school to work transitions

How have young people’s routes from school to work changed over the past 30 years?

In recent years there has been growing concern about the number of young people failing to make a successful transition from education into employment.  Increasingly, this appears to be a structural, rather than cyclical, problem. We see evidence of this from that fact that although youth unemployment in the UK was falling in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it started rising again as early as 2004, long before the general downturn in the economy.

What young English people do once they reach school-leaving age: a cross-cohort comparison for the last 30 years

This paper examines how young people’s early transitions into the labour market have changed between cohorts born in 1958, 1970, 1980, and 1990. We use sequence analysis to characterise transition patterns and identify three distinct pathways in all cohorts. An ‘Entering the Labour Market’ group has declined significantly in size (from 91% in the earliest cohort, to 37% in the most recent), an ‘Accumulating Human Capital’ group has grown in its place (from 4% to 51%), but also a ‘Potential Cause for Concern’ group has grown alongside this, reaching 12% in the most recent cohort.