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to return to learning. Above all, education and learning must be relevant and
meaningful to the learner, though their reasons for engagement may be very different.
2. We need to think much more about public sector support for vocational training,
labour market and enterprise initiatives. Many young people now find themselves
excluded from the private sector competitive labour market. Neither they, nor
society, wants them to live without ‘occupation’ or on welfare, nor do we want to
contemplate some kind of ‘custodial democracy’ (as being advocated by some in
the USA) whereby we secure safe lives by the massive incarceration of others.
Serious attention to public programmes of work for the young unemployed, and
wider attention to ‘work-life balance’ for the employed is urgently required.
3. We must look at the idea of ‘purposeful’ leisure-time activity for young people. This
does not necessarily have to be either organised or accredited! But it must be
concerned with enabling young people not to opt for more destructive life-style
choices, such as substance misuse or criminality.
4. Throughout young people’s lives, we must be looking at supporting shared
experiences with others: those from both privileged and less advantaged
backgrounds, those from different faiths and ethnic backgrounds, those from urban
and rural areas.
5. There need to be timely services for young people facing ‘problems’ in their lives.
6. There need to be timely responses to young people creating ‘problems’ in their lives.
7. Finally, we must pay much more serious attention to the question of access routes
to opportunity and experience. We must do more than simply provide an enabling
context (“you can join in if you want to”) and think of ways of providing an
ensuring context (“this is what all young people should have a taste of”).
The Milltown Boys
In 1973, I accidentally met a group of young teenagers from a ‘disadvantaged
neighbourhood’. I spent five years with them, partly as a youth worker, partly as a researcher.
I ‘hung around’ with them at all hours of the day. They were an early group of the
‘disengaged’. They left school with very few, and usually no qualifications. They all had
criminal records.
In 2000, 27 years later, I followed up a significant number of the ‘Milltown Boys’. I
learned that seven (out of 67) were already dead, before the age of 40. None of them had
died from natural causes. On the other hand, about a third had done quite well, so I noted in
the introduction to my book (Williamson 2004) that their story is as much a celebration of
success as a commiseration with failure. But it is also a miserable story – one of long term
unemployment, criminality, addictions, broken relationships, loss of contact with children,
and so on. I am convinced that, had stronger policy reached these individuals during their
younger days, many more could have been helped on to a more positive pathway through
their lives.
Without any support, many of the Milltown Boys still have to try to live a life. As Cloward
and Ohlin (1960) reported, young people react in different ways to what they called ‘blocked
opportunity structures’. Some (a considerable proportion) turn to crime, to realise
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