The Context of the Youth Training Scheme: an analysis of its strategy and development

Abstract

The Youth Training Scheme (YTS) owes its existence to the political opportunities created by youth unemployment and it retains unemployment‐relatedas well as training‐related objectives. This paper investigates the tensions between these two sets of objectives. Because YTS attempts to innovatefrom the bottom up, it risks entrapment in a ‘vicious circle’ of low status. Thecurrent YTS strategy assumes that the employment prospects of YTS trainees, and the effective dissemination of YTS and its training philosophy, both depend primarily on the content and quality of YTS training. The paper argues, by contrast, that both depend primarily on the context of YTS‐‐its relation to the structure of educational differentiation and to processes of recruitment and selection in the labour market‐‐and very little on its content. High quality training alone is unlikely to enable YTS to break the vicious circle of low status and achieve its broader training objectives. This is only likely to be achieved either through pro...