An Assessment of Young People in Jobs Without Training (JWT)

Increasing the participation of 16 to 24 year olds in education or training is currently high on the political agenda. The current government recently set out its strategy on how it plans to put in place reforms of schools, vocational education, skills and welfare provision to maximise young people’s participation rates in its Building Engagement, Building Futures strategy paper (BIS, DWP and DfE, 2011). A key change includes raising the participation age (RPA) from September 2013, as part of which all young people will have to continue in some form of education or training until they reach the age of 17. This will be raised to the age of 18 from September 2015.

A lot of research has been conducted exploring the reasons for young people being not in education, employment or training (NEET), but much less is known about those working in jobs without training (JWT)- how will they be affected by the forthcoming policy changes?

Working in collaboration with Sue Maguire and Sarah Golden, Thomas Spielhofer (Senior Researcher at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations) has just published a paper which draws on several relevant studies providing an insight into this group of young people.

Click here to read the full paper.