Education, Work and Social Change (PDF)

Robin Simmons is Professor of Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning and Social Justice at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is co-author of NEET Young People and Training for Work: Learning on the Margins.

Ron Thompson is Principal Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is co-author of NEET Young People and Training for Work: Learning on the Margins.

Lisa Russell is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is also author of Understanding Pupil Resistance - Integrating Gender, Ethnicity and Class: an Educational Ethnography.

"Education, Work and Social Change is an enlightening read and would appeal to anyone interested in social policy, education and youth employment." - LSE Review of Books

"This book is a delight to read. Simmons, Thompson and Russell have produced a text that is both empirically grounded and theoretically informed. The case studies of the young people interviewed provide a moving authenticity. The authors confirm the message of several previous studies in this area. The problems of youth marginalisation lie in the intersection of the structural and personal. This is sociology at its best, as C. Wright Mills put it, at the junctions of history and biography and of private troubles and public issues. It should be read by all politicians, journalists, youth workers and students seeking to understand some of issues surrounding marginalised young people." - Dr Ian Finlay, Oxford University Department of Education, UK

"Unlike populist and politically-driven perspectives on young people's lives that portray them as unmitigated 'bundles of pathologies', this book goes beyond conventional explanations and gets up close to young lives. Rather than presenting these young people as 'troublesome', disengagement is revealed as being a much more complex amalgam of poverty, neighbourhood conditions, changing labour markets, a training fallacy, and policy dysfunction. Thus construed, this book provides a refreshing view of re-engagement as being fundamentally about the reclamation of hope. A most enjoyable read!" - John Smyth, Research Professor of Education, Federation University Australia and co-author of Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling

"A real strength of this book lies in how it successfully connects the experiences of marginalised young people with the profound impact that the wider economic and social context has upon their attitudes and behaviours. It provides a well constructed intellectual framework within which to