The Transition from School to Work and the Recession: evidence from the Scottish School Leavers Surveys, 1977‐1983

This paper uses data from the Scottish School Leavers Surveys to investigate trends in the transition from school at a time of deepening recession. The main change observed is the collapse of employment between 1979 and 1983. The paper also describes trends in the distribution of school‐leaver employment, in its industrial and occupational composition, in patterns of movement in the youth labour market and in the role of special programmes. Some of its general conclusions challenge ideas current among some British sociologists. First, youth unemployment (at least among recent school leavers) is no longer significantly connected with patterns of subemployment or frequent job‐changing. Secondly, unemployment has not fundamentally changed the ‘selective function’ of education; credentials have retained their labour‐market value in relative if not in absolute terms. Thirdly, the recent rise in school‐leaver unemployment is very largely a result of the recession—the decline in the aggregate demand for labour—rather than of underlying structural changes that disadvantage young people; most recent changes in the transition from school to work are in principle reversible if the recession ends. The paper assesses the implications of these findings for the sociology of education, and concludes with a discussion of the possible impact of the Youth Training Scheme.