Table Of ContentLost Generation?
Also available from Continuum
Overschooled but Undereducated, John Abbot, Heather
MacTaggart and Prue Leith
Killing Thinking, Mary Evans
Lost Generation?
New strategies for youth
and education
MARTIN ALLEN AND
PATRICK AINLEY
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704
11 York Road New York, NY 10038
London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
© Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage
or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of
this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781441134707 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Martin, 1955-
Lost generation? : new strategies for youth and education /
Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-3470-7 (pbk.)
1. Education–Economic aspects–Great Britain. 2. Youth–
Employment–Great Britain. 3. Labor supply–Effect
of education on–Great Britain. 4. School-to-work
transition–Great Britain. I. Ainley, Patrick. II. Title.
LC67.G7A45 2010
338.4’7370941–dc22
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: New term, September 2009 1
1 From Jobs without Education to Education without Jobs 13
2 Overtested and Undereducated 45
3 Overqualifi ed and Underemployed 69
4 Lost in Transition or Transition Lost? 103
5 New Directions for Youth and Education 131
Afterword 163
References 171
Index 183
Acknowledgements
Matthew Cheeseman for the many suggestions he made, only
some of which we have been able to add – we should have talked
to him sooner as he probably knows more about English under-
graduate experience than anyone else no longer living it. Lorraine
Petersen for also kindly reading the draft all through – any remain-
ing errors are not her responsibility. Also, other students and
former-students at the University of Greenwich and elsewhere
– including on Facebook – who have shared their opinions and
experiences with us. Beulah and Adam.
My sixth-form economics students and their efforts to make
sense of the current global crisis. Colleagues and comrades in the
National Union of Teachers. To J for curiosity and providing a dif-
ferent take. To friends, family and, in particular, a teenager, or two.
vi
Introduction
New term, September 2009
No one would seriously claim that the rush of applicants for UK
university and college places in summer 2009 represented a new
found enthusiasm amongst the nation’s youth for higher learning.
Nor that it was the triumphant achievement of the New Labour
government’s long-held goal for half of 18–30 year olds to be in
some sort of higher education by 2010. In fact, the government
had refused to fund the necessary increase in places and was later
to fi ne those institutions that offered them.
Nor could it be claimed that the record levels of qualifi cation
of the applicants for undergraduate degrees that reached unprec-
edented proportions of top passes (67.1per cent A-C at A-level)
– represented a new accumulation of knowledge or wisdom when
the publication of rising GCSE and A-level scores and their Scots
equivalents are annually dismissed by a media chorus with the
insensitive label of ‘dumbing down’. Indeed, grade infl ation is
recognised by all but government, university Vice Chancellors
and the heads of exam boards. These are the same vested interests
for whom the queues of would-be students willing to pay, only
encouraged those in the elite universities who want to raise fees
still higher – perhaps to whatever the market will bear.
It is surely not coincidental that widespread allegations of
‘diploma devaluation’ coincided with widening participation to
post-compulsory further and higher education and accompanied
1
Lost Generation?
supposedly rising standards in compulsory schooling. This paradox
is explored and explained in this book. Similarly, social mobility
is known to have decreased at the same time as participation
has been widened to higher education. There are also consider-
able doubts about whether levels of non-computer literacy and
numeracy have risen at all. A generation of students and teachers
at school, college and university are working harder, but not
necessarily learning more.
Another paradox whose resolution is also becoming clear to
the growing number of disillusioned educators and educated
alike, is that in important respects, society is not learning at all but
the culture becoming more ignorant and irrational. It is not just
that teaching to tests may not, after all, have improved literacy
and numeracy when student standards of spelling and maths
are slipping. More importantly, largely corporately owned mass
media daily plumb new depths of banality and sensation, whilst
a self-destructive society is stuck in recession and slides towards
ecological catastrophe. This is perhaps the gravest indictment
that can be made of the education system since the prime role of
institutionalised learning in any society should be to critically learn
from the past to discover new knowledge that can contribute to
altering social behaviour in the future.
Hope triumphed over experience in the willingness of would-
be students to rack up record debts for student fees and loans in
expectation that they would be repaid with professional salaries
in three or more years’ time. The experience this ignored was
that of those graduating a few months earlier in record numbers
to another media chorus greeting them as ‘the lost generation’ of
graduates without jobs. They were the fi rst to have paid the new
higher fees and therefore left higher education with record levels
of debt. The desperate hope of many of the new applicants and
their parents – along with other not so young people who also
applied – was that the economy would soon recover from the
recession into which it had plunged the year before and business
as usual would soon be resumed, a bandwagon joined often by
pure panic at the lack of any other alternative.
2
Introduction
Overtested and undereducated
To understand how this situation came about, our fi rst chapter
recounts the history of education and training in England since the
war. To do this it compresses the account we presented in our 2007
book Education make you fi ck, innit? which was written mainly for
Education Studies students but is here précised for a more general
readership. We move on from the past to the middle three chapters
which look at the present before advancing an alternative future
in the last chapter.
Chapter 2 then looks at the testing regime that has been imposed
on England’s schools and colleges and which is now sinking under
its own weight. We explain how and why this is happening and
we look at its consequences which are endemic to the whole
system of education and training. One consequence is the culture
of plagiarism shared across education. Another is that competi-
tion between schools, parents and students has generated a new
cramming industry of private tuition on and off line, adding to the
national obsession with passing tests and taking exams.
We also explain how it happened that under New Labour, while
being ‘over tested’ and assessed as never before, many young peo-
ple, despite their prolonged period in formal education, can also
be considered ‘undereducated’. For the large majority of students
– and their teachers who, instead of being autonomous profession-
als, have become the directed deliverers of a product – education
has become a mechanical and instrumental affair. Students learn
what they have to, when they have to and in many cases by
whatever means they have to. The perception of this situation
is not lost upon them, as a fi nal year Education Studies student
at the University of Greenwich summarised in his investigation
project in 2004:
Students learn to connect their self esteem and what they may
achieve in later life to their exam results . . . Over-assessment has
made subject knowledge and understanding a thing of the past as
students are put through a routine year after year, practising what
exactly to write and where in preparation for exams.
3
