Post-16 Transitions: a Longitudinal Study of Young People with ...

ordination these young people need (and that they have
experienced pre-16) actually survives the transition phase.
• The second group of young people are those with less welldefined
or evident needs eg less severe learning difficulties,
and behavioural, emotional or social development needs who
effectively form part of a broader population of educational
low-attainers. They are most likely to have attended
mainstream schools, are less likely to have had statements of
SEN or well-defined transition pathways, and the level of
statutory support they have received to date appears to be
low. Many have left education and have entered or are seeking
to enter the bottom end of the labour market. The issue for
these people is whether the mainstream ‘systems’ within
which they operate, including the education system and the
labour market, are sufficiently powerful to overcome the
(sometimes significant) difficulties that these young people
face. There is considerable evidence already that this may not
be the case.
Of course there is a much larger group of young people who fall
between these two groups. These young people have a range of
special educational needs, including communication and
interaction, and cognition and learning difficulties. These may or
may not be attributed to various ‘conditions’ or to more contested
and less ‘visible’ impairments. They may or may not have had a
statement of SEN, may well not have had any significant
involvement from other agencies and constitute a population for
whom transition pathways are less well defined, or understood.
The issues for this group of young people are likely to centre
around the appropriateness of the available transition pathways
that they are following, and the level and effectiveness of such
support as is available.
This study has reported the experiences of young people two
years after they have completed statutory schooling. Given that
these young people are likely to take time to work their way
through the transition process and that many of them are
experiencing what might be called a ‘deferred transition’, it is too
early to reach conclusive judgements about the quality and
effectiveness of the processes they are experiencing, or the
outcomes they have achieved. It is likely to become clearer in
successive waves of research whether what is happening is a slow
and steady progression towards a meaningful and productive
adulthood, a largely non-productive process of ‘churning’ and
stagnation, or a complex mixture of the two.
xiii