How the education system limits career options for young people facing disadvantage in Northern England
1. ¿Cómo deciden las y los adultos jóvenes sobre
su futuro, cuando viven con desigualdad en el
Norte de Inglaterra?
Esta conferencia presenta cómo el sistema educativo
en Inglaterra puede limitar las opciones de carreras a
futuro para gente joven que vive con desventajas en el
norte de Inglaterra. La realidad que se percibe a través
de estudios de caso de las vidas reales de la gente
joven será contrastada con las ideas alrededor de la
elección libre y los futuros abiertas que son promovidas
en la política y los servicios ofrecidos por el gobierno.
3. What did I do?
• PhD at the school of Environment, Education
and Development (Manchester University)
• Masters in International Development and
Social Policy (Manchester University)
• BA Degree in Youth and Community Work
(Manchester Metropolitan University)
5. This Presentation
¿Cómo deciden las y los
adultos jóvenes sobre su
futuro, cuando viven con
desigualdad en el Norte
de Inglaterra?
How do young people
decide about their future,
when they live with
inequality in the North of
England?
10. What has changed?
• Jobs in industry no longer exist
• People like ‘Eric’ and his family are finding it
hard to support the future of their children
• In Manchester 1,000,000; just over 20% of
young people between 16-24 are unemployed
(IMD, 2015)
• 20% of neighborhoods in Greater Manchester
are in the top 10% most deprived in the
country (IMD, 2015)
12. Carrie
• High achiever
• Looks for a different life
to the estate
• Thinks carefully about
her options
13. What are the government saying?
‘To inspire pupils to think about their future
possibilities, to be informed about education,
training and career options; to asses their
current strengths and areas for development;
and to acquire skills valued by employers’
(Ofsted, 2016)
And….
Archer (2007, 2010)
15. I’m always asking the different teachers. They
know what I’m like, they must think I’m dead
rude but I just ask like, how much does that
person get paid, what do you have to do for
that, I just waffle on with myself (Carrie, interview 3).
16. Although Carrie is a:
• High achiever
• Looks for a different life
to the estate
• Thinks carefully about her
options
HOWEVER
• She is the granddaughter
of a cotton mill worker
• Lives in Wythenshawe
• Attends a school in
Wythenshawe
19. Carries Ideas
1 Interview 2 Interview 3 Interview 4 Interview
Job
idea
Pediatric nurse
General nurse
Teacher
Art teacher Primary
school teacher
Secondary school
teacher
Support worker
Paediatric nurse
General nurse
Art teacher Primary
school teacher
Secondary school
teacher
Support worker
Primary school
teacher
College
idea
Learning and
Development,
Child Health,
Counselling
BTEC in Childcare BTEC in
Childcare
20. “No, I don’t even, like… this school has took us to, like,
Universities to look around and they told us everything,
like, the loans and all that, we did some day at [the]
University and the er… was it student ambassadors, yeah,
them, they was telling us everything… Like, the loans,
everything that they do to survive and stuff… stuff like
that… and how… They took us in the lecture rooms but
we’ve not been to, like, the colleges and stuff, to do stuff
like that and I think we should really ‘cause college is
before Uni and if you don’t know what you’re doing at
college then how could you get into Uni anyway?”
(Carrie, interview 1)
21. “They won’t go further than Wythenshawe, I
don’t want to sound snobby but they go on, you
know the Micky Mouse courses. This is such a
shame ‘cause there are some great kids here,
you know really capable ones!” (English teacher, July 2013)
23. Some books and Journals
• Archer, M. (2010). Conversations About Reflexivity, London: Routledge.
• Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Webster, C. & Garthwaite, K. (2012). Poverty
and Insecurity: Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.
• White, D. (2014). How are the career related decisions of young people
from disadvantaged backgrounds shaped during their transition towards
the end of compulsory schooling? PhD thesis, University of Manchester.
• Furlong, A. & Cartmel, F. (2006). Choice biographies and transitional
linearity: Re-conceptualising modern youth transitions, Social Science, 79,
225-239.
• Willis, P. (1997). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working
Class Jobs. Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Bourdieu, P. (1984, 2010 reprint). Distinction: a social critique of the
judgement of taste. Abingdon: Routledge.
24. If you want to read any of my
work…
mmu.academia.edu/daniellewhite
Editor's Notes
Leave on for people to come in to
Working at UoM and MMU
I taught in Childhood, youth and Education Studies. My research focuses upon Youth Transition and my background is in Social Work with a focus on youth.
I am interested in how young adults make decisions about what they want to do in life, why do young people from certain backgrounds choose certain types of work and how might the reproduction of disadvantage be interrupted.
Because my degree was in Youth and Community Work my own research has always included the voices of young people but it has often involved young people as the researchers. I train young people to ask questions about their own lives so that services aimed at supporting them can be improved.
I am interested in why despite the incredible energy and determination of young people I have had the pleasure to work with, when these people live in poor areas they often choose jobs that will keep them in poverty.
So I am interested in the recreation of inequality through young peoples career related choices. Although I am discussing this in relation to England, I hope that you will see some similarities in how disadvantage can be recreated in your own lives and studies.
So we are talking about Manchester ! What do you know about Manchester? (Oasis, MU, MC)
This city is rich, but even when a country has money it doesn’t mean it will look after its people. Here we have huge poverty, some people in Manchester are rich and others are very poor where they struggle to heat their house or eat.
In England the disadvantaged areas are urban, people used to work in heavy industry, manufacturing, mining, fishing.
Like many places in the North of England (leeds, liverpool, sheffield). Manchester was a strong industrial power city. It was full of factories and mills, these canals were used to move products around the UK and further for export.
After the MU logo the symbol for Manchester is the worker bee, you see this all over the city, it represents the hard working people who worked in industry to build the city.
Here on the left you can see Manchester’s worker bees. This was painted by LS Lowry, a painter who really captures this industrial feel of the city. He drew factories, mills and lots of people going to work. People worked their entire life in one job. On the right is an example of one such worker, Eric Massheder.
Eric Massheder was a dripping-refinery worker outside his home next to the factory he'd worked at for 12 years, on Vulcan Street in 1975. During the 1970s the North of England provided stable jobs for its workers, many many people worked in industry. People like Eric were often very loyal to the company the identity of people was very connected to their work.
Not enough housing
Beautiful garden cities
In 1970’s
Research location in Wythenshawe
There was no strategy to support families to transition to a different kind of work.
There have been 3 generations of children since jobs in industry closed
Many families are now living day to day, crime is high, unemployment is high, housing is insecure, many families struggle to eat or pay heating bills.
A cycle has been created
In the career choices of the young, the recreation of disadvantage can be seen
Sometimes the media makes fun of these people !
This TV series is based in Manchester and is based upon families like Eric’s today
What do you notice about how people can be presented?
Set in pub, drunk, aggressive, attitude, unruly,
Are their communities in Bolivia presented badly?
What is it like to be the daughter or granddaughter of someone like Eric? To be in the last two years of school and to be thinking about what to do for a job?
Carrie was one of 14 people interviewed, I talked to Carrie over 2 years. She was 14 in the first interview and 16 in the last. Carrie talked repeatedly about wanting something different from living on the estate, in a ‘poverty flat’, going to the same college as everyone else.
She was finishing school and needed to choose what to study at college.
People in England attend school until 16, then they go to college. Sometimes the school and college are in the same building. When this happens the school get money for every student recruited to the 6th form. She lived in Wyth and all she kept telling me was she wanted a ‘better life’.
If the government want to interrupt the cycle of inequality, Carrie should be perfect !
Carrie engagement also included all elements of Archers (2010) reflexive process: constructed, dev awareness of self, self talk
She wants to be informed about education, training and her career options so she can work out what she wants to do.
In this sense Carrie had much agency, agency seen by both the UK government and theorist Margret Archer as promising for social mobility.
HOWEVER, she is constrained by not who she is, but where she is in society. Theorist call this ‘structure’, ‘structural factors’
Bourdieu is a theorist who helps me understand how disadvantage is recreated over generation after generation in all kinds of contexts.
He explores the kinds of fields that exist and how they are hierarchically structured according to how close they are to the field of power. So in this example we look at Education, we can imagine lots of education fields some of them very close and some very far from the filed of power. The school Carrie attends in Wythenshawe is very far, it doesn't’t receive very good reports, it doesn't’t expect its students to achieve very much academically so it tries to offer vocational subjects. Other schools offer A levels and would enable students like Carrie to fair much better in a university application. The position of this field has effected Carrie life.
Only vocational qualifications are offered to these young people. 82% of students who go to Carries school attended its 6th form in the year of the research.
The closest place to offer academic qualifications is 8 miles from Carries home.
These qualifications are low skilled and gendered
Having worked as a careers advisor I know finding work with these qualifications is very hard!
Student desire to study vocational qualifications in childcare, media employers do not.
Carrie considered school and hospital based work, courses considered were similar or identical to those offered in the sixth form.
Carrie struggled to imagine what a different life might look like.
She could have studied A levels to attend a good university but none were available for an 8 mile radius of her house. At no point in the 2 years that she was interested in becoming a teacher did anyone from the school engage in conversation regarding the non-vocational routes into this area of work. They did not engage with her desire to pursue something different.
Carrie was critical of the careers support the school offered… but couldn't’t see anything different
The teachers too recognised a problem.
Here it is the schools position within the education market that limits choice. This example shows the impact that a school can have when young people like Carrie emerge, vocational routes were promoted to strengthen league tables and the number of student recruited onto courses.
But there are many fields of influence ! Family, community, peers, work...
In your neighborhood it may be different?
There are many theorists you can use to understand structures that reproduce disadvantage/advantage in your lives/studies
Bourdieu is useful because he has these thinking tools but there are many
Be creative !
A new report by Ofsted (2016) ‘Getting ready for Work’ highlights the lack of focus schools are giving to good quality and impartial careers guidance but the marketization of education will limit the extent to which guidance can truly be impartial
Willis and Bourdieu have Spanish translations!
