'I just want a job' : what do we really know about young people in jobs without training?

Over recent years, a central concern of policy has been to drive up post-16 participation rates in full-time education and address the needs of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). As a result, young people who enter work which is classified as 'without training' at 16/17 have largely been ignored. However, the decision to Raise the Participation Age (RPA) for continuing in learning for all 17-year olds from 2013 and for all 18-year olds from 2015 in England, together with a growing unease about the impact of the current recession on youth unemployment rates, have revived interest in the 'jobs without training' (JWT) group. This paper draws on the findings from two studies: first, a qualitative study in two contrasting local labour markets, of young people in JWT, together with their employers and parents; and second, an evaluation of the Learning Agreement Pilots (LAP), which was the first policy initiative in England targeted at the JWT group. Both studies reveal a dearth of understanding about early labour market entrants and a lack of policy intervention and infrastructure to support the needs of the JWT group throughout the UK. From this, it is concluded that questionable assumptions have been made about the composition and the aspirations of young people in JWT, and their employers, on the basis of little or no evidence. As a consequence, a policy 'quick fix' to satisfy the RPA agenda will not easily be achieved. If the decision to raise the participation age is adopted also by the Welsh and Scottish parliaments, similar challenges may have to be faced

Where do young people work?

The current policy intention, that all young people remain in some form of accredited education or training to the age of 18 by 2015, poses significant challenges. The jobs without training (JWT) group includes young people who are in full-time work and not in receipt of training leading to National Vocational Qualification level 2 (or above); knowing more about them and meeting their needs will be crucial for the delivery of the Raising of the Participation Age agenda. This paper presents findings from a study of the JWT group, from the perspective of employers, which formed part of wider research including policymakers, young people and their parents. It concludes that the label JWT fails to describe the heterogeneity of this group and the needs of those who employ them. If routes into the labour market remain open to 16- and 17-year-olds, attention must be given to supporting young people's transitions through a more active role in job placement and securing greater support for formalised training

Barriers to participation in education and training

This study explores the barriers and constraints young people currently face when deciding what to do at the end of their compulsory schooling in Year 11. The study conducted by the NFER, working in partnership with Triangle and QA Research, included a survey of 2029 young people who completed Year 11 in either 2008 or 2009 conducted between August and October 2009. This survey was supplemented by interviews with booster samples of 519 young people across specific sub-groups and 102 parent interviews

Not Just Cyberwarfare

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015Bringsjord and Licato provide a general meta-argument that cyberwarfare is so different from traditional kinetic warfare that no argument from analogy can allow the just war theory of Augustine and Aquinas (hereinafter called JWT) to be pulled over from traditional (modern) warfare to cyberwarfare. I believe that this meta- argument is sound and that it applies not just to cyberwarfare: in particular, on my reading of the meta-argument, argument from analogy has never been adequate to allow JWT to be applied to the kind of warfare that we are familiar with now.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Jus Ad Bellum after 9/11: A State of the Art Report

An examination of the applicability of conventional and revisionist just war principles to the global war on terror

Understanding Ordinary Women: Advertising, Consumer Research and Mass Consumption in Britain, 1948-67

This paper reflects on the ways market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the ?mass housewife? in the 1950s and 60s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising and how it sought to understand the ordinary housewife and her consumption habits. In exploring JWT London?s approach to the ?mass market? housewife, the paper draws on recent sociological arguments about advertising and market research that have conceptualized these commercial practices as technologies or socio-technical devices for ?making-up? the consumer; that is, devices for formatting and framing consumer dispositions. In particular I draw on the work of Michel Callon and Peter Miller and Nicholas Rose. In doing so, however, the paper also seeks to revise certain aspects of these sociological accounts. Firstly, the paper proposes a more differentiated sense of the various marketing and market research paradigms that were used by advertising agencies. Secondly, the paper seeks to bring a more international and specifically trans-Atlantic dimension to the understanding of post-war market research. One notable feature of post-war market research in Britain was the influence of commercial techniques first formulated in the United States, including applied psychological knowledge. Like many other aspects of advertising in the 1950s and 60s, market research moved in an eastward direction across the Atlantic. JWT London?s parent company was an important player in this world and through its offices on both sides of the Atlantic it helped to disseminate research methods and techniques first pioneered in the USA to Britain. These US-derived techniques formed a visible presence within post-war British market research and constituted a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. Of course, this influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged. Staff at JWT?s London office, like colleagues elsewhere in British advertising, selectively appropriated and reworked elements of US market research, frequently combining it with more indigenous traditions of social research. Nonetheless, even as they rejected elements of ?American? approaches to consumer they still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period

The Feynman problem and Fermionic entanglement: Fermionic theory versus qubit theory

The present paper is both a review on the Feynman problem, and an original research presentation on the relations between Fermionic theories and qubits theories, both regarded in the novel framework of operational probabilistic theories. The most relevant results about the Feynman problem of simulating Fermions with qubits are reviewed, and in the light of the new original results the problem is solved. The answer is twofold. On the computational side the two theories are equivalent, as shown by Bravyi and Kitaev (Ann. Phys. 298.1 (2002): 210-226). On the operational side the quantum theory of qubits and the quantum theory of Fermions are different, mostly in the notion of locality, with striking consequences on entanglement. Thus the emulation does not respect locality, as it was suspected by Feynman (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21.6 (1982): 467-488).Comment: 46 pages, review about the "Feynman problem". Fixed many typo

Nonparametric identification of dynamic models with unobserved state variables

We consider the identification of a Markov process {W t, X t*} for t=1,2,...,T when only {W t} for t=1, 2,..,T is observed. In structural dynamic models, W t denotes the sequence of choice variables and observed state variables of an optimizing agent, while X t* denotes the sequence of serially correlated state variables. The Markov setting allows the distribution of the unobserved state variable X t* to depend on W t-1 and X t-1 *. We show that the joint distribution of (W t, X t*, W t-1 , X t-1 *) is identified from the observed distribution of (W t+1 , W t, W t-1 , W t-2 , W t-3 ) under reasonable assumptions. Identification of the joint distribution of (W t, X t*, W t-1 , X t-1 *) is a crucial input in methodologies for estimating dynamic models based on the "conditional-choice-probability (CCP)" approach pioneered by Hotz and Miller.