. At the boxing club, Damian is able to engage in activities he enjoys while working towards qualifications that, we hope, will give him something to fall back on should his relationship with his father, upon whom he is currently relying on for work, break down. Damian is now also starting to mentor other young people, giving him an opportunity to provide forms of care, kindness and wise counsel of the kind that he himself has benefited from at the boxing club and, in the process, to grow in confidence and develop valuable employment-related and life skills.

In an elaboration of their learning ecologies framework, Hodgson and Spours (2018) draw attention to the pivotal role that system actors can play in facilitating more inclusive and opportunity-rich learning ecosystems. To support this work, they bring the ideas of ‘vertical’, ‘horizontal’ and ‘mediating’ forces into their conceptual matrix. Vertical forces are represented by state structures, policies and regulatory systems, emanating from the macro-level but which tend to drill down through the ecosystem, enabling and/or constraining activity at each of its levels. Horizontal forces consist of place-based social partnerships and ‘connectivities’ between different organisations and actors operating at the exo and meso levels. Mediating forces operate at the intersections of the vertical and the horizontal and are often associated with the ‘place-shaping’ work of local ‘anchor institutions’ – organisations that have ‘a key stake in a place … recruit from and serve local communities … and can contribute to wider outcomes’ (Centre for Local Economic Strategies 2015, 9). In the case of VET, this includes a capacity to ‘facilitate “citizen pathways” to new jobs and sustainable living’ (Hodgson and Spours 2018, 3). Applying this lens to the work of Bellden-based VET practitioners and policymakers, and integrating it with an equalities lens, helps to illuminate how the mediating role of actors like Stefan is accomplished. We suggest that this is via a form of professionalism that involves the creative identification of spaces for action, connection and collaboration in the cracks and crevices that lie beyond the grasp of macro-level policies and their constraining and often coercive ‘verticalities’. Stefan and his colleagues’ ability to see and exploit these spaces arises from their ‘can-do’ attitude, which is part of a wider culture of care that puts young people’s needs at the heart of their professionalism. It also arises from their deep embeddedness in, and commitment to, their local communities and the intimate knowledge of the local civic and economic environment this embeddedness gives them. This includes, for example, knowledge of relevant funding opportunities or work experience, volunteering and work opportunities, which they are able to tap into for the benefit of the young people in their care. A similar story can be told about local authority actors, whose scope for action is similarly deeply constrained by verticalities emanating from the macro-level, yet who have been able to establish trust-based, cross-sector partnerships between schools, pupil referral units, alternative education providers and support services. These mediating, ‘place-shaping’ practices are creating opportunities, at least in some instances, for young people marginalised from and by the educational mainstream to access valuable skills and connections relevant to their life and career aspirations and learn in supportive environments characterised by relationships of recognition and respect, in which they are enabled to feel ‘seen’ and valued, participate in the codesign of their programmes of study and take ownership of their own learning.

Conclusion

In this article we have used Damian’s story to illustrate the multidimensional and intersectional nature of inequalities pertaining to the transitions of young people not taking the university route. In doing so, we have shown how the inherently dilemma-laden nature of inequality and its intersectional nature make realising equality in this domain a significant challenge for policy and practice. In addition, Damian’s story illustrates how young people’s post-16 transition experiences are nested within a nexus of policies and processes operating at different system levels. This means that, in the absence of whole-system reform, prevailing inegalitarian policies operating at the macro level will always risk undermining or frustrating well-intentioned policies and practices operating at other levels of the system. Without macro-level policy economic and social reform, and reform of the wider education system within which VET sits – including reforms that create more space for the creative exercise of autonomy and place-shaping at the exo and meso levels – it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sustainable changes to VET policy and practice that will be experienced as positive by all young people. The broader policy ecology of VET, combined with the diverse life-worlds of young people, makes it likely that there will be many who are let down by the system or who the system hasn’t connected with or enabled to make and enact authentic and meaningful life choices.

All of this makes VET policy and practice a very difficult area to work in. But, as Damian’s story shows, there are nevertheless possible interventions that can make a real difference to some people’s lives. In particular, we have drawn attention to the important work that can be done by local actors in mediating the harmful effects of policies emanating from the macro level. In the case of Stefan and his boxing club colleagues, this crucial work is achieved through a distinctive form of professionalism and community of practice that is animated by a holistic vision of education with an ethic of care, compassion and collaboration at its heart. This vision is strikingly at odds with, and represents a direct challenge to, the top-down ‘zero tolerance’ professional practices promoted by central government, which have proved to be so damaging to the mental health and education of those young people who experience their sharp end.

Yet we should also not forget that Bellden is the same local authority where Damian attended a school in which he was subject to bullying and the cruel disciplinary practice of isolation. The local authority is aware of such practices and, at the time of writing, is putting in place strategies to support schools to consider in a more holistic way how they can function as more genuinely inclusive institutions. But the authority’s freedom of manoeuvre here, as with so much activity at the local level, is tightly constrained by macro-level policies, including the curriculum and qualification reforms mentioned above, which are experienced as deeply alienating by many young people (McPherson Bayrakdar, and Gewirtz 2023). In addition, a recent internal report by Bellden’s Director of Children and Young People’s Services has noted a serious concern in the authority about an exponential rise in the use of school exclusions by some multi academy trusts, which lie beyond the jurisdiction of the local authority, yet whose actions are putting pressure on its services. This is a policy effect produced by the fragmentation of school provision associated with the ratcheting up of the marketisation of education by macro-level policy actors in recent decades. Building more inclusive and collaborative school systems and cultures represents a core component of the additional work that is required to create positive equality-oriented change in the fraught and complex space of VET policy and practice. The crux of the argument presented in this article is thatthe more we can understand what makes such change difficult to bring about, the better; and this is partly because this helps to illuminate the things that can be done, and the distinctive forms of professional practice they rely on, even despite the difficulties and constraints.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to ‘Damian’, ‘Stefan’ and the other study participants for being so generous in sharing their life stories and perspectives with us. We are also indebted to Alan Cribb for enormously helpful conversations that fed into the writing of this article and feedback on various drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under grant number [ES/S015752/1].

Notes

1. ‘Damian’ (a pseudonym) is one of 123 young people participating in the qualitative strand of the study. The research gained the approval of King’s College London’s Education Research Ethics Panel (LRS-19/20–14,873) and voluntary informed consent was obtained from participants prior to data collection. All data has been pseudonymised to preserve the anonymity of participants and places.

2. See, for example, Fleckenstein and Lee’s (2018) account of the history of English VET reforms since 1979.

3. It also requires us to combine different empirical methodologies, which adds a whole other layer of complexity that we do not have the space to discuss here, but which we hope to explore in future publications.

4. Construction Skills Certificate Scheme.

5. A 2022 report by Bellden’s Corporate Management Team identifies the main cause of this rise in demand as the 2014 Children and Families Act, which extended the age of eligibility for additional support for those identified as needing special education provision from 5–19 to 0–25 years. This report also notes that this rise in demand has been exacerbated by the ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic on young people’s social and emotional wellbeing.

6. For discussion of the differential effects of the pandemic on local economies and sectors and its contribution to the exacerbation of existing sociodemographic inequalities, see Witteveen (2020), Brown and Cowling (2021) and Blundell et al. (2022).