Introduction
Since the advent of the ‘New Labour’ Government under Tony Blair in spring 1997, public policy in the United Kingdom related to career guidance for young people has been dominated by the issue of social exclusion. In 1998, the Department for Education and Employment introduced a policy of focusing the attention of the Careers Service more strongly on those who had already dropped out of the education, training and employment system, or were at risk of doing so (DfEE, 1998a). Then in 1999 the Government announced, in a report from the Social Exclusion Unit within the Cabinet Office, the details of a new youth support service – incorporating the Careers Service, parts of the youth service and a range of other specialist agencies – designed to address the needs of young people, ‘especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds or experiencing particular difficulties’ (SEU, 1999, p.78). Ministers subsequently indicated that the Careers Service was to disappear as a visible national entity: the statutory duty to provide careers services under the Employment and Training Act 1973 would remain, but would henceforth be delivered through the new youth support service, to be termed the Connexions service (Baroness Blackstone, House of Lords Hansard, 17 February 2000).
 
It is important to note the extent of the policy shift denoted by these measures. Under the previous Conservative Government, the Careers Service had been ‘marketised’ by contracting it out on a competitive tendering basis (Watts, 1995), but the service had been clearly defined as a universal one, addressing the needs of all young people. Indeed, steps had been taken to extend the universal entitlement to cover the earlier years of compulsory schooling as well as the period of transition from school or college (Morris, 1996). Guidance-related programmes designed to address the distinctive needs of young people who had dropped out of the education, training and employment system (see e.g. Ford, n.d.) were mounted largely on the initiative of individual careers services, supported by European funding, and remained marginal to the main officially-endorsed Careers Service provision. Now, under the ‘New Labour’ Government, the marginal programmes have become mainstream, and the service itself is being subsumed within the wider entity which such mainstreaming is seen to require.
 
These changes pose major challenges for the future of career guidance provision for young people in England (rather different approaches are being adopted in the rest of the United Kingdom). The notion of career guidance as an entitlement for all young people, and the extent of the service provided to them, are at risk of being subordinated to the Government’s social exclusion agenda. It is accordingly important to analyse the nature and origin of this agenda, the impact it has had so far on career guidance policy and practice, and the issues which it poses for the future.
 
The concept of social exclusion
‘Social exclusion’ is a new term in British political debates, subsuming and in some eyes replacing the traditional left-wing preoccupations with poverty, inequality and disadvantage. It is defined by Room (1995) as ‘the process of becoming detached from the organisations and communities of which the society is composed and from the rights and obligations that they embody’ (p.243). Its intellectual roots lie in Durkheim’s concern with the ways in which social integration, solidarity and social cohesion can be effected in advanced industrial societies (see Levitas, 1998, ch.9). L’exclusion sociale, and the complementary notion of l’insertion sociale, have been a focus of political debate in France since the 1960s (Silver, 1994). The concept of social exclusion has also exercised a growing influence on social and economic policy within the European Union (see e.g. EC, 1994).
 
The concept is a contested one. Levitas (1998) has pointed out that it is embedded in three different discourses. The first is a redistributionist discourse, primarily focused on poverty, which draws on traditional left-wing concerns with reducing inequality. The second is a moral underclass discourse, centring on the moral and behavioural delinquency of the ‘excluded’ themselves, which draws on American right-wing analyses of the growth of an ‘underclass’ fostered by welfare dependency and moral irresponsibility (see Murray, 1990). The third is a social integrationist discourse, which focuses on participation in paid work as the key to social inclusion.
 
In a careful and detailed analysis of how these discourses have been interwoven in recent UK political debates, Levitas notes that the dominant influence on New Labour Government policy has been the social integrationist discourse, with some moral underclass overtones. Concerns for distributional equality have been marginalised. Instead, social inclusion is defined primarily in terms of participation in paid employment. This is viewed as the key to other social and economic goals, including reduction of crime and of welfare costs. Achieving such participation is seen as the moral responsibility of the individual: the right to work is replaced by the individual’s duty to secure employment or, as a means to this end, to enhance his or her employability through, in particular, participation in education and training. The role of the state is to ensure that all have opportunities for participation in education, training or employment, and to encourage individuals to take advantage of such opportunities through a mixture of ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’. The New Deal and ‘Welfare to Work’ programmes are central parts of the Government’s strategy for carrying out this role.
 
Within this broad policy frame, particular attention has been addressed to young people who have dropped out of the education, training and employment system. The substantial rise in youth unemployment in the late 1970s and 1980s led to a range of youth training schemes, and to a ‘youth training guarantee’ of access to such schemes; the existence of this guarantee was used as a rationale for withdrawing unemployment benefits for 16/17-year-olds. The result was that many young people who were unwilling to take up such a place disappeared from official statistics, and their existence was officially ignored and even, on occasion, denied (Williamson, 2000). A study in South Glamorgan (Rees, Williamson & Istance, 1996) estimated that the local monthly totals of young people in this ‘status zero’ group varied between 16% and 23% of the age cohort. National figures, based on more limited data-sets, have tended to produce figures of around 7-8% (Robinson, 1999).
 
The ‘NEET’ group (not in education, employment or training) is volatile. Many young people change tracks frequently, moving in and out of school, college, training schemes, jobs, and being unemployed (see e.g. Hodkinson, Sparkes & Hodkinson, 1996). Youth Cohort Study data indicated that in their first two years after the end of compulsory schooling, 6% of young people were NEET for more than six months in total, and that 4% had more than one NEET spell. Only 1% of the cohort were NEET throughout the two years (Payne, 2000).
 
The policy concern for social exclusion is not confined to 16/17-year-olds. In terms of younger age-groups, substantial numbers of young people drop out of school before the age of 16. The number of young people permanently excluded from schools in England rose from 2,910 in 1990/91 to 13,581 in 1995/96, dropping slightly to 13,041 in 1997/98 (Parsons, 1999). In addition, nearly 10% of pupils have been recorded as truanting at least once a week or more, and 1.6% as doing so every day, during the final year of compulsory schooling; these figures are likely to be underestimates (O’Keeffe, 1994). Such data represent the visible part of the iceberg: beneath the surface lie a larger number of pupils who attend school but are disaffected from formal learning and therefore can be regarded as being at risk of dropping out from formal systems. These include, according to Barber (1994), a disruptive minority of 10-15% who express their disaffection through their behaviour and seriously undermine the quality of schooling for as many as half of all secondary-school pupils.
 
Williamson (2000) suggests that young people who have become disengaged from education, training and employment can be divided into three main groups: the ‘essentially confused’, the ‘temporarily sidetracked’ and the ‘deeply alienated’. Many suffer from multiple personal and social problems, including dysfunctional family backgrounds, personality and behavioural difficulties, and experience of traumatic events (Stone, Cotton & Thomas, 2000). They are more likely than their peers to be involved in drugs and in crime (SEU, 1999). The policy attention devoted to them stems partly from concern for their welfare and partly from the social threat they are perceived to represent.
 
The design of appropriate policy responses to social exclusion in general and NEET young people in particular depends on the view adopted of the relationship between the sociological concepts of agency and structure. This relationship is the pivotal concern of recent social theory, and arguably has always been the central sociological dilemma (Archer, 1995). The relationship is a complex one: as Giddens (1993) argues, ‘social structure is both constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the very medium of this constitution’ (pp.128-129). The stance adopted on the balance and interaction between the two in policy debates is however of considerable practical significance. The widespread use of the term ‘disaffection’, for example, tends to view the young person as the author or agent responsible for their own life situation, suggesting that remedies need to be found in sanctions or incentives aimed at changing their attitudes and behaviours. On the other hand, the use of the term ‘socially excluded’ can permit the young person to be viewed as the victim of structural factors which have to be removed or improved if their situation is to be ameliorated (Pearce & Hillman, 1998, pp.5-6; Hodgson, 1999, p.12; Merton & Parrott, 1999, pp.5-6). The risk of an analysis based on a narrowly structural position (e.g. Byrne, 1999) is that it leads to a sense of impotence in the absence of major political change. The danger of an analysis based on a narrowly agency-based position is that it can lead to naïve solutions which are doomed to failure.
 
In practice, as Merton & Parrott (1999) point out, all programmes and projects focusing on direct work with young people are based on the idea of young people as agents. So if – as they and other commentators affirm – it is likely that the situation of disengaged young people occurs as a result of a complex interaction between agency and structure, this has consequences for the design of such programmes. First, some degree of modesty is needed in setting expectations for the programmes’ results. Second, care needs to be taken, in planning the programmes, to start from the assumption that young people’s disengagement may not be pathological but be based on a rational response to their structural situation (Piper & Piper, 1998/99).
 
The role of career guidance
These issues are particularly pertinent to the role of career guidance in relation to social exclusion. This role is mainly two-fold: preventive, helping young people to avoid such exclusion; and reintegrative, supporting those currently excluded to gain access to education/training and the labour market. In its preventive role, it can, for example, clarify the links between education and the achievement of vocational goals, and prevent ‘false moves’ which lead to failure and undermine future participation. In its reintegrative role, it can operate directly to support educational participation and to incorporate individuals into the labour market, as well as operating collaboratively with other agencies in contributing to holistic multi-agency approaches to addressing multiple disadvantage (Killeen, Watts & Kidd, 1999). In addition, Morgan & Hughes (1999) identify a recovery role, aimed at bringing young people back into learning provision specifically designed to meet their needs (this is perhaps best seen as a ‘stepping stone’ within the reintegration role of helping them into mainstream provision). Certainly guidance has an important role to play in innovative education and training programmes designed to attend to the needs of ‘at risk’ young people (Watts, 2000).
 
But those involved in offering career guidance to young people who have dropped out of the formal education, training and employment system, or are at risk of doing so, are unlikely to be effective unless they address the reality of the current lifestyles of such young people and are able to do so within the young people’s own phenomenological perspective. Many such young people are engaged in work, not within the formal economy, but within one or more of the three informal economies: the household economy, covering production for internal consumption within the home of goods or services for which substitutes might otherwise be purchased for money; the communal economy, involving the production of goods or services that are consumed by people other than the producers, but not sold on a monetary basis; and the hidden economy, involving work conducted wholly or partly for money which is concealed from the taxation and regulatory authorities (Gershuny & Pahl, 1979/80; 1980; Watts, 1983, ch.9).
 
Johnston et al. (2000), in a study of a deprived housing estate in Teesside, identified six career routes which young people might take in such a neighbourhood, three of which were located in the informal economies. They used the term ‘career’ as a tool for theorising the complexity and diversity of transitions and pathways the young people appeared to follow. The first was domestic and home-centred careers, concentrated largely on childcare and domestic labour. The second was careers involving extensive or repeated engagement in informal economic activity, such as volunteering, self-employment and cash-in-hand ‘fiddly work’. Much of this work was found through word-of-mouth via local contacts. In many cases it was legitimate, in the sense that it did not infringe tax or benefit regulations, but sometimes it was linked to criminal enterprises like the selling on of stolen or counterfeit goods. The third was more specifically criminal careers, often linked to the sale of drugs.
 
Most of the young people in Johnston et al.’s study did not remain within any one of these career routes, but moved between several of these and the other more formal routes during their post-school years. From their own perspective, however, they were engaged in work even when they were operating in the informal economies. Moreover, within the context of their neighbourhood, many of them did not feel ‘socially excluded’. Indeed, their access to local knowledge and their capacity to navigate local networks – in other words, their sense of social inclusion within their own community – was the key to their survival.
 
Of the three alternative routes outlined by Johnston et al., the criminal route was the most distinct. A recurrent theme amongst those who regarded themselves as criminals was their perception of crime as an alternative form of work, offering many of its psychological benefits: enforced activity, social contacts, social identity, and goals and purposes within a time structure. Coles (1995) indicates how criminal careers can develop in a series of staged career progressions through which some young people move from minor acts of hooliganism, through more persistent offending, to accepting a life of instrumental crime punctuated by periods of imprisonment. Within particular communities, gaining access to informal forms of work can provide access to a social network which can offer ‘opportunity structures’ including apprenticeship in the techniques of entrepreneurial crime. Craine (1997) argues that such career routes have been systematically under-reported in ethnographic youth research.
 
From the individual’s point-of-view, entering such a career route may be perceived to be economically rational, at least within a short-term time perspective. It may also offer more social status within the local peer culture: ‘rather than tolerating regular hours for low pay, there can be more status in proving one’s ability to get by without surrendering to the system’ (Roberts, Noble & Duggan, 1982, p.174). Entering low-paid training schemes and jobs may be viewed with derision: ‘slaving your bollocks off for £30 – I can nick that in 10 minutes’ (quoted in Rees, Williamson & Istance, 1996, p.228).
 
Guidance services paid for by Government are likely to have to view such issues differently, condemning activities which are regarded as being illegal or anti-social. Many informal-economy activities, however, do not fall clearly into these categories, and here judgements are much more open to question. For example, Craine (1997) found that for unemployed young women in his study, the ‘mothering option’ provided a socially acceptable alternative to the limited opportunities available for employment (see also Wallace, 1987). Are such young women feckless and morally irresponsible drains on the welfare state, as social-underclass theories (e.g. Murray, 1990) contend? Or misguided individuals cutting themselves off from the mainstream opportunity structure? Or responsible young adults committing themselves to the demands and responsibilities of parenthood? Public policy under the New Labour Government has tended to adopt the second of these positions, with some undertones of the first (see Levitas, 1998, pp.139ff). A credible social case can however be made for the third. At the very least, it raises the issue of how far government should seek to take firm prescriptive positions on the personal and moral issues involved in such decisions, or leave them for individuals to resolve. Even if they use financial and other incentives to favour particular options, should they thereafter adopt a ‘self-denying ordinance’ and permit guidance services to be client-centred in weighing up these and other pros and cons (cf. Watts, 1996)?
 
There are important political and ethical issues here, but there are also practical issues. If careers advisers are to be able to intervene effectively with young people who have dropped out of the formal system or are at risk of doing so, they need to understand – and to be prepared to work to some extent within – the subjective frame of reference of the young people with whom they are working. As Coles (1988) puts it, they need to be not only experts in local labour market intelligence but also ‘ethnographers of local “youth culture”’ (p.83).
 
Traditionally, however, formal career guidance services have paid little if any attention to the informal economies. Indeed, even within the formal economy they have tended to be drawn to its more bureaucratic parts, such as the professions and large organisations, where educational credentials tend to be more important; somewhat less attention has in general been given to the more entrepreneurial parts, including small firms and self-employment. This is not surprising, since formal guidance services tend to be located within – or closely connected to – the formal education system, which is significantly legitimated through the structure of credentialism that such services support. In secondary schools, in particular, the chief basis for organisational control is the promise that: ‘If you work hard and pass your exams, you’ll get a (good) job.’ The premise underlying this promise is much more valid in the bureaucratic sectors of the labour market than in its entrepreneurial sectors. When guidance programmes emphasise the bureaucratic sectors, therefore, they are serving the interests of the school itself (Watts, 1981).
 
The tendency for formal career guidance services to relate narrowly to the formal education, training and employment system explains why strategies addressed to social exclusion have tended to focus on building close working links between career guidance services and youth/community services. The latter are more likely to have contact with, and credibility with, the young people concerned, because they know more about the informal systems within which the young people live, and are more prepared and better equipped to work within their frame of reference. On the other hand, if the policy aim is to encourage the young people to move back into the system, the career guidance services can provide the information and support they need in order to do so. The ‘street knowledge’ of the youth/community services is thus in principle complemented by the ‘formal knowledge’ of the careers services; the process-oriented methods of the former mesh with the more formal methods of the latter (see e.g. Morgan & Hughes, 1999).
 
Such partnerships can adopt a number of different strategies. In a six-country European project on ‘non-formal guidance’ for young people at risk, the non-formal guidance agents were defined to include not only youth/community workers but also significant adults or peers who had ongoing relationships with the target-group of young people or might be able to form such relationships on an informal basis. Three strategies were developed for linking the formal and non-formal guidance providers (Watts & McCarthy, 1996). The first was for the non-formal guidance agents to act as referral points for accessing the target-group to the formal guidance system. The second was concerned with outreach: for the formal guidance services to develop new methods for working with the non-formal guidance agents and with the target-group itself. The third focused on capacity building: helping the non-formal guidance agents to be initial deliverers of guidance to the target-group. The latter was carried out through training programmes designed to develop the guidance skills of the non-formal guidance agents (Watts & McCarthy, 1998).
 
The inclusion of unpaid volunteers within the project raised a number of complex issues (ibid). How far should the project be concerned to formalise the non-formal, or to respect and value its non-formality? For example, should the volunteers be paid, particularly where they were unemployed themselves; should, indeed, they be given opportunities for using the training courses as the first step towards a professional qualification in youth and community work or related fields? Or, especially in the case of the ‘deeply alienated’ young people identified by Williamson (2000), would unpaid non-professionals find it easier to secure young people’s trust than adults paid by the state? Beneath these issues lay the definition of ‘social exclusion’ being adopted by the project. If it was defined as being outside the formal education, training and employment system, then the unemployed volunteers were socially excluded too. Should the project seek to ‘include’ them (as they were seeking to ‘include’ the young people) by offering them training and a paid post – with the public expenditure this would require? Or should it, in effect, reinforce and utilise their ‘exclusion’?
 
The partnership design of such projects can be seen as an attempt to manage the tensions and the ethical and practical dilemmas involved in designing guidance strategies to achieve the voluntaristic participation of young people in formal systems which they have rejected. These tensions and dilemmas are also evident when defining the outcome criteria by which the success of the projects will be measured. If these are defined too rigidly as reintegration into the formal system, this assumes that such an outcome is the only desirable one, and thus fails to respect the autonomy of the young person: their right to determine the course of their own lives. As well as being ethically questionable, this may be pragmatically counter-productive: attempts to drive too directly towards such an outcome may be resisted and therefore reduce the chances of achieving the outcome itself. Accordingly, it is argued that the outcome criteria should be framed in terms of ‘graded steps’ which are valuable in relation to achieving viable and socially legitimate lifestyles outside the formal system, as well as enabling young people to move towards the formal system as and when they wish to do so (Watts & McCarthy, 1998).
 
Many of the same issues emerged from the major career guidance initiative addressed to the needs of ‘at risk’ young people under the Conservative Government that held power in the mid-1990s: the Mentoring Action Project. This represented an example of an ‘outreach’ strategy: developing the ‘mentoring’ skills of careers service staff so that they were equipped to work in more informal ways with disengaged young people. The project was initiated not by the Government but by careers services themselves, through the Institute of Careers Guidance, with funding from the European Commission’s Youthstart programme. It stemmed from the recognition by careers services that: ‘The increasing emphasis placed nationally on the main core of pupils and students in full-time mainstream education meant that young people who had left school and were encountering difficulties – for a variety of reasons – in adjusting to the formal system and progressing into education, training and work, were at risk of losing the ready access to in-depth career guidance services which they required if they were to establish a clear sense of personal direction’ (Ford, n.d., pp.16-17). By the end of the project in December 1997, there had been a change of Government, and the focus of concern was being precisely reversed.
 
‘Foregrounding’ social inclusion
Prior to the General Election of 1997, the Labour Party had been working on a policy statement entitled A Successful Career: the Careers Service in the 21st Century. The document stated that: ‘The Skills Revolution will demand the creation of a Careers Service integrally and inextricably linked to a learning-led culture and economy’. It made a number of proposals for extending services to adults, including the introduction of personal learning advisers: ‘Our aim is that everyone should have an entitlement to meet with a personal learning adviser at least every two years.’ The Careers Service was seen as being ‘at the centre of a network of providers, be they schools, further and higher education, the Employment Service (ES), TECs or individual companies and LEAs’ (Labour Party, 1997, p.2). The move was towards a universal all-age Careers Service. The only reference to young people who had fallen out of the system was a statement that new ways of targeting such young people needed to be explored (p.6).
 
This document, colloquially known as the ‘Byers/Gee document’ was nearing publication when the General Election was called. In a speech to the Careers Services National Association in June 1997, shortly after the Election, David Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education and Employment) referred to ‘the emerging paper that we didn’t quite manage to get out in time for the General Election’ and declared that: ‘We will manage to get it out in the weeks and months ahead as fully fledged Government paper.’ But it was never published.
 
Instead, the first major Government statement came in a speech by Dr Kim Howells, a junior Minister, at a Careers Service Conference held at Heathrow in November 1997. He included a passage in which he emphasised the priority attached by the Government to social inclusion:
 
‘We want all young people to have the help they need … But we also want to concentrate some of our resources, and activity, in schools on those who are most at risk, or who have “dropped out” … And we want schools and colleges to take more responsibility for preparing pupils to take careers decisions. This will free up services to concentrate more on the areas where they are most needed – to focus their professional skills more on those who need it most, and supporting lifelong learning … For young people over the age of 16, we want services to concentrate on those who are not in education, training or employment’ (emphases in original).
 
This ‘focusing agenda’, as it came to be called, meant that careers services ceased to carry out careers interviews with all young people in schools (a practice that was already beginning to be modified in some areas by the growth of small-group work). The agenda had, in principle, two facets: allowing greater flexibility of response, so that more attention could be given to young people of all kinds who were ‘ill-informed or undecided’; and targeting attention on young people who had already dropped out of the formal system or were deemed to be at risk of doing so (DfEE, 1998a). In practice, the targeting agenda predominated. In a growing number of schools, young people who were performing well but were uncertain about what they wanted to do found it difficult or impossible to secure a careers interview.
 
Then, in June 1999, the Government moved the issue of social exclusion centre-stage. It issued a White Paper in which it indicated its intention to create ‘a comprehensive structure for advice and support for all young people beyond 13, improving the coherence of what is currently provided through organisations such as the Careers Service, parts of the Youth Service and a range of other specialist agencies’ (DfEE, 1999a, p.51). Significantly, the details of this new service were published soon afterwards in a report from the Social Exclusion Unit within the Cabinet Office, entitled Bridging the Gap: New Opportunities for 16-18 Year Olds Not in Education, Employment or Training (SEU, 1999). The report indicated that the service would take the form of a single national agency, which would contract with a single lead body locally to be accountable for providing the service in its area.
 
Subsequently, a policy statement on this new Connexions Service, as it was to be called, indicated that it would operate through a ‘new profession’ of Personal Advisers, who would ‘end the current fragmentation of services’ and ‘take responsibility for ensuring all the needs of a young person are met in an integrated and coherent manner’. These Personal Advisers would ‘be drawn from a range of backgrounds including the Careers Service, Youth Service, Social Services, teachers and Youth Offending Teams, as well as from the voluntary and community sectors’. They would operate at three levels of priority: ‘intensive sustained support for those with multiple problems’; ‘in-depth guidance for those at risk of disengaging’; and, for the rest, ‘information and advice on career/learning/employment choices with minimum levels of intervention’. Alongside these Personal Advisers, the service would also ‘encourage and provide training to members of the community to act as mentors’ (DfEE, 2000a, pp.35, 39, 41 and 45).
 
While there was some consultation following the White Paper, it was on points of detail rather than on the key design features of the proposals. It is accordingly important to note that the proposals themselves did not emerge from any in-depth analysis involving research and open consultations with professionals in the field. They were significantly influenced by Demos, a policy think-tank. Geoff Mulgan, the former Director of Demos, had been appointed as adviser to the No. 10 Policy Unit and was the eminence grise behind the Social Exclusion Unit (Levitas, 1998). Demos had published an analysis of the problems of marginalised youth (Bentley & Gurumurthy, 1999), supported by a report on the views of young people who had experienced various aspects of social exclusion (Bentley & Oakley, 1999). The former report recommended, in particular, that the Government should create ‘a new profession: the youth broker, responsible for supporting young people in creating pathways to independence’. This ‘national service … could be created through the long-term merger of the youth, careers and education welfare services’. It should include ‘the offer of a mentor to any at-risk young person who wants one’ (Bentley & Gurumurthy, 1999, pp.105-106). All of these ideas were clearly evident in the design of Connexions. Although the title ‘youth broker’ – specifically referred to in Bridging the Gap (SEU, 1999, p.83) as an idea that was being examined – was not subsequently adopted, the concept was, in the proposals for the ‘new profession’ of Personal Adviser.
 
Thus the key design features of Connexions stemmed essentially from an analysis related to the needs of young people at risk of social exclusion. The core of the analysis was the belief that a key cause of the ineffectiveness of current provision was the proliferation of specialist agencies, each dealing with a disconnected part of the young person’s life. Bentley & Gurumurthy (1999) quoted and endorsed the view of an American commentator who saw the basic problem as being the inclination of agencies to protect their own turf: ‘Every agency has a speciality, a catchment area, a raison d’être. Every profession has its own area of expertise … They are suspicious of, if not downright unfriendly to, others who may approach the problem from a different angle’ (Ianni, 1989). This was reinforced by Merton’s (1998) comment that ‘young people often feel as if they are being passed from pillar to post and each time they meet an official from yet another agency they have to tell their story again’ (p.21). Accordingly, there was a widely-held view that the agencies needed to be brought more closely together, and that – as part of this process – there was a strong case for each young person to be linked to a key worker who could form a relationship of trust with them, see their problems as a whole, and ‘broker’ the support of the relevant specialist agencies.
 
In transferring this analysis into the design of Connexions, however, there were two fundamental design flaws. The first was linked to the fact that Connexions was designed not just for young people at risk of social exclusion but for all young people: it was both a targeted and a universal service. The conventional and logical way to reconcile these dual aims is first to design the universal service and then extend it to ensure that the distinctive needs of the targeted group are satisfactorily addressed. But Connexions was designed on the reverse basis. Significantly, a key rationale given by Ministers in the Parliamentary debates on the Learning and Skills Bill was the principle that ‘if “poor people’s services” are just for poor people, they tend to be poor services’: accordingly, ‘it will be a universal service for all people, because that is the most civilised and dignified way of giving support to the most disadvantaged’ (Malcolm Wicks, House of Commons Hansard, 27 June 2000, col.863). In other words, universality was a second-order consideration. As a result, efforts were made to extrapolate to all young people measures designed to address the needs of the primary target-group. If the needs of young people at risk were perceived to require the merging of services, then the services must be merged as a totality. If young people at risk were to have a Personal Adviser, then all young people must have one.
 
The second design flaw was that the original Demos aim of merging the youth, careers and educational welfare services was only part-implemented. The only service totally subsumed within Connexions was the Careers Service; the other services remained as entities, but expected to participate in – and pass some of their resources to – the Connexions service. The main reason for this distinction was administrative convenience: the Careers Service was the only budget that the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) – as the main Government department responsible for the planning of Connexions – was able to control; without it, the funding base for the new service looked fragile. But the decision to commit the whole of the Careers Service budget to Connexions, alongside the failure to secure similar commitments from other budget-holders, immediately produced an imbalance in the structure of Connexions partnerships. It also meant that careers services’ existing mainstream work was placed under threat.
 
Problems
A number of problems stemmed from one or both of these two design flaws. The firstrelated to case-loads. It was felt that ways had to be found of securing Personal Advisers for all young people. But, on cost and staffing grounds, the case-load outside the ‘at risk’ group would have to be much higher. Unpublished working papers produced within DfEE suggested that Personal Advisers might work with ‘10-20 young people with multiple problems, 250 young people in need of in-depth guidance or more than 800 young people who only [sic] need a guidance interview’. While such specific figures did not appear in official public statements, the principle of three levels implying very different case-loads was regularly mentioned (e.g. DfEE, 2000c, p.35). With large case-loads, however, the rationale for the role of a Personal Adviser – able to form a relationship, view the young person in holistic terms, broker specialist services – was clearly neither credible nor sustainable.
 
The second problemrelated to staffing. DfEE calculated, presumably on the basis of its initial ratios, that between 15,000 and 20,000 Personal Advisers would need to be recruited (Baroness Blackstone, House of Lords Hansard, 17 February 2000, col.1380). The notion was that these would initially come mainly from the Careers Service and the Youth Service. But there were only just over 7,000 Careers Advisers working in the Careers Service in the whole of England, Scotland and Wales (ICG, n.d., p.10). In order to meet the target, as many of these as possible might need to be recruited as Personal Advisers. DfEE accordingly became reluctant to commit itself to the inclusion of Careers Advisers among the specialist services to which Personal Advisers would broker access (e.g. SEU, 1999, p.81; DfEE, 2000a, p.41). The notion grew that in the case of career guidance, Personal Advisers might be expected to deliver what was required. But, of course, not all Personal Advisers would have been trained to provide career guidance. It was suggested that a small element of training in a short generic course might fill this gap (DfEE, 2000d). This raised the danger of serious erosion of professional standards in service delivery. When, later, a clearer distinction was established between generic Personal Advisers and specialist support in vocational guidance, the issue was still blurred by using the term ‘specialist personal advisers’ for the latter – these being distinguished from those who wished to become ‘fully qualified Connexions personal advisers’ (DfEE, 2000e, para.H7). Locating Careers Advisers as specialists within a new profession of Personal Advisers, in which they were not regarded as being fully qualified, seemed paradoxical, confusing and indeed demeaning.
 
The third problemconcerned the role of pastoral-care structures in schools and colleges. In the initial design of Connexions, such structures were virtually ignored. Bridging the Gap included an analysis of the range of functions which might be performed by the Connexions service, identifying by whom they were currently performed: on the function of ‘providing a network of Personal Advisers to provide a single point of contact for each young person and ensure that someone has an overview of each person’s ambitions and needs’, the only pre-16 reference was to ‘learning mentors being introduced into schools in some inner city areas as part of Excellence in Cities’ (SEU, 1999, p.81). Yet for pupils in schools and colleges, tutors clearly fitted this job description – much more credibly so, indeed, than Personal Advisers with case-loads of between 1:250 and over 1:800. When, belatedly, a Ministerial speech acknowledged that ‘tutors are usually closest to pupils, and may be important in identifying initial needs’, it added that they ‘can give advice on courses themselves, and refer young people to Personal Advisers for further help or guidance’ (Malcolm Wicks’ speech to Annual Conference of the National Association of Careers and Guidance Teachers, 6 July 2000). Since Ministers had already by this stage indicated that, where appropriate, Personal Advisers would refer young people to specialist careers advice, this seemed to suggest a cumbersome three-stage model, in which the intermediate stage had no evident rationale. By late 2000, policy statements were suggesting that Personal Advisers might only be needed for those requiring intensive support (DfEE, 2000e, para.H3).
 
The fourth problemrelated to impartiality. Because the role of Personal Advisers pre-16 was focused largely on combating disaffection from learning, there appeared to be a strong case for basing them in schools. Following lobbying from headteachers’ associations, a circular was issued stating that: ‘Personal advisers working in schools and in Pupil Referral Units will be appointed and managed by the Head Teacher or teacher in charge but will also operate as part of the integrated Connexions Service’ (DfEE, 2000b, p.3). This immediately raised concerns about the long-standing issue of the impartiality of advice offered on post-16 options in 11-18 schools which had a financial interest in persuading their pupils to stay on rather than move elsewhere (e.g. OFSTED, 1998, p.16). The main assurance of impartiality of advice was access to careers advisers based outside the school: this was the rationale for mandating such access in the Education Act 1997 (DfEE, 1997). But if many Careers Advisers were to be replaced by Personal Advisers appointed and managed by headteachers, the extent of this access seemed likely to be severely reduced; and insofar as career guidance was in future to be offered by these Personal Advisers, the likelihood of overt or subtle pressures being placed on their impartiality was significantly enhanced. The DfEE’s Planning Guidance nonetheless reiterated the principle that ‘all young people [should] have access to impartial careers information, advice and guidance’, and stated that: ‘The Connexions Service should have the final say on how this is to be achieved’ (DfEE, 2000e, para.I8). The potential for conflict or collusion here seemed considerable. Confidence was not enhanced by a Ministerial statement that the proposed Connexions Direct website and helpline could be ‘one route for giving them access to impartial guidance on post-16 choices, or for gaining a second opinion if they are not convinced by what they hear in school’ (Malcolm Wicks at NACGT Annual Conference, op. cit.). A key issue here was whether ‘reactive impartiality’, requiring student initiative, was sufficient, or whether agreement should be based on ‘positive impartiality’, requiring positive steps to be taken to make students aware of the full range of choices (Watts & Young, 1997).
 
The fifth problemwas more generally concerned with standards of career education and guidance provision in schools and colleges. As noted earlier, the 1997 statement by Kim Howells indicated that the Government wanted schools and colleges ‘to take more responsibility for preparing pupils to take careers decisions’, in order to ‘free up [careers] services to concentrate on the areas where they are most needed’. But an official survey of careers work in schools stated that ‘the wide variation in content, organisation, and time allocated for careers work is unacceptable’ (Ofsted, 1998, p.17). Had significant steps been taken to address this situation, then a serious and credible strategy to move towards a more school/college-based model of provision would have been discernible. But no such moves were made.
 
All of these problems related to the services provided for mainstream young people. But even in relation to the primary target-group of ‘at risk’ young people, further confusions were evident. Roles were ill-defined. It was unclear how far the Personal Adviser was expected to be a first-in-line adviser, a nominated specialist with an additional generic role, a new additional generalist, or a merging of existing specialists into a multi-skilled generalist. All had very different implications for the competences required of Personal Advisers (Watts, 1999). Young people at risk were to have access not only to a Personal Adviser but also to a volunteer mentor: the relationship between the two roles was not clear. Further confusion was added by initially using the term ‘Learning Mentors’ – adopted from the Excellence in Cities programme (DfEE, 1999b) – to describe Personal Advisers based in schools. To compound the confusion still further, initial statements indicated that ‘The Personal Adviser for most 13-16 year old children will be a Learning Mentor based in their school’ (DfEE, 2000a, p.53); whereas later it was stated that, in Excellence in Cities areas, Connexions advisers were to ‘work alongside EiC Learning Mentors’ (DfEE, 2000b, p.3) – with no indication of how their roles were to be differentiated.
 
Moreover, there was little sensitivity in the policy statements on Connexions to the complexities of working with disengaged young people. Bridging the Gap made no effort to conceptualise or even acknowledge the informal economies: when referring to lone parents, for example, it stated that there was no reason to believe that they ‘could not participate in learning or work given the opportunity and help in doing do’ (SEU, 1999, p.22) – so denying the status of child-rearing as legitimate work. Again, the initial policy statement on Connexions appeared to see no contradiction or tension between on the one hand a young-person-centred service able to command the trust of young people and understand their needs, and on the other a service that would be required to carry out the control function of ensuring school attendance pre-16 and whose performance would be measured by prescribed outcomes related not to subjective measures of satisfaction and appropriateness but to objective measures of participation in the formal education and training system (DfEE, 2000a, pp.34, 35 and 56). In this context, the liberal intentions of co-ordinated support for young people could easily be turned into its obverse: co-ordinated surveillance (Kelly, 2000) – ‘weaving an all-pervasive web of “social control”’ (Rose & Miller, 1992, p.175).
 
It is difficult not to conclude that all of these problems stemmed, in one way or another, from the decision to seek a structural solution to the problems of ‘at risk’ young people rather than building on the programmes and partnerships that were already in place. Other studies of linkages between guidance services have classified them at five different levels: communication, co-operation, co-ordination, cross-fertilisation and integration (e.g. Miller, Taylor & Watts, 1983; Watts, Dartois & Plant, 1988). Initiatives like the Mentoring Action Project (Ford, n.d.), the Stepping Stones project (Ford, 2000a), New Start (Morgan & Hughes, 1999) and the Learning Gateway (GHK Economics & Management, 2000) were already successfully developing linkages between careers services, youth services and others based on the more modest levels, including cross-fertilisation (where efforts are made to encourage services to share and exchange skills, and in effect to work across professional boundaries in ways that are likely to re-draw the boundaries themselves). These developments appeared to be achieving effects: official Labour Force Survey figures for young people aged 16-18 who were not in education, training or employment fell from 185,000 in 1998 to 157,000 in 1999 (Malcolm Wicks at NACGT Annual Conference, op. cit.) (though, of course, causality cannot be assumed). The decision to move to integration, however, meant that instead of these developments progressing organically, the focus of attention shifted to organisational restructuring, which had major unforeseen side-effects on mainstream provision. The problems and confusions analysed in this paper demonstrate the efforts of policy-makers to struggle with these side-effects.
 
It is significant in this respect to note that Scotland and Wales decided not to follow the Connexions route. In Scotland, the Beattie Committee (1999) recommended that careers service companies should have adequate resources to work with ‘at risk’ young people, including identifying those who would benefit from the support of a ‘key worker’ and/or mentor in collaboration with schools and guidance staff, but it proposed building stronger links between the Careers Service and other agencies rather than seeking to restructure them. In Wales, a report from the National Assembly for Wales Policy Unit (2000) explicitly stated that it had examined and rejected the option of restructuring all sources of funding for youth support into a new single funding stream for allocation at local level across providers. Its reasons were telling: that ‘the disruption caused by restructuring would be unlikely to be justified by gains in delivery’; that ‘restructuring would be a distraction from service improvement’; and that ‘there is a good case for maintaining the Careers company input as a centrally funded stream to preserve the independence of vocational advice to young people’ (p.72).
 
Indeed, instead of moving towards horizontal integration of support services for young people, Wales and Scotland have decided to move towards vertical integration of all-age career guidance services. Following a report from the Education and Training Action Group for Wales (1999), steps are being taken to establish Careers Wales as a national all-age information, advice and guidance service. Based on the current role of the eight careers service companies in Wales, it is drawing together provision from the Careers Service, the Adult Guidance Initiative and Learndirect. A broadly similar model is being adopted in Scotland, where the Duffner Committee (2000) has recommended that the Careers Service be responsible for ensuring the provision of an all-age careers guidance service, and be given a new collective identity as Careers Scotland. The all-age model is that proposed for England too by the ‘Byers/Gee document’, noted earlier. But it contrasts sharply with what has subsequently occurred in England, where the government’s adult guidance strategy based on local Information, Advice and Guidance for Adults (IAGA) partnerships (DfEE, 1998b) is at risk of being undermined by the fact that careers service companies – which in most areas have been the lead partner in these partnerships – are in some cases to be totally subsumed with the local Connexions partnership.
 
In other areas of England, careers service companies may continue, carrying out work for Connexions on a sub-contractual basis. As a final irony, the Planning Guidance states that ‘where a Partnership subcontracts for services an open and transparent competitive tender exercise should be undertaken’ (DfEE, 2000e, para.L29). It seems, therefore, that in those areas where careers service companies wish to remain in being, they will have to return to the competitive tendering introduced by the previous Conservative government. Yet the ‘Byers-Gee document’ was critical of these arrangements, proposing to replace them with licenses and franchises – as later recommended by the National Audit Office (1997). It noted: ‘the costs of contracting out have been substantial … This money could be put to better use’ (Labour Party, 1997, p.4).
 
Conclusion
The analysis of the development of Connexions in this paper has taken the story up to the end of 2000, and has focused on design faults and the problems that have ensued from them. Other commentators have been more optimistic. Law (2000), for example, has suggested that Connexions offers opportunities for reframing support for career on a broader and deeper basis. Roberts (2000) has pointed out that: ‘Many careers officers have long aspired to broaden out into life counselling. They will now have that chance’ (p.27). There are possibilities for innovation in using information and communication technologies (Offer & Watts, 2000) and in taking steps to ensure that the integration of services working with schools is mirrored by schools taking a similarly holistic view of their work supporting pupils (Andrews, 2000). Ford (2000b) has identified a number of common elements between Connexions and IAGA partnerships which could provide the basis for all-age strategies.
 
But it is clear that many problems remain to be solved if these potential benefits are to be realised, and to outweigh the risks. Unless the fundamental flaws are acknowledged and addressed, workable solutions are unlikely to be found. Current policy seems to favour solutions being found at local level, and over a longer time-frame than originally envisaged (Weinstock, 2000). These represent classic responses of policy-makers when faced with intractable difficulties in original policy design.
 
Many of these difficulties could have been avoided. The way in which the design of Connexions emerged, from think-tank exercises supported by some limited scanning of the views of young people, represents a clear case of what le Fanu (2000) terms ‘the culture of ignorance’, demonstrating that this culture, ‘nourished during the Thatcher years, flourishes still’. Its distinctive feature is that ‘its adherents mistrust those with specific skills or expertise, suspecting that they are interested only in feathering their own nests’ (p.23). The failure to conduct any open consultation of professionals in the field meant that the implications of the measures recommended were not thought through. To add insult to injury, Ministers subsequently appeared to take the view that they were battling against a recalcitrant profession rigidly attached to the bureaucratic target-driven regime established by the previous Government. The fact that, with little official support, careers services had carried out innovative work addressed precisely to the problems which the new government was concerned to prioritise, was given little if any attention, and the opportunity to learn from this experience was missed. It will not be surprising if, when a new government in due course gains power, Connexions services are similarly excoriated for neglecting the needs of mainstream young people and the labour market.
 
This demonstrates the dangers of guidance services being directly subject to the ebbs and flows of political processes. In such situations, they are vulnerable to destabilising swings of priority, as well as being used as scapegoats for the perceived deficiencies of the preceding Government. Much depends on key civil servants understanding the distinctive nature of guidance services and being able and willing to inform Ministers of likely implications before the Government commits itself to particular courses of action. In the case of Connexions, this role seems to have been inadequately performed.
 
The emergence of the Connexions service provides a salutary demonstration of the dangers of giving excessive prominence to the issue of social exclusion in framing policy on career guidance services. Certainly such services have a potentially important role to play in strategies designed to address social exclusion. But in the end, the social benefits of guidance are not limited to participation: they are concerned with individual progression and development, and with linking societal needs to individual needs on a voluntaristic basis (Watts, 1996). In short, the primary role of guidance services lies in lubricating the societal structures to which inclusion is being sought.
 
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