'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

The question of ‘alternatives’ within food and drink markets and marketing: introduction to the special issue

The question of 'alternatives' within food and drink markets and marketing: introduction to the special issu

Status Crystallization, Social Attitudes, and Powerlessness Within a Student Population

The threefold purpose of this chapter is: (1) to briefly discuss the history of scholarly thought on the subject of social inequality, (2) to make a distinction between social differentiation and social stratification, and (3) within the context of the two former objectives to introduce the subject of status crystallization

Irish Plan offers European Roadmap to Improve Teaching

How do you improve teaching quality in higher education? It’s a question that is never too far from the headlines as students, parents and politicians demand more from universities. Publishing more data appears to be the UK’s favoured approach in recent times, with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework adding to other data sets available on student satisfaction and graduate employment rates. Tougher regulation, more student participation in curriculum design or asking industry to step into the classroom are a few other approaches tried in some quarters

Evidence of Muddy Knowledge in Reaching for the Stars: Creating Novel Endings for Event Sequences

This experiment examines people’s ability to invent creative outcomes to simple event sequences. We report a study where participants are given everyday event descriptions and asked to describe either a predictable outcome (Predictable group) or a creative outcome (Creative group). Following the Creative Cognition approach (Finke, Ward & Smith, 1992), we expected that though those instructed to be creative might generate novel and interesting outcomes, they would also be bound by their knowledge of the outcomes that typically occur. The results support this prediction, in that while the Creative group manifested more inventive variability in their outcomes relative to the Predictable group, their proposed outcomes still overlapped in part with those of the Predictable group. These results show that although creativity may take people beyond their knowledge, they can never fully break free from that knowledge

A study of the social and physical environment in catering kitchens and the role of the chef in promoting positive health and safety behaviour

This is the account of a mixed method study of chefs and their kitchens in order to identify the nature of their workplace and how this affects their ability to manage health and safety in the kitchen. It included extended periods of observation, monitoring of physical parameters, analysis of records of reported accidents, and a series of reflexive interviews. The findings were integrated and then fed back in a smaller number of second interviews in order to test whether the findings fitted in with the chefs' understanding of their world. Major factors identified included survival in a market environment, the status of the chef (and the kitchen) within organisations, marked autocracy of chefs, and an increasing tempo building up to service time with commensurate heat, noise, and activity. In particular during the crescendo, a threshold shift in risk tolerance was identified. The factors, their interplay, and their implications for health and safety in the catering kitchen are discussed

A Cognitive Model of Surprise Judgements

In this paper we outline a cognitive theory and model of surprise judgements which aims to explain how and why some events are considered to be surprising in a piece of text , while others are not. The model is based on a series of experiments carried out by Grimes-Maguire and Keane (2005a), which show that subtle changes in the predictability of a discourse can have a profound effect on a reader’s perceived surprise at certain events. Rather than defining surprise in terms of expectation, we conceive of it as a process involving Representation-Fit. We have implemented this theory in a computational model that has two stages: the Integration stage entails building a coherent representation of the scenario by means of an objective knowledge base rooted in WordNet. The Analysis stage then outputs a surprise rating for a specified event, based on the degree to which that event can be supported by the prior representation. Simulations reveal a strong correspondence between model and participant generated surprise ratings