Introduction

The chapters of this book have built up a picture of youth employability training in the UK as framed by powerful national policy discourses, translated through regional policy strategies into a variety of entry route schemes, operationalized in practice by trainers, local employers providing work experience, and experienced by young people from wide-ranging and diverse social and educational backgrounds. Building our picture of youth employability training has required drawing together critical and historical analyses of national and regional youth employment and training policies, and the debates and controversies around these, with our on-the-ground ethnographic research. Plaiting these together, we have explored the complex landscapes of youth employability training to fulfil three aims: to investigate what it is like for young people to undergo employability training as a pathway into work in the current context in the UK; to capture the voices, strategies and motivations of local policy makers, training providers and young people; and to contribute theoretically to understanding of youth employability policy and training. In terms of the latter, we have adopted the theoretical lens of a post-Foucauldian governmentality approach, which has proved valuable in informing the way in which we have approached and analyzed the ‘discursive field:’ the national and regional policy spaces where the ‘problems’ of youth employability and training are identified and solutions proposed, as well as the ‘interventionist practices’, as demonstrated in the four training programmes investigated through our empirical research.

What the post-Foucauldian emphasis on the power–knowledge relationship between the contemporary, dominant framing of policy on young people, un/employment and skills, and the ensuing technologies of youth governance foregrounds most dramatically is the pervasive force of neoliberalism. This operates as an overarching, structuring discourse that articulates through the ways that young people's transitions into and within the labour market are constructed and experienced. Resonating throughout our analyses are the ways in which the free-market logic seeps into every encounter by young people with education, training and work, structuring both the ‘getting in’ and the ‘getting on’.