Place matters: young people’s transitions to the labour market.

Career guidance is a core element of labour market and education policy. Young people’s transitions from education to employment need support through active career guidance. This body of research examines aspects of place and partnership working as it applies to career policy and practice for young people with a particular focus on the role of schools. The engagement of diverse partners from different sectors and interests has become an essential element of public policy and its implementation. To understand partnership working it is critical to pay attention to the relationship between the selection of partners, their combined remit, the scale of their activities and the diverse places in which they emerge. Many of the issues that policy attempts to address are also shaped by, and in, the places in which they are experienced. The research informing these papers has been undertaken as either academic research projects or as funded research over more than two decades. Many have used place-based case studies. The overall finding of this is that deliberative multi-partner engagement has become essential to the provision of pathways to the labour market that would otherwise be blocked for some young people. The centre of gravity in these discussions is the school. As organisations with a geographic footprint, the active engagement of schools in partnerships builds infrastructures, pathways and new spaces of engagement that help their pupils understand the work place. Through the twin policy paths of territorial economic development policy and a progressive socio-political approach to career guidance, policy makers have endowed schools with this responsibility. Schools are spaces of engagement with a wider world and simultaneously they are places that reflect their economic, social and cultural context. Their role as partner and place-maker needs acknowledgement within any national careers strategy that hopes to connect a spatially sensitive industrial policy with a locally enacted careers and labour market policy.