Moving away or staying local: the role of locality in young people's 'spatial horizons' and career aspirations

Social mobility has been a central tenet of UK Government public policy, viewed as a silver bullet to creating a socially just and fair' society as well as an economically successful one. Within policy discourse young people's aspirations are deemed of critical importance to achieving educational success and in turn social mobility. However, within both popular and policy rhetoric place attachment' is routinely posited as a serious hindrance to successful realisation of aspiration, putatively because it embeds young people in place' (e.g. a particular community or geographical location) and prevents them from accessing employment in national labour markets. This paper, however, problematises the notion that place attachment' and spatial mobility' are necessarily mutually exclusive. Calling on data from a qualitative study of young people's aspirations in two distinctive regions of South Wales, UK, the analyses reveal that despite the largely localised imagined futures' of these young people they held very high' aspirations for professional forms of employment, which for some young people meant moving away from home and locality in order to achieve. The paper calls for a rethinking of how young people's aspirations are conceptualised both in government policy and academic research.