New patterns of youth transition in education

Current research provides evidence that new relationships are being forged between youth and education. Increased participation in post-compulsory education, combinations of work and study and uncertain career outcomes have become common experiences. There is an emerging disparity between the stated goals of education and the changing priorities and choices of young people. In particular, the linear notion of transitions, expressed in the metaphors of pathways used in policy documents, is increasingly at odds with the patterns of life experienced by young people in many nations. Three themes stand out in the research on young people in the 1990s. First, an awareness of foreclosed options in educational outcomes is a consistent thread across a range of studies. Secondly, there is a discernible shift by the end of the 1990s toward more complex life-patterns and a blending or balancing of a range of personal priorities and interests. Thirdly, the need to give 'active voice' to young people about the dramatic social and economic changes they have been subjected to, is unmistakable in the light of the increasing disparity between the rhetoric of youth and education policy and their own experience of its outcomes.