Conversation with Professor Sharon Gewirtz, King's College London
A conversation between Sharon Gewirtz, Professor of Education and co-director of the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London, and Alex Thornton, Director at Kantar Public.
Professor Sharon Gewirtz
Alex Thornton
The Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR) is a multi-disciplinary research centre, committed to using research to inform national and international public policy debate.
Its research is organised around four programmes of work: equality and social justice; knowledge, values and ethics at work; governance, accountability and public service quality; and children youth and society.
The CPPR sits within the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London.
In this interview, Professor Sharon Gewirtz talks about some of her projects including Young Lives, Young Futures which Kantar Public are involved in. Her work aims to understand and address inequalities in young people’s access to good quality education, training, and employment.
Sharon highlights the need for policymakers to incorporate the perspectives of young people so as to ensure that education policy is more sensitive to their diverse views and needs.
Sharon has published extensively on issues of equality and social justice, public sector restructuring, education reform, the policy process, and values in social research.
Alex: Could you tell us about your current work at the CPPR at King’s College and your research interests in relation to young people?
Sharon: Much of our work deals with questions of values and ethics in the design and delivery of public services. It seeks to understand and respond to inequalities in access to, and experiences of, education, health and social care, and other areas of public service provision.
Alongside my colleagues, I work in collaboration with policy makers and policy actors of various kinds, to ensure that the research we do is as relevant as possible, and can help inform their work and agendas.
My current research with colleagues at King’s College London and the Edge Foundation, the Young Lives, Young Futures project, is concerned with the experiences of the 50% of young people in England who don’t go to university.1
We are interested in understanding how inequalities in access to good quality vocational education and training, employment and support for these young people are produced and experienced.
We are also looking at what alternative policies and practices might be put in place to tackle these inequalities and ensure that education systems and the people who work in them are more responsive to the diversity of young people’s experiences and values about worthwhile life courses.
This project - which includes the longitudinal survey that Kantar Public is working on with us, alongside more in-depth qualitative case studies - is being conducted in partnership with young people and a range of policy and practice organisations with an interest in this agenda.
In our current research we are particularly interested in helping policymakers develop greater insight into the perspectives of young people who are rarely consulted when education policies are being formulated. This includes those who are not in education, employment, or training.
The idea here is to help ensure that policy is more sensitive to the diversity of young people’s views and needs, and more likely to be successful in bringing about more navigable education-to-work transitions and more equal access to high-quality education and employment opportunities.
The idea here is to help ensure that policy is more sensitive to the diversity of young people’s views and needs
To this end we are working in partnership with the Department for Education, and a range of third sector organisations with an interest in supporting these transitions, as well as an advisory group of young people.
Alex: How well do you think the education system prepares young people for the world of work?
Sharon: This is a difficult question to answer because both education settings and workplaces are so very diverse which means that it is difficult to generalise about how well the system as a whole is doing. But also, of course, if education was to be solely directed towards work as it is today, it would likely be ineffective, because work and life continually evolve: it is difficult to predict the kinds of expertise and dispositions required for the work of the future.
It would also impoverish the inherent value of education in helping young people to live meaningful lives beyond the world of work: to develop meaningful relationships; think and act independently and critically in relation to issues of social, moral and political importance; and develop a lifelong love of learning.
Moreover, we might want to question the idea that education and work are distinct entities, and rethink and enrich some work settings to make them learning settings too. In other words, find ways of shaping work more around learning, rather than vice versa.
There can be clear economic benefits of doing so, as well as benefits to worker well-being. So, part of the remit of our current research is to identify examples of existing good practice in the creation of more ‘learner friendly’ workplaces, and think about how these might be scaled up.
Having said this, we are also interested in how school education can better value, celebrate and enable a broader range of capabilities - as so much of mainstream education tends only to be suited to a narrow range of work, with the majority of courses preparing people for further academic study in the subject, rather than the more practical jobs they might want to pursue.
This problem has been exacerbated in recent years with the introduction of reforms designed to make the curriculum more academically ‘rigorous’. These have meant fewer students taking more practical subjects, such as design and technology, physical education, music and drama. The practical elements of some of these subjects have also been reduced, resulting in a significant narrowing of the school curriculum.
Alex: In what ways do you think the COVID-19 pandemic has affected transitions from education into work?
During Covid-19 lockdowns, young people on vocational courses who had been looking forward to accessing more hands-on practical training found the shift to remote learning especially challenging.
Sharon: This is another question we are exploring as part of the five-year project, Young Lives, Young Futures, which launched in April 2021. Although it is too early to draw any conclusions from the study, our preliminary analysis of the data collected from its qualitative strand suggests that the pandemic has had a substantial impact on young people’s lives and transitions.
This data was collected during sustained periods of lockdown, and while some young people had enjoyed the shift to remote learning, others told us that they had struggled, finding it difficult to stay focused without being able to ask for help in person.
Those on vocational courses who had been looking forward to accessing more hands-on practical training – but instead had been confined to classroom-style learning – found the shift especially challenging.2
Concerns about the digital divide also featured prominently, with some young people unable to access the technologies, such as a laptop and broadband connection, required to participate in their classes.
Our research participants – both young people and education practitioners – also spoke of their concerns about the impact of Covid-19 on the youth labour market, with many of the young people expressing anxiety about their futures.
The lack of good quality employment opportunities for young people has long been a problem in the UK, but the economic impact of the pandemic has exacerbated this. The sectors in which young people are most likely to work, such as hospitality and retail, are those that have been most severely impacted by Covid-19, with young black workers disproportionately affected.3
The impact of the pandemic on young people’s mental health was also a significant theme. Alongside education and employment related anxieties, some of the young people told us that they were finding it difficult to cope with feelings of isolation.
The practitioners we interviewed who were involved in supporting young people, expressed particular concern about the impact of successive lockdowns on the mental health of those who most relied on in-person interactions for support and safeguarding.
Alex: What role does education play in reducing inequalities and supporting social mobility?
Sharon: A typical response from a critical sociologist of education such as me would be to say that education – at least in its current dominant form – rather than reducing inequalities, helps to reproduce them.
There is, for example, a wealth of research showing that what is taught in schools and how it is taught and assessed, alongside organisational practices – such as putting students in different classes according to assessments of their ability, or the methods used to steer students into different education pathways.
White middle-class students have disproportionately benefitted some groups over disadvantaged, minoritised and working-class students, both in terms of educational experiences and outcomes.
Critical sociologists of education would likely also want to challenge both the value and possibility of social mobility, as dominant notions of social mobility tend to rest on a picture of more people standing a chance of getting to the top of hierarchies when many such hierarchies might be better dissolved.
For example, one might ask whether there should be such a substantial income and power gap between the heads of organisations and employees, or whether investment bankers or lawyers should earn so much more than care workers or teaching assistants.
But having noted that important critique, it is also important to investigate real world possibilities for organising things differently to reduce inequalities in educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes, as well as inequalities in how different educational routes and employment opportunities are valued and rewarded.
Alex: Finally, what would you say are the greatest challenges for young people about to leave education or training? And how can public policies and programmes best address these?
Sharon: The challenges in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and, more generally, the limited availability of well-paid, secure, and satisfying jobs for young people, especially in the deindustrialised North and coastal communities, and their unequal distribution, are among the most significant ones facing young people.
Yet many of the current policy solutions are focused on individualised supply-side solutions - for example, addressing assumed deficits in young people’s ‘employment readiness’ - rather than addressing deficits in the structure of the labour market.
A more holistic policy approach would encompass both improved support for young people looking for work, including good quality apprenticeships, education and training, and the supply of more equitably distributed, high-quality job opportunities.
But I would argue that there is also scope for policymakers to take more seriously some of the important ideas coming out of the ‘anti-work’ movement and its imaginings of what a ‘post-work’ future might look like.
Those working in this tradition argue that increased automatisation will inevitably result in insufficient work to go around, that the problem of unemployment is not unemployment per se but the centrality of work in contemporary society, and that life with less work could be more fulfilling because it leaves more time for leisure and communal activities.
It may be that anti-work advocates underestimate the importance of work as a source of identity, fulfilment and wellbeing for many people.
Nevertheless, policies that enable shorter working hours, expanded rights of leave and guaranteed income schemes, have a potentially important role to play – not only in distributing work more fairly, but also in contributing to more healthy work-life balances and a society in which leisure and forms of non-waged work, such as care work, are more highly valued.
References and notes
1. The Edge Foundation is an independent foundation working to inspire the UK education system to give all young people the knowledge, skills and behaviours they need to flourish in their future life and work.
2. Vocational courses are training programmes that focus on equipping people with practical skillsets that are required to work as a technician or take up employment in a skilled occupation, craft or trade. Vocational education typically places less emphasis on traditional academic learning.
3. According to analysis of ONS statistics conducted by the Guardian in April 2021, more than 40% of 16-24 year old black people were unemployed, an unemployment rate that is three times higher than for white workers of the same age.
