Basic skills and transitions to adulthood

Abstract

This article reports on the fi ndings of a qualitative research project conducted in the North East of England. This project involved interviews with 55 young adults in an attempt to explore the impact of poor basic skills on transitions to adulthood. Poor basic skills have been identifi ed across Europe as a problem facing nation states, groups and individuals. But apart from large-scale survey-based studies (Bynner and Parsons, 2001), previous youth research has neglected the process through which basic skills play a role in transitions to adulthood. Proposing a social theory of situated basic skills as communal and individual resources, the authors develop an approach that is sensitive to both structure and agency in theorizing the role of literacy, numeracy and oracy in transitions. They claim that the mobilization of basic skills resources and their role across the life-course can best be understood by using a conceptualization of agency that recognizes the importance of refl exivity as a mediating link between subjective (agential) and objective (structural) dimensions of transition.

Relationship with Literacy: a longitudinal perspective on the literacy practices and learning of young people without a diploma

“…It seems that these two young people did not let themselves be defined as 'struggling readers' or writers (Compton-Lilly, 2013), and positively engaged with literacy practices in their personal lives. In contrary to the participants in Simpson and Cieslik's (2007) study, Anaïs and Zachary did not seem to be dependent on their social network to deal with literacies in their everyday lives.…”

“…The participants (n= 55), aged 20 to 30, were from North East England and attended 'basic skills' classes in a community college or at their workplace in 2003. The authors explain that some participants had developed complex coping strategies in order to avoid reading and writing at work or at home (Simpson & Cieslik, 2007). For instance, some were dependent on their social network (e.g.…”

“I Wouldn't Stay Here”: Economic Crisis and Youth Mobility in Ireland

“…Considering the utility of geographical movement, including migration, it is not surprising that research on youth mobility has been increasing in popularity, particularly in disadvantaged regions. Pioneering work by Jones (, ) and Jamieson () has explored mobility with young people in rural areas of Great Britain, while more recently a host of studies have emphasized the relationship between locality, labour markets, social marginality and class habitus (see, e.g., Furlong et al, ; MacDonald et al, ; Pilkington and Johnson, ; Shildrick, ; Shildrick and MacDonald, ; Simpson and Cieslik, ). In respect to understanding why young people from Ireland may need to be mobile, we can thus see that their location matters, given both the spatial distance from the European core and the fact that much of the population of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland lives outside the main metropolitan centres.…”

Basic Skills, Literacy Practices and the ‘Hidden Injuries of Class’

“…5.3 We discuss elsewhere (Simpson and Cieslik 2007), how school was a challenging time for those with poor literacy. The expectation from teachers and students alike was that children should have mastered the basic aspects of reading and writing in primary school yet our interviewees made slow progress so that by secondary school they repeatedly failed literacy tests and struggled with routine classroom activities.…”

“…We developed this focus as despite a, ‘crisis of poor literacy in the UK’ (Aldridge and Lavender 2003; Save the Children 2014) basic skills tend to be under-researched in sociology generally and in youth studies in particular. In other papers we have documented how poor literacy, numeracy and oracy can be associated with marginal transitions into adulthood (Simpson and Cieslik 2007) and how individuals can develop different ways of coping with poor skills (Cieslik and Simpson 2009). In this paper we continue our exploration of how structuring processes and agential strategies intersect but focus attention more on the ways that poor skills influence identity formation than on the detail of our respondent's life course transitions.…”