the youth employment service
a study group
young fabian pamphlet 14 3s6d
young fabian pamphlet 14 the youth employment service
this pamphlet, like all publications of the Fabian Society, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individuals who prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publications which it issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour movement. Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1. October 1966
contents
1	introduction
2	the service today
3	the YES and	education
4	the YES and	industry
5	conclusion
1
5
15
22
26
1.	introduction
Ability is a scarce commodity; individuals differ in their abilities; a man is most likely to be happy in an occupation which uses his abilities to the full. These three propositions form the basis for the existence of vocational guidance.
It is only in comparatively recent times that choice of career has become a meaningful concept for the majority of people in this country. In the inter-war years the high level of unemployment severely limited the individual’s freedom of choice, and he was often thankful to take any job. The full employment of the period since 1945 has not only made choice of career a reality for many more people, but the shortage of skilled labour has made it vitally important for society that the choice should be the correct one. The Youth Employment Service (yes) exists to help young people make this difficult choice.
Vocational guidance has four main stages. First of all the adviser must attempt to measure each individual’s aptitude and abilities in so far as they may have a bearing on the choice of occupation. Second, he must be able to relate these in a fairly precise way to the aptitudes and abilities required for different occupations. Third, by discussion with the individual the adviser must try to help him to see his abilities and must provide him with full information on the range of careers for which these abilities may be appropriate. This stage will often include placement in a particular job. Finally, the young worker must be followed up to see how well suited he is to his job. and vice versa.
It is clear that, unless the first part of this process (the evaluation of the individual) is done adequately, the further stages cannot be carried out meaningfully either. In The scientific analysis of personality Raymond Cattell states: "The time demand, in getting an adequate evaluation of an individual’s personality, even with the most judicious use of tests and scoring methods, is likely to be four hours or more. But in all conscience this is precious little to take from a person’s time for advising him
on a life career” (p350). However, the average interview given by a youth employment officer lasts only from 15 to 20 minutes.
The second stage in the guidance process, even supposing that the first stage is adequately performed, presents "even'’ more intractable problems, since detailed classification of most occupations and. the qualities required for them is not yet' available. As Professor H. J. Eysengk. has said in Uses and abuses of psychology :	“Even if all available jobs
could be neatly catalogued with specific requirements, nevertheless our knowledge of the abilities and temperamental traits relevant to success in any of these occupations is still so much lacking that, without very large scale research, prediction would be mostly impossible.”
In this context the third stage of the guidance process, in which the adviser helps the individual to match his abilities to the range of available jobs, must be seen as a somewhat random and inaccurate business. One might feel that vocational guidance is a necessary but impossible task. At present the yes must content itself with a very much more modest role of providing factual information about careers to school children, discussing their career problems with them, and helping them to find what seem to be suitable openings or to choosS suitable courses of further education or training. While this falls very far short of the vocational guidance service we would wish to see established in the future, it is nonetheless a necessary and worthwhile service. However, even this modest task is in some respects being frustrated by weaknesses in the schools and the yes.
the Albemarle report
The operation of the service has recently been examined by a working party of the National Youth Employment Council, under the chairmanship of Lady, Albemarle. The working party’s report. The future development of the Youth Employment Service, was published at
2
the end of 1965. Its publication had been eagerly awaited by those interested in vocational guidance who , were looking forward to a thorough going reappraisal of the service’s work. In the event, there was widespread disappointment with the report. Despite its often enlightened views and good documentation, it lacked any sense of intellectual commitment on the desirability of a vocational guidance service and the role it should play in our educational system. Its recommendations are likely to lead, therefore, to largely superficial organisational reforms. We consider the major weaknesses of the report to be its handling of six important issues:
1. Its failure to consider the changes that would be required if the yes were to become a true vocational guidance service.
2. Relations between the yes and the schools. In some places these are very bad, and the report does not help by glossing over the fact and the reasons for it, some of which are of basic importance.
3. The service’s piacing work. The yes is far from fully effective in this important aspect of its work, and the report’s complacency on this score is not justified.
4. Raising the age limit of the service beyond 18.
5. Training of yeos. The report seems inconsistent here.
6	Ministerial responsibility for the service and the need for all education authorities to organise the service in their areas.
who needs vocational guidance?
There are considerable areas of resistance to the whole concept of vocational guidance. It is difficult for those whose choice of career was a straightforward process, or for those who were never able to make a real choice because of the shortage of alternative opportunities, to realise that career selection can pre-
sent any problems. It is perhaps particularly unfortunate that the career plans of many school teachers should have been the relatively uncomplicated circle from school to college or university and back to school. The indifference of many of the teaching profession to the concept of vocational guidance may, in part, explain why some of the recommendations of the Ince Committee have not yet been acted on. For example, the report said: “We believe it is essential in the best interests of the juvenile, that every pupil should be given vocational guidance before taking employment. For this purpose we recommend that vocational guidance should be given before leaving school and that every school (including private schools) should be required by statute to register with the service . . . every school leaver or every person attaining the age of 17 if still at school” (Report of the Committee on the Juvenile Employment Service, 1945, para 44). Twenty years later only inadequate progress seems to have been made towards this objective.
the older school leaver
Resistance to the work of the yes has been particularly strong in the selective schools. The service interviews only 50 per cent of the pupils at such schools, and there are some grammar schools where the yes is refused admittance altogether.
It is sometimes suggested that the able child has no need of careers guidance, but a;i the evidence we have obtained has led us to conclude that there is no justification for this attitude. We were glad to note that the Albemarle Report accepted the view that the older leaver needs vocational guidance (The future development of the Youth Employment Service, para 42, et seq). The Heyworth Report, discussing careers guidance for university graduates (presumably the cream of the country’s intellect), said: "Most students nowadays reach the university at public expense as a result of public policy, and nearly 90 per cent are more or less dependent on grants. In
3
general they have no tradition, either from school or family, of what a university education is or what it should lead to. They stand in need of advice if they are not to lodge unhappily in some job they are not very good at, letting their expensively cultivated abilities run to waste at a loss both to themselves and the community” (University Appointments Boards, Report to the University Grants Committee, 1964).
Some grammar schools seem to assume that education and vocational training can be kept in water tight compartments: “He’s not thinking of a career, he’s going to Oxford”. The Robbins Report firmly rejected such a view: “We deceive ourselves if we claim that more than a small fraction of students in institutions of higher education would be where they are if there were no significance for their future careers in what they hear and read” (Report of the Committee on Higher Education, 1963, p6).
Arguing the need for school leavers to be more fully informed about the range of careers, Robbins suggested:	“Too
many people and their parents are choosing institutions and courses on the basis of inadequate knowledge . . . We recommend that the institutions of higher education and the schools should consider . . . how better information can be made more generally available about the great variety of courses offered in the three main sectors of higher education” (p82). The survey conducted for the Robbins committee found that only about 40 per cent of university students received some advice about the range of courses open to them.
The Alexander Report expressed its concern at the lack of information about further education available to children in the schools: “There is no doubt that the work of the colleges (of higher education) continues to be seriously handicapped by persistent ignorance and misunderstanding among young people, parents, schools, industry and the general public . . . Many schools are badly informed about further education. This applies particularly to grammar and pub-
lic schools” (The public relations of further education, para 6).
This ignorance not only results in a waste of scarce educational resources, but causes an immense amount of human waste. Further, the waste is on a class basis. Brian Jackson and Dennis Mars-den have highlighted this particular problem of working class youths: “their parents had not the knowledge of the professions with which to help them, and the schools did not assume the need for early and detailed advice” (Education and the working class, pi 58).
technical college students
There is, at present, no formal provision for giving vocational guidance to students in technical colleges. The majority of these students will be pursuing courses with a vocational bias, but there are some who are studying for gce o level and a level. This group needs to be made aware of the provisions for vocational guidance provided by the yes.
guidance for the over 18s
The Albemarle Report (para 232 et seq) made out a convincing case for vocational guidance facilities to be made available to certain categories of young people who are over the age of 18. It pointed out that these people may be considered under four categories:
1. Those who have started work but feel they have chosen the wrong path and wish for further advice;
2. Students at further educational institutions who fail their courses or have doubts about their choice of career;
3 Similarly those who do not complete a university course;
4.	The physically and mentally handicapped and the maladjusted.
The Minister of Labour, Mr. Ray Gunter, has already stated his intention to ex-
4
tend the facilities of the employment exchanges in an attempt to cover the first of these groups.
We are at a loss to understand how it is that the Albemarle Report should be able to make out so strong a case for extending the facilities of vocational guidance to young people over the age of 18 and yet suggest that this issue should be shelved until after 1970. If this is an important reform, immediate action should be taken.
statutory age school leavers
There is much less controversy about Ihe need for pupils who leave school at the statutory age to have vocational guidance, though the service is not yet fully effective with this group. One of the biggest gaps in the vocational education of this group of young people lies in the lack of appropriate courses within the schools which will relate their education to the adult world they will be entering when they leave school. This problem of the lack of relevance of the school curriculum was fully dealt with by the Newsom Report, which at one point said: “Too many at present seem to sit through lessons with information and exhortation washing over them and leaving very little deposit. Too many appear to be bored and apathetic in school, as some will be in their jobs also. Others are openly impatient. They don’t see the point of what they are asked to do, they are conscious of making little progress.” (Half our future, 196?).
As a recent book on the problems of young people entering work has expressed it: “Individual children are not enabled to develop their potential ability, and in consequence lead lives more mean than they need be, whilst the country as a whole is deprived of the human resources of which it stands in need—not only, but not least, in straightforward economic terms. Children thus come ill prepared to the world of work . . . the transition from school to work aggravates the situation, rather than ameliorating it” (Michael Carter, Into Work).
The extension of the school leaving age to 16 provides an excellent opportunity to remedy this situation. If this opportunity is not taken, the raising of the school leaving age will probably worsen the problem. Therefore our answer to the question “Who needs vocational guidance?” is that almost everyone does. For some the level of guidance may be fairly elementary—perhaps simply a question of discussing, for example, the rival merits of engineering and physics at university. Others may have no ideas of their own at all, and if they are to be prevented from drifting, they will need to be provided with detailed information on a wide range of careers.
Even at the modest level of vocational guidance with which we have to content ourselves at present a great deal can be done. Though accurate assessment of a child may be impossible in present circumstances, the yes can do a valuable task by simply raising the level of information about careers among school leavers and perhaps also offer some encouragement to children to continue their education. For too many parents their children’s continuance in education i;‘ an act of faith. Worried parents faced with the prospect of keeping a child at school beyond the age of 15 or 16 may want to know the relevance of any further education to his future career. When the yes can give some help on this point he can narrow down the area of uncertainty and to a large extent allay understandable parental anxieties.
The value of straightforward information should not be under estimated. That not enough is being done to provide it at even the most elementary levels is clear, as brought out in an editorial in Technical education and industrial training”. “The means through which students are recruited or guided into higher education are casual to the point of sheer negligence . . . Almost every student interviewed claimed he was unable to get the sort of information on which alone he could have made a rational choice” (February 1965).
2.	the service today
Nationally the yes is controlled on behalf of the Minister of Labour by the Central Youth Employment Executive. This comprises senior officers of the Ministry, the Department of Education and Science and the Scottish Education Department. The majority of local services (144) are operated by the local education authority under schemes approved by the Minister, 75 per cent of the cost being provided from state funds. In the remaining 52 areas, the Ministry runs the service itself.
The Minister is advised on national policy by the National Youth Employment Council, with separate advisory committees for Scotland and Wales. Employers, workers, educational authorities, teachers and local youth employment committees (but not yeos) are represented on these bodies. At 1 January 1965 there were about 1,100 youth employment bureaux in Britain, employing 1,493 yeos (1,279 employed by the local authorities and 214 by the Ministry.)
The Central Youth Employment Executive gives the following outline of the work of the yes: “The yes is a service for young people at the stage of transition from school to work, up to the age of 18 or until they leave school if they stay beyond that age. Its main functions are to provide vocational guidance for school leavers and other young people within these age limits, to help them find openings in employment, and to keep in touch with them during the early years of their working life ... It is a recognised principle that adequate guidance at the transitional stage from school to work needs to be based upon a thorough knowledge both of the individual boy or girl and of the field of employment . . . In the latter stages of the pupil’s school career, the school is asked to send a report to the yeo on the young person’s health and physique, educational attainments, general ability and aptitudes. For leavers at the statutory age, schools are required to provide these reports, either by statute or under the approved scheme of the local education authority. Schools are encouraged to provide similar reports voluntarily for young people who leave
later than the statutory age” (The Youth Employment Service in Great Britain, coi, 1963).
The yeo will normally have two or, possibly, three contacts with each school leaver. His first contact with a pupil is usually when he gives a group talk to those pupils who may shortly be leaving. The object of this talk is to stimulate children to start thinking about their careers and to give a brief outline of the range of careers open to children of differing abilities and interests.
The second stage in the programme is when the yeo meets each school leaver individually and discusses his career with him. The yeo must try to relate what he has to say to the description of the pupil’s abilities which has been provided by the school. He will ask the pupil about his career plans and try to ensure that his ideas are soundly based on accurate information about the world of work. He will try to point out to the pupil any suitable openings of which he seems not to have taken account and will attempt to reach an agreement with each boy or girl on the most suitable field of work. In some, but by no means all, areas there may be two or more interviews at this stage.
Finally, the yeo will, if requested, help each school leaver to find a suitable opening. He may do this by inviting him to his office for a further interview shortly before the pupil leaves school or by sending him notes of introduction to employers who have suitable vacancies.
It has been apparent for several years that all is not well within the yes. The service has had an almost uniformly bad press: “The service is officially publicised as one of vocational guidance for all school leavers, but existing conditions lender this claim entirely unrealistic; there are too few yeos (and in some areas they are inadequately trained); they obtain too little reliable information about the leavers before the interview; and their contact with them is too fleeting for the possibility of genuine vocational guidance in anything other than a
6
minority of cases The authors soften the blow by commenting that the shortcomings which they describe are “almost entirely a function of the system imposed from above which the Youth Employment Officers are expected to operate, and in no way reflect on them as individuals” (G. Jahoda and A. D. Chalmers, “The Youth Employment Service —a consumer perspective,” Occupational psychology, 37, 1963).
The majority of practising yeos are in no way complacent about the apparent ineffectiveness of the service. Many of the most outspoken critics of the yes are to be found within the service itself.
Some of the causes of weakness could be remedied by comparatively minor adjustments such as increasing salaries in order to attract more and better staff, and reducing yeo’s case loads to enable them to spend more time on individual pupils. But other weaknesses are so fundamental that they can only be tackled if those in authority are prepared to undertake a major structural reorganisation of the service.
decision before maturity
There are problems which are inherent in the present educational system, such as the fact that children have to make important decisions which affect their careers before they have the maturity to understand the nature of their decisions. For example, a decision to drop physics and take history may be taken at 14 or even earlier, and to a large extent this decision means that a boy may be lost to scientific careers long before he is of an age to have begun to think seriously about the problem of career choice. Donald E. Super, an American professor, describing his own researches into occupational choice among American 14 year olds concluded in a paper given at the International Conference and Seminar of Vocational Guidance, Margate, 1959: “at least in the culture from which our sample of boys was drawn, 14 year old boys have reached a stage of development at which vocational
orientation has become meaningful and possible, but at which vocational choice, or even pre-vocational choice, is premature.” A view also taken by the Ince Report: “Vocational guidance given at about the age of 14 cannot be more than tentative in many cases and inevitably and rightly, the first job is experimental.”
In fact, therefore, the yes is having to provide a service for an age group not yet capable of fully appreciating the nature of the problem. Fortunately, this is a weakness which will be less important as more and more children stay on beyond the present statutory school leaving age, and, in particular, after 1970, when all children will remain at school for the extra year.
It is something of a paradox that some yeos and writers on the service should be campaigning for the service to have contact with school leavers even earlier than their 15th year. For example, G. Jahoda commented: “Institutional agencies (yes) usually came into operation at a stage when job attitudes had already hardened, so that the range of jobs the young people were eager and willing to enter had become rather narrow.” If it was to be effective, a programme of vocational guidance “should be designed to provide earlier, fuller, and more realistic job information and to prevent premature fixation of choices” (“Job attitudes and job choices among secondary modern school leavers”, Occupational Psychology 26, 1952) A similar point was made by the Albemarle Report (para 35).
In fact, the need for this earlier contact with the yeo is manfestly important so long as children do have to make at an early age vital decisions which will affect their careers. The choice may still be distorted by the child’s immaturity, but it is likely to be even more distorted if made without full information. In other words, if a boy says he wants to be a doctor, and assuming that he appears to have the potential skills needed for this profession, the school has a duty to ensure that he knows what range of subjects he will need to study, even though
7
the tentative nature of the boy's choice may be recognised.
In so far as the situation affects the more academic pupil, it may be that the problem should be tackled from the other end by eliminating the need for early choice by making the school timetable and university entry requirements much more flexible. The need for reform along these lines was cogently argued in the Crowther Report (15-18, Central Advisory Council for Education, 1959). But again, one needs to insist that children must be helped to make their decisions in the light of the relevant information. At present this does not happen.
limited scope
One of the major defects of the yes at present is its limited scope. In 1945 the Ince Report said: “A basic weakness of the system and the prime cause for its not being as effective as it might be, is the fact that ... it has been far from comprehensive. No boy or girl has had to use the service in seeking employment, and many employers failed to take advantage of it. Heads of schools, private employment agencies and the advertisement columns are responsible for much placing, and many firms prefer to make their contacts by other means ... As a result, the service does not have full knowledge of the vacancies available, nor is it able to draw on the full range of juvenile labour in filling vacancies; it is therefore limited in the extent to which it can give good vocational guidance or prevent mistaken choices of employment” (paras 32, 33).
Since then, of course, the yes has attained 90 per cent coverage of pupils leaving school at the statutory age, and more employers make use of the service. But when these two points have been taken into account, much of what the Ince Committee said is still true today. To some extent it is a vicious circle. If schools try to give vocational guidance to their more able pupils themselves and then place them in firms which are known to them, the yes will only be
called on to place the less able and will only be approached by the employer who is prepared to accept such pupils. Just as the Ministry of Labour’s employment exchanges have acquired a “seedy” public image because they have tended to become a bureau of last resort for those who have failed to find a job through other means, so the youth employment bureaux have sometimes acquired a similar reputation among many parents and young people. It is perhaps not without significance that some parents still refer to the bureaux as “the labour”.
the interview
The pupil’s advisory interview with the yeo is intended to be the climax of a career planning which has taken place in the previous few months. All too often it makes almost no impression on the school leaver. The interview is often surrounded by a puzzling amount of organised ceremony. There may be no less than four adults present—the yeo, the careers teacher, the head, and the pupil’s parent. Since the average length of interview is about 15 to 20 minutes, and since each adult will want to make some contribution, it is unlikely in these cases that the yeo will be able to have much discussion with the boy or girl he is meant to be interviewing. Any possibility of the pupil establishing a friendly relationship with the yeo is out of the question. It is essential that the interview should be as relaxed as possible, and to this end it would seem desirable to exclude from it all but the young person and his parents, and perhaps part of the interview should be with the pupil alone. This is not, of course, to suggest that the yeo should not have full consultations beforehand with school staff. But a more fundamental absurdity of the present procedure is the length of each interview and the number of times a young person is interviewed. Here again it is useful—and salutary—to look back at what the Ince Report said 20 years ago: “We feel it necessary to condemn the perfunctory methods (of interviews) which are sometimes used. It cannot be regarded as reasonable or econo-
8
mical after a child has been educated in school ... at considerable public expense for nine or ten years to devote only a few minutes to an interview which may determine the child’s whole life.” (para 82). yeos are the first to acknowledge that the length of the advisory interview is still too short. Those who work with the more academic pupil seem to have established a right to an interview of half an hour for each pupil, but the average child still has to be content with about 15 minutes.
It is interesting to compare the length of yes interviews with the practice of large firms when recruiting new staff. For example, a personnel manager at a large electrical firm wrote to us as follows: “A yeo just does not have the time to deal thoroughly with very many boys. In the firm for which I work we may spend a total of four or five hours dealing with one particular applicant, and hardly ever less than 30 minutes, and this is with people who are supposed to have made up their minds ... In order to give effective advice in a sixth form the yes would have to give more time to each individual to diagnose abilities and interests, and would need access to a great deal of specialist knowledge. To give you some idea of the time, our selection procedure involves as a minimum one hour of tests and 1hours of interview, and the latter can increase to four or five hours or more, spread over several separate occasions.”
case loads
The present arrangements for interview lengths and numbers are not really grounded in precise knowledge of the optimum provision. They are a reflection of the staff shortage among yeos. At present yeos have case loads of about 500-550; one ex-yeo told us of the time she had a case load of 1,000. Under these circumstances individual case work became almost impossible. Several yeos have suggested that 350 to 400 is the maximum case load which would enable genuine guidance to be given. But perhaps this traditional method of estimat-
ing a yeo’s work load by merely examining his case load is becoming outdated. As the Albemarle Report points out: “A predominantly numerical approach, largely based on ‘counting heads’, may have served well enough in the past, but it seems to us that a more sophisticated approach would be better suited to the new demands which are likely to be made on the service in the next few years” (para 212).
It is obvious that pupils’ requirements will vary widely. Some will need much care and several interviews, whereas some are probably well served by the present system. Therefore, whatever is proposed as the optimum length and number of interviews will not fit every case. What is needed is a system sufficiently flexible to allow for whatever is required. The present case load of yeos is a straight jacket which makes possible nothing more sophisticated than one group talk plus one 20 minute interview plus a couple of extra short interviews for those who go to the yeo’s office.
tools and techniques
If the yeo were given the opportunity to interview all children as many times and for as long as he thought they required, he would find the amateur nature of his own tools and techniques a severe limitation of his ability to provide effective vocational guidance.
The majority of youth employment bureaux make no use of psychometric testing. It is unfashionable, at a time when more and more local education authorities are realising the inadequacies and faults of the 11-plus examination, to suggest that psychometric tests might have a part to play in educational and vocational planning. The Armed Forces and many large companies have for many years made use of these methods in personnel selection, but they are still viewed with suspicion by the majority of employers, teachers, and perhaps even yeos. The reliability of psychometric tests in selecting, for example, engineers, has been demonstrated in at least one
9
survey (Tests for engineering apprentices: a validation study, National Institute of Industrial Psychology, 1959).
It is clear that there would need to be some provision for training quite large numbers of yeos in the use of psychometric tests if the tools of psychology are to be made available to the service. Some authorities are experimenting with psychometric tests, and it is hoped that their use will be extended. Indeed, some would go so far as to say that vocational guidance in any real sense of the term cannot exist in the absence of scientific testing procedures: “Vocational guidance proper ... is a scientific process whereby objective assessments of abilities, interests and aptitudes are made, and the data thus gathered are related to the demands made by particular jobs. It is not simply intellectual ability that is taken into account; temperament is also important and such matters as whether a child is likely to feel more at ease in a large working group than in a small, or always with just men rather than in a mixed group. It is important to recognise that vocational guidance of this sort is just as important for the dull child as for the more able—one job for the dull child is not necessarily the same as the next ... In this scientific sense, the Youth Employment Service cannot substantiate the statement that it gives vocational guidance” (Michael Carter, Into work).
Unfortunately psychometric tests can only be used as a reliable guide in a limited number of occupations, but the yes should be experimenting more extensively with their use. There is no doubt that they can provide valuable information about abilities which should be known by a yeo trying to guide children into suitable occupations.
follow up
It is regrettable that at present yeos have so little opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the advice they have given young people. There is a great need for feed back—for information
about what happens to the young people who have been advised and placed by the service. More important still is the value of some kind of follow up to the young people themselves, who may very much appreciate a chance to discuss with some independent knowledgeable person the problems that arise in the first few years at work. A follow up procedure is provided by the yes, but it is far too limited, as shown by M. P. Carter in Home, school and work: “Effective vocational guidance requires that all children are followed up at regular interviews during their first few years of work. The Youth Employment Service is not at present equipped for this task. The lack of an efficient system for reviewing progress helps to perpetuate a situation in which people spend their working lives in jobs which fail to satisfy them and in which their abilities are not tested or developed. And because the follow up system is so limited in its scope the youth employment officer is severely handicapped in his attempts to evaluate the success of his placement and guidance work.”
yeos have no statutory power to follow up anyone over the age of 18 who, at that age, automatically becomes the responsibility of the Ministry of Labour’s employment service. Thus the yeo never has the opportunity of making a long term check on the value of his advice.
age limit
A related problem concerns the age range of the clients of the yes. The division at 18 is appearing increasingly artificial. John Torode commenting on this recently wrote:	“The upper age
limit for the people helped must ... be raised considerably. Today 17 may be reasonable ... in 1970 it will not. Sixth formers and university drop outs who are over age but in need of guidance, will become more important. So will the 80 thousand or so at techs, (sz'c) and elsewhere with no university appointments boards to look to” (“How the Youth Employment Service should change”, New Society, 1 April 1965).
10
In 1965 the former London County Council commented in a booklet, From school to work: “There is a need to know whether the further education course or apprenticeship has been completed satisfactorily. Because the youth employment service ceases to be responsible for a boy or girl at the age of 18, no youth employment officer is officially able to obtain such information. If the age limit were raised to 21 or until full time education and training were completed, the Youth Employment Service would have this valuable data available by which to judge its effectiveness. For those at universities the appointments boards would have the main responsibility, but by close liaison between them and the service the information about successes and failures as well as the careers the students subsequently enter can be mad® available to the service and schools.”
If career planning is to be a continuous and logical process rather than a series of disconnected choices, the process ought to be followed through by one agency. The absence of any overall supervision throughout an individual’s early career means that those who advise a child often have very limited knowledge of what happens to the end product. A yeo or careers teacher may advise a pupil to undertake a course of further training in, for example, art or biology, only for the unfortunate youngster to find that there is a rather limited demand for his particular skill. The absurdity of this situation as it affects the more academic child was highlighted in the Heyworth Report: “The great majority of both the students and the graduates who were interviewed . . . thought that advice about studies relating to careers ought to be given in sixth forms, and they were pretty generally agreed that it was a proper job for appointments officers . . . We think that appointments officers should be encouraged to do what they can, and with increased staff they might find it possible to do more . . . but obviously they can never provide a comprehensive service; there are too many schools” (para 122) (our italics). This paragraph typifies the muddled
amateur nature of the careers advisory services. There is no attempt to say who is to fill the gap after appointments officers have done “what they can”. There appears to be merely a bland assumption that it will be all right in the end. It seems to us that either there must be a much improved flow of information between the services catering for the different age groups, or some attempt must be made to set up a unified service.
specialisation
There is a considerable variance of opinion on the question whether yeos should specialise in different groups of children. Some services, such as that of the Inner London Education Authority, believe that yeos need to specialise. It is felt by these authorities that no yeo can hope to give guidance and help to school leavers throughout the whole range of ability, and therefore specialised officers are employed to deal with those staying at school after the statutory school leaving age and those with some mental or physical handicap. In other authorities, however, a yeo is expected to deal with everyone from the brilliant to the educationally sub-normal.
Those who believe in specialisation would claim that the specialist officer is able to gain a greater and deeper knowledge of the employment and education field that comes within his sector. The job of the yeo who is concerned mainly with children in non-academic streams is to have a detailed knowledge of the local industry into which the majority of school leavers in his charge will go.
By contrast the yeo dealing with the more academic child needs to be able to give advice on a much wider range of educational and vocational opportunities, many of which will occur outside his immediate home area. He therefore needs knowledge of courses available at universities and other institutions and of a different range of career opportunities from those of importance to his colleague dealing with the non-academic. At the other end of the ability range, work
11
with school leavers suffering from some kind of handicap requires much more intensive case work than other types of vocational guidance. A yeo trying to deal with both handicapped and normal children will have difficulty in trying to work out a just allocation of his time.
i
The argument against specialism is that a yeo dealing with all ability ranges will have a better perspective of the total employment situation. However, it seems to us that this somewhat nebulous benefit would be dissipated by the yeo’s difficulty in trying to master the necessary facts about the total spectrum of career opportunities. We therefore believe that a move towards greater specialisation would be a move towards an improved service. The Albemarle Report came down in favour of the appointment of specialist officers, not only for the more able school leavers, but also to deal with the handicapped and what it describes as “the socially unsettled” (para 97 et seq).
manpower forecasts
Most of the advice given to school leavers is given in ignorance of manpower requirements. Although it must be recognised that studies of future manpower requirements are in their infancy at present, as we move slowly towards a planned economy there will be both a growing need and growing ability for producing these studies. But it must also be appreciated that the choice of career is not the only factor affecting choice of further education studies.
To the extent that manpower requirements can be evaluated and to the extent that the young person is concerned about his future chances in a particular career, there is a need for knowledge of the state of the employment market to enter more positively into the guidance process. For example, there are three qualified applicants for each place at medical school whereas there is a surplus of places at dental schools. It would be appropriate to draw the attention of some of the would be doctors to this situation so that they may at least
have the opportunity to revise their aims. Is it right, to take another example, that many young people should spend their time studying commercial art, when the great majority of them will be unable to find an opening in that particular field?
Education should not be geared almost exclusively to vocational objectives; this would be a disastrous outcome. But young people entering a course of further education should be given some indication of the likely extent of the relevant openings available to them in different fields. And the information on which this advice is based must be as accurate as present methods allow.
research
Closely related to this problem is the need for the yes to undertake a much more vigorous programme of research into all aspects of careers guidance. At present many of the deficiencies of the yes in the field of research and even in the straightforward provision of information are masked by the vigour with which a number of private non-profit making bodies is filling gaps in knowledge.
It has been left to the Careers Research Advisory Centre to run courses on a national scale for careers masters; to discuss such problems as careers in technology and failure rates in professional examinations. For the past two or three years the Advisory Centre for Education and The Sunday Times have helped provide information about openings in degree level courses outside universities. The Albemarle Report accepted the need for more research into matters affecting the yes (para 132).
recruitment and training of YEOs
Any service or profession is the sum of the people in it, and though critics of the yes have usually been fairly kind towards yeos themselves, it is pertinent to inquire whether the service is recruiting,
12
training and retraining people of suitable calibre. The National Youth Employment Council itself expressed doubts on this score in its 1959 annual report: “We are not satisfied that the training which the new entrant at present receives is in all cases adequate. Nor are we satisfied that the salary and prospects offered by authorities are at present such as will continue to attract men and women of the right calibre.”
The problems of salary and training are clearly closely related in the yes as in the teaching profession, since as long as salaries are inadequate to attract qualified candidates to undertake training, authorities will have to resort to appointing the unqualified. Figures quoted in the Albemarle Report indicate that only 10 per cent of local authority yeos earn over £1,500 a year (appendix V). Salaries are to a certain extent a problem beyond the control of yes, and it is fair to say that there has been an improvement in the last 10 years. However, it is still true that salaries are inadequate to attract the personnel required.
Salaries of yeos should be on a similar basis to those of lea organisers and organising inspectors of special subjects (such as domestic science, handicrafts, music and physical education). These officers are performing a similar function to the yeo, if the latter post is to develop as a trained officer providing true vocational guidance. The salaries of yeos have recently been re-negotiated (National Joint Council for Local Authorities, Circular No. N.0.194). The new scale, which was originally to have come into operation on 1 August 1966 has now been postponed until 1 February 1967 following the Government’s incomes freeze. The salaries of the organising inspectors are at present governed by the Eighth Report of the Committee on Salary Scales and Service Conditions of Inspectors, Organisers and Ad-vistory Officers of Local Education authorities, 1965. The new scale for yeos stretches from £820 to £1,435 a year, the grading of higher level posts bearing major responsibilities being left to the employing authorities. The scale for the
organising inspectors is classified according to number of years service and according to three grades dependent on qualifications and degree of responsibility. It is left to the authority’s discretion in which grade it places a particular officer. The starting salary of an organising inspector on the lowest grade is £1,525. This compares with £1,060 as the minimum for a yeo who has received training approved by the yes Training Board, and between £1,260 and £1,435 for a yeo with responsibilities and with a university degree or similar qualification.
The problem of training is more serious since it reflects a fundamental division between the two branches of the service: those employed by leas and those employed by the Ministry of Labour. The Central Youth Employment Executive states:	“Local	authorities appointing
them (yeos) usually require them to have a degree or diploma in social science or a diploma in vocational guidance, or to have teaching or industrial experience or experience of social work, particularly with young people, while the completion of the Lamorbey Park or Manchester training courses for intending yeos would be a strong recommendation for employment” (The Youth Employment Service in Great Britain).
It is evident from this that even today there is no insistence on any special training or qualifications for prospective yeos, although there is an obvious desire to recruit trained staff. One reason for the lack of any determined drive to increase the training given to yeos is the policy of the Ministry of Labour, which appoints a small proportion of officers but which has the over riding responsibility for the service. Ministry yeos do not make the yes a career. For them it is just one of several jobs in the Ministry’s general class in which they may work for some years before being moved to entirely different work. This is not to imply that Ministry yeos do not take their yes work seriously (some are as dedicated to their task as the best lea yeos). but it does mean that the Ministry is not very interested in long term training arrangements. This subject was dis-
13
cussed by Professor Alec Rodger, one of the leading authorities on the yes, in an article some years ago. He pointed out that the longest Ministry course for yeos, at Birkbeck College, London, lasts four weeks, and went on to say: “As long as the Ministry is satisfied with its job-rotating yeos, who specialise only temporarily in this kind of work, rarely for much more than five years, it cannot be expected to look with favour on lengthy courses. Here we have another basic point. To the Ministry, which clearly is satisfied, long courses must seem both uneconomic and unnecessary. They savour of the kind of specialisation which is contrived to safeguard the interests of people who are trying to make out that their work is ‘professional’.” (“Arranging jobs for the young”, New Society, 6 December 1962).
The courses at Lamorbey Park and Manchester usually last one year, and it is clear that the Ministry of Labour is not fully convinced of their value. In fact, according to the Albemarle Report (appendix III), of the 1,279 local authority yeos in post on 1 January 1965, only 227 had been to Lamorbey Park or Manchester. A further 136 had been on the four week course at Birkbeck College, and 140 of the 214 Ministry employed officers had been on this course. The short 5-10 day courses organised by the Central Youth Employment Executive had been attended by 396 local authority yeos and 72 Ministry yeos, and “in service” courses arranged by local education authorities had been attended by 272 officers.
To some extent the situation is the result of uncertainty about what the yes is trying to do and what tools and techniques it needs to do it. We suggested at the outset that vocational guidance was a complex process, and that under present circumstances the yes could only be regarded as providing an information and placing service, with a relatively small “guidance content”. If the job of the yeo is seen in this limited sense as an information officer and job finding agent, it may be true that the techniques necessary for such a task can be taught
in much less than a year. But it is our contention that the horizons of the service need to be lifted so that it is seen as a true vocational guidance and educational counselling service based on the accumulated knowledge of educational and occupational psychology and related subjects that can help a young person decide his future. If it were taken seriously, all yeos would need a sound knowledge of these subjects, in addition to information of a purely factual nature about education and industry. Such knowledge cannot be acquired in less than a year, and if yeos are ever to be regarded as other than well meaning amateurs there will have to be much greater official recognition of the fact that there is a great body of knowledge which is relevant to vocational guidance problems but which is unknown to many yeos.
The Albemarle Report is particularly disappointing on this vital question of training. It strikes us as confused and contradictory. It accepts the need for local authority yeos to have a full year's training, but goes on to say: “Having regard to the previous employment exchange training and experience of the great majority of the Ministry of Labour yeos, we consider that the arrangements now proposed (three month training courses) are reasonably satisfactory” (para 192). This would seem to imply that the longer training period needed for local authority yeos is required merely in order to give them that occupational information which the former employment exchange officer is assumed to possess. If so, this is a sad reflection on the working party’s vision. The kind of problem it should have considered is how' the youth employment service is to attract high quality university graduates through the provision of post graduate studies in specialised vocational guidance.
ministerial responsibility
The Ministry of Labour’s record on yeo training must cast serious doubt on its suitability for the task of having national responsibility for the yes. There is a fur-
14
ther point to be considered. If vocational guidance is in future to be viewed as an intrinsic part of the educational system, and if it is to be provided by specially trained experienced officers who are making a profession of their guidance work, national responsibility for the service should be transferred to the Department of Education and Science. In the early days of the Juvenile Employment Service, when the basic problem was to avoid juvenile unemployment, the Ministry had a valid claim to be the responsible department. But we must now move towards a wider educational concept of vocational guidance.
One result of this change would be that local services now provided in some areas by the Ministry would have to be provided by the local education authority. This would be a useful reform in itself. It is regrettable that the Albemarle Committee should have decided: “This is not the time to make a change in the existing arrangements for local administration of the youth employment service” (recommendation 37). The only reason that seems to have been given for this retention of the present anomalous system is that unspecified benefits are supposed to flow from the “tension” between the two systems of organisation.
size of LEAs
Finally, consideration should be given to the size of lea areas. This is especially important if yeos are to specialise in different groups of children as we have argued above, for specialism is, indeed, impossible if there are not enough children of one type to justify the appointment of specialists. This will be especially true where handicapped children are concerned. There are further general problems of small authorities which tend to extend beyond the field of the yes. These were summarised by L. J. Sharpe in a recent Fabian pamphlet: “They (smaller authorities) have neither the scope to attract adequately trained staff, the resources to provide services at present day standards, nor are their populations big enough to provide case loads
to warrant the provision of the necessary specialised staff and institutions. In a word, there are too many small authorities” (Why local democracy, Fabian tract 361). This problem has also been related directly to the problems of the yes by John Torode: “Small leas will never be able to offer a ladder of responsibility and pay. Good senior men can move on to bigger authorities, but is it fair to condemn some areas to the younger or less ambitious man? . . . Progress is bound to mean larger areas” (“How the Youth Employment Service should change”, New Society, 1 April 1965).
A caveat should be entered here. It may be impossible to run a service over vast rural areas with scattered population, and there is obviously a point where size becomes cumbersome. Perhaps some of the smaller counties which are unable to provide a full scale service should be encouraged to pool their resources with a neighbouring county. Some of the smaller county boroughs would probably do well to merge their yes with the surrounding county service. This would be especially valuable where the county borough and county depended on each other’s resources for job vacancies and job applicants.
One final problem that is raised by the scattered population in some areas is that of the location of bureaux. It is obviously uneconomic and inefficient to have bureaux located in villages where a skilled man has to spend a large part of his day doing nothing. Alternatively, it would be wrong to merely provide lower quality yeos for these bureaux. It has been argued that these under used offices should be closed down and that the children should travel to the nearest large town for their interviews. However, it seems to us that this is not a measure that would result in greater use of the bureaux bv young people. There is no simple answer to this problem, but perhaps more use should be made of part time offices in the villages. The question of local authority areas is now beint; studied bv the Royal Commission on Local Government.
3.	the YES and education
Relationships between schools and yeos are not always free from strain. That tension occurs in only a minority of schools is probably true, but the minority is a fairly sizeable one. The greatest difficulty occurs in selective schools. Trouble can usually be related to one of the following causes:
1. The school may be sceptical of the whole concept of vocational guidance, which is considered to run counter to the “liberal tradition” of English education.
2. Some schools undoubtedly see the service as a threat to cherished traditions. Put at its crudest, the school is unlikely to be delighted to allow the yeo to ask a boy to consider the vocational value of his studies if this is likely to lead to the classics master finding himself out of a job.
3. There may be uncertainty as to the dividing line between the work of the yeo and that of the careers teacher.
4. The absolute right of a head teacher to accept or not the services of the yeo can lead to a service being debarred from a school.
5. There may be some conflict as to the point at which a pupil ought to consider leaving school. Some head teachers are reluctant to accept that a pupil may do better to enter employment or start a technical college course.
6. The school may be aware of inadequacies in the local service and have no confidence in the quality of its guidance.
division of responsibilities
A recent review in the Journal of the Assistant Masters’ Association of the booklet Preparation of young people for employment (Institute of Youth Employment Officers) pinpoints one of the sources of friction: “The policy of the institute is that there should be a designated careers teacher in every secondary school, and the writer emphasises
the importance of the careers teacher and the yeo working in close harmony with each other. How this is to be achieved is set out in some detail, but the impression is given that the main function of the careers teacher is to feed information to the yeo to supply information on careers to the careers master and leave the advising, at least in the first place, to him. The careers master will know the boy, he can talk to him on a basis of mutual understanding and not as a complete stranger in a short, set interview. But the booklet states categorically, ‘It is not the function of the careers teacher to give vocational guidance or to persuade boys and girls to take special courses with a view to entering particular careers’. In what kind of position does this place the careers teacher? If his or her work is to be reduced to those tasks set out at the end of the booklet under ‘Suggested duties of a careers teacher’, then it seems probable that headmasters and headmistresses may have some difficulty in finding teachers who are willing to undertake careers work in their schools.”
This assumes that the yeo should basically be a provider of information for the school, which itself takes on the role of the vocational guidance agency. Undoubtedly a yeo who shares our view that he should be seen as a specialist officer providing a specialist service and a careers master who shares that of the Assistant Masters’ journal are bound to clash at some stage. At present, when the yes is so hard pressed and is unable to give guidance as many yeos would wish, and when careers masters are given a paltry allocation of time to deal with careers work, there may be little chance of either officer being able to tread on the other’s toes. But if, as we hope, the yes will in the not too distant future be equipped for a much larger role, and if careers teachers are able to improve their position, it is vital that the respective duties of the two persons should be defined and, as far as is possible, a dividing line agreed on.
Schools rightly feel a great sense of responsibility towards those who have been
16
under their care for a number of years and are anxious to see that the child’s education reaches its climax in the choice of career. It is therefore natural that teachers should often insist that only the school really knows the pupil and that only someone intimately associated with the school is in a position to give advice. The yeo is a stranger to the child, and, since he does not know him well, cannot advise him, it is said. Though we appreciate that this view has many worthy advocates, we believe that it is based on a number of erroneous assumptions.
First it presupposes that a boy or girl will be reluctant to accept information and advice from a stranger. But what evidence is there that this is so? Several yeos believe that, since they are strangers, children may be more likely to confide in them than in someone they know as a teacher. It is true that this view is also not based on hard statistics or research, but it is as valid as the former argument. More positively, it could be pointed out that if the school takes care to explain to the children who the yeo is and what he is coming for, children will be more ready to accept him.
Further, it is difficult to understand what relevant knowledge of a child the school has which cannot be communicated to the yeo either verbally or in the report which is provided by the school for the yeo on each pupil. It may well be that mistakes of guidance made by yeos because of inadequate knowledge of the child are results of an inadequate school report. It is also most doubtful whether manv careers masters, who onlv have a couple of periods a week to devote to careers work, have or can have a detailed knowledge of each child. They relv on the views of their colleagues on the school staff in much the same wav as the yeo relies on the careers master. Finally, if the yes were to be expanded in the way we suggest, the yeo’s contact with each pupil would be greatly increased.
It would be wrong to blame careers teachers themselves for any confusion in the respective roles of yeo and careers
teacher. The diffuse language of the Department of Education and Science in its booklet Forward from school is not calculated to clarify the position: “From the moment when the pupil embarks on a particular course until he leaves school, he should be able to expect advice from a member of the staff. In a growing number of schools careers masters (or counsellors) are giving this advisory service. If a careers master is to play his part eifectively, he must have full and up to date information about the structure of further education in general and about local opportunities in the technical college and in industry. The more first hand experience he has of the inside of the technical college and of some local firms, the more convincing and helpful his advice will be. He will be working hand in glove with the youth employment officer. If he himself was educated at a grammar school and a university, or at a grammar school and a teacher training college, he will need to learn about and think imaginatively about the ever widening range of further education.”
On grammar school careers teachers specifically, the booklet has this to say: “In the grammar school the task of the careers master is particularly delicate. The pupils have been selected as apparently suited to an academic course, and the school will be anxious that as many as possible shall pursue such a course and crown their achievements in the sixth form. Careers masters in grammar schools, again with the help of the youth employment service through its careers advisers, will need to know what sixth form studies can lead to nowadays in addition to a place at a university or teacher training college. They must be able also to recognise the boy or girl for whom an earlier transfer into further education is likely to prove more beneficial than continued attendance at school. This calls for knowledge, judgement and generosity of outlook.”
The Albemarle Report made no attempt to deal squarely with the sources of conflict inherent in the present vague division of responsibility between yeo and school.
17
It is also hard to justify the present arrangement whereby the head of a school can, in effect, decide whether a pupil should have the benefit of the yes, which is one of the services provided for him by the community. If it is argued that the service in some areas is not competent to provide guidance, then let the faults be discussed openly and the service improved. If a head teacher feels that a particular yeo or group of yeos is not fit to give guidance to his pupils, it is far better that the matter be examined than that the young people be left without guidance and the yeos left to practise their incompetence in other schools in the area.
the careers teacher
It is important to establish exactly how much and what kind of careers work schools are doing or are in a position to do. If it is being suggested that the careers teacher and not the yeo should be the main figure in the vocational guidance process, it is necessary to inquire how well equipped he is for this task.
According to the National Union of Teachers (“Careers work in schools” Careers for young people), the average careers teacher has four periods a week in a timetable of 40 teaching periods for his careers duties. Others would estimate the figure as lower still. This must seriously limit the amount of work he is able to do and also affect the quality of what he is able to get done. The situation is near farcical and suggests that the official conception of the role of the careers teacher is entirely unrealistic.
What chance has a careers teacher working under these conditions to become reasonably well acquainted with industry in the locality? And if he is not so acquainted, his advice and guidance may well be worse than useless. He will be acting on incomplete information, will be out of touch with the real requirements of different jobs, and will be unaware of the state of the employment market. And what chance has he of giv-
ing the continuing guidance that is considered desirable if young people are to have a full chance of making reasoned choices when they come to make their decisions?
The following quotation from a letter received from a careers master in a grammar school gives some idea of the work a conscientious careers teacher tries to do. Given officially one 40 minute period a week, with responsibility for about 140 fifth formers in a school of 760, he says, “To carry out the programme in the autumn and spring meant my seeing one or two pupils daily for talks up to an hour, based on a questionnaire previously completed by each. This year I have conducted hardly any formal interviews, but had instead to collect data from my colleagues for the completion of a yes pre-interview question-naire-cum-report for some 130 pupils. With perhaps 25 members of staff to ‘chase’, this again was a lengthy affair, as was the summarising of their individual comments.”
It is not surprising that in spite of earnest efforts by a conscientious and overworked minority, the situation in many schools remains most unsatisfactory. Even in dealing with its university candidates, where it might be presumed to be expert, the school seems to be making little impact, or, worse, failing to provide the opportunity to choose. According to Peter Marris in The experience of higher education:	“Students rarely
seem to be encouraged to consider what further education could provide for them and enter university without any clear sense of purpose . . . They do not so much choose the university as fail to choose otherwise.” He goes on to quote a statement made to him by a student: “My grammar school was one of these production lines. By the sixth form the headmaster divided them off and said, ‘You will apply to Oxford and Cambridge’. You weren’t really given any choice.” He also found that few of the students to whom he spoke seemed to have had adequate advice: “Many had only the vaguest information about the various institutions of higher education.
18
the qualifications needed to enter them or the careers to which they might lead. Their parents had little experience and their schools seemed seldom to have possessed a well informed and energetic enough service of vocational guidance.
Evidently there is a great need for a real intensification of guidance. Young people hoping to continue their education in universities and other institutions need help in selecting the type of course most suited to their needs and require concrete information about the career implications of the various choices open to them. Those intending to go directly from school into employment need information on the content of the job and of the opportunities available in their home area.
While these services must be intensified and improved, we do not believe that schools themselves can provide what is essentially a specialised skilled service.
There are dangers inherent in separating the functions of giving guidance and placing in employment. And if it were suggested, however, that schools should take over the task of placement as well, there would be further grave dangers. In this connection, Professor Alec Rodger has said: “There are dangers for school leavers in direct placement (by the schools). Many boys have been steered towards less than suitable work by a headmaster who, proud of his contacts with local businessmen, has virtually prevented them from finding out through the yeo what other openings might be available. Many employers have taken less than suitable recruits because they have limited their inquiries to a particular school, instead of asking the yeo for help based on his knowledge of several schools” (“Arranging jobs for the young”, New Society, 6 December 1962).
Only the day to day contact which the YEOs have with industry and commerce enables them to keep their information continually up to date. The careers master has to obtain his knowledge about openings from literature that quickly be-
comes out of date and which is often produced by a commercial organisation that may show some bias. It is sometimes difficult to persuade careers masters that the fact that children find jobs easily may not necessarily mean they find the right jobs. However, it is important to realise that any attempts by schools to leave the yes “out in the cold”, as it were, are direct votes of no confidence in the yes as it exists. It would be wrong to take any determined steps to prevent schools from trying to act this way unless and until equally determined steps are taken to improve the service provided. Before schools can be criticised for giving guidance divorced from placement, the yes must ensure that it is seeing pupils often enough to justify its claim that it does in fact give any guidance.
university appointments boards
The existence of the University Appointments Boards as separate bodies to deal with the placing of graduates in employment leaves the yeo giving guidance to potential university entrants in a strange position. He is giving guidance on the type of careers that follow a university course, but has no experience of actually placing graduates. It is important that the vocational adviser should be involved in the whole guidance process, as if he has no responsibility for placement he cannot really claim to be in touch with the changing state of the employment market.
The schools themselves are in no position to give this guidance as they too are out of touch with the actual employment situation. Furthermore, school staff are generally not well equipped to discuss with pupils courses like sociology or architecture, which do not form part of the school curriculum. The Heyworth Report on University Appointments Boards proposed that the boards’ officers should visit the schools giving this kind of guidance. But this would create problems; many young people might need guidance on the very problem of whether to go to university or not. It
19
would be an unwieldy arrangement if they had to go to different officers for advice on the two options. It might also result in pupils being subject to more pressure than they are already to decide in favour of university, even though this might not always be the most suitable course for them as individuals.
That there is a need for more intensive work of this nature to assist young people in this vital choice was shown in a survey on Advice systems in schools, carried out by an education study group at Imperial College, which revealed the vague nature of some of the choices made and the way in which they were approached. Many yeos try to help by providing information on what subjects can be studied. At present, however, there seems to be little in the way of formal links between the yes and institutions of higher education.
When a decision is finally made to increase the age limit of the service from 18 to 21 there will be a useful opportunity to effect some form of integration between the yes and the University Appointment Boards. If it were possible completely to merge the two services, with officers giving guidance to school leavers, under graduates and graduates, the upper age limit of the service could be defined as 21 years old or the age at which a person ceases to receive full time education, whichever came later. Such a merger would involve a welcome strengthening of the ties between the yes and the institutions of further and higher education. The service would also be formally recognised as equipped to give guidance on university courses to school leavers, in conjunction with the schools.
However, it might be found that a complete merger would be impracticable. For example, it would mean that students not in their home area would have to receive vocational guidance from an officer in their home town who would not be well acquainted with the university concerned. An alternative would be to give the task of guiding university students to yeos in the university towns alone, but this would destroy one of the purposes of the
merger—achieving a greater contact with the graduate employment situation for all yeos assisting pupils planning to go to university. If a merger is unpracticable, the two services could be maintained as separate entities under one central organisation. Machinery could be set up to ensure that there was a constant flow of information, statistics and so on, between University Appointments Boards and the yes. At present many yeos feel very much “in the dark” when discussing post university courses with young people, and the provision of detailed information to help them is vital.
public schools appointments boards
Vocational guidance and placement in public schools is carried out by the Public Schools Appointments Boards. To the extent that these boards have special connections with firms and are able to provide career opportunities not available to the yes and its customers, they are providing an unfair advantage to public school pupils and restricting the field of recruitment. However, if they provide no such advantages, it is difficult to see that they have any valid claim to maintain a separate existence.
school counsellors
A development which has only recently appeared on the British educational scene, but which is already established in the United States and some European countries, is the school counsellor system. Under such a scheme trained school counsellors are members of the staff of a school and are able to help pupils with a wide range of educational, personal and social problems. So far only a few potential school counsellors are being trained, at courses provided at Exeter, Keele and Reading universities, and at Edge Hill College of Education. How quickly the concept will spread will no doubt depend on how soon it becomes generally recognised that school children have a whole range of problems with which modern psychological knowledge is becoming increasingly equipped to
20
deal, if only it can be made available.
Two years ago a plan for a reformed service was outlined by Mr. H. Z. Hoxter, then principal youth employment officer of East Ham. Under this scheme school counsellors would have responsibility for giving guidance on subject choices, educational choices and courses, etc., to school pupils, although they would do no placing. The final stages of occupational guidance and actual placement would be carried out by a second officer, the vocational guidance counsellor, who would be based on the local education authority. The work of these two officers would be co-ordinated by a third officer, the vocational guidance adviser. The divorce between guidance and placing that a scheme of this precise nature would involve would entail the risk of conflicting advice being given to young people. The school counsellor would not be in constant contact with developments in industry, and consequently could not be relied upon to give detailed advice on careers prospects.
However, since 1964 Mr. Hoxter has developed his concept further. He envisages a two tiered service with one group of officers, the school counsellors, based on the school and providing a full counselling service for pupils between the ages of 13 and 16. Because of the age group they are serving, the training of these officers would be biased towards the study of educational conditions. At 16 years old, school leaving age, the local authority based vocational guidance counsellors would assume responsibility until the age of 21. They would provide occupational advice and a placing service for young people entering enrol oyment and would give continued guidance on further and higher educational opportunities to all young people aged 16 to 21. Consequently their training would be biased towards the study of vocational conditions, although they would also be equipped with educational knowledge similar to that employed bv the school counsellor. Although this revised scheme integrates the counselling and placing services more closely, we still believe that the sharing of guidance functions by two
officers could have unfortunate consequences. Naturally, school counsellors will have an invaluable role to play in the assessment of an individual pupil, and such assessments would be essential information for the youth employment officer. However, since we believe that there is a necessary connection between guidance and placing, and that this should therefore be performed by one person, we consider that the school counsellor’s vocational guidance function should be minimal.
If the school counsellor system is extended in Britain, its staff should concentrate on personal and educational counselling, throughout the age range of the school. They would be well acquainted with the work of the yeo and would liaise with him, providing him with valuable personality assessments, but they would not give guidance as such. The yeo, in turn, would contact pupils at whatever age they first needed guidance on vocational matters, and would follow their career through the school, using information provided by the school counsellor. There is evidence -that some American vocational guidance experts are beginning to appreciate the advantages of such a unified service. According to R. Hoppock in Occupational information : “We could make tremendous improvements in the quality of vocational guidance if we could require all counsellors to . . . follow the client through the process of placement and stay with him until his record indicates that the placement and counselling have been successful.”
the Fife scheme
An interesting experiment in the integration of vocational guidance within the educational process is being carried out by Fife county council. Here the education authority is introducing a new system of vocational and work based courses in its junior secondary schools. From 14 to 15 the pupils will follow four guidance courses, that is eight periods a week of a course based on a particular industry. At the end of the year they will
have an interview with a yeo before deciding on one particular work course to be taken as a major subject in the final year. There will then be a further interview with the yeo.
Every attempt seems to have been made to integrate the work of the schools and the yes. When the scheme was being planned the yes was called in to provide statistics of the number of young people entering various careers, so that the number of people trained on a particular course would be related to the requirements of industry. Guidance teams have been formed in each school comprising a yeo and three or four teachers who act as careers teachers. These work together in organising a guidance programme. There might be some criticism of the heavy vocational content of the Fife courses, but the attempt to establish real co-operation between yeos and teachers is an example of what can be done when the attempt is made.
Similar exercises in the provision of vocational education in schools are now being carried out by several education authorities. Details of many of them are given in Michael Carter’s recent book, Into work.
4.	the YES and industry
Most yeos feel less strongly about their relationship with industry than they do about	relations	with the	schools.	Be-
tween the schools and the yes there is or ought to be some identity of interest. One of the things that yeos find so frustrating about their relationship with schools is the disagreement about means towards agreed ends, yeos tend to feel that schools are, more or less, “on our side”.	Attitudes towards	industry	are
more ambivalent. It is important that the yeo’s contacts with industry should be harmonious, but most yeos regard the interest of the school leaver of first importance and their duty to the employer as a secondary consideration.
The yeo is, in	a sense, a	mediator	between	schools	and industry. It is	his
knowledge of industry that makes it possible for him to advise children about the range of openings and to help them find suitable employment. In so far as he does not have close contacts with industry his advice tends to be of less value in the task of helping school leavers find employment. A substantial minority of yeos do not enjoy “placing”, tending to prefer the “guidance” side of their work. Placing is sometimes seen as a relatively unimportant part of the yeo’s work. This is unfortunate. It. cannot be stressed too much that vocational guidance divorced from the realities of placement can be a grave danger.
guidance and placing
First, it is impossible to say exactly where guidance ends and placement begins. Guidance that simply turns children in a particular direction towards a particular range of jobs is an incomplete task, and may become divorced from the realities of the situation. The good yeo is happy when he has been able to guide a person right into a particular job. This can, of course, be taken too far, as is reflected in the obsession with placing figures in the annual reports demanded of yeos by their local youth employment committees. Statistics of placements during the year can be utterly meaningless. To some extent they will
simply reflect that the yeo guided a boy into a job he had already set his heart on, which may or may not be the best thing he could have done.
A number of surveys has shown that many secondary modern school children are unaware of the fact that the yes has any function other than placing, and if the service fails them at this point, it may be failing them at the only point where it can be of value to them. School leavers need careful guidance in choosing between firms which may offer widely varying standards of training and which may provide environments suited to different personalities. At the brief advisory interview it is often only possible to identify a child’s suitability for a career in the most general sense. A boy may simply be identified at that stage as suitable, for example, for some form of engineering apprenticeship, and it is only as he nears the time of leaving school that he can begin to be assisted to clarifv his ideas more precisely and is then ready to be introduced to suitable employers. The Albemarle Report seems to have been unduly complacent about the placing facilities that are currently being offered by the yes as a whole. The service is particularly weak when it comes to the re-placement of boys and girls who wish to change their jobs.
One shortcoming is the tendency for some yeos to try to place boys and girls in vacancies notified to them rather than find vacancies which fit more precisely the wishes and abilities of the young people themselves. A recent survey bv Joan Maizels of yeo placement records in Willesden suggested that a bureau’s register of vacancies might not accurately reflect the employment market. It was found that boys approaching the local bureau tended to be placed predominantly in semi-skilled or unskilled manual posts, and that the majority of apprenticeships tended to be filled bv channels other than the local yes. (“The entry of school leavers into employment”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, March 19651. The implications of this are grave indeed ; it suggests that a young person seeking an opening
23
through the yes may sometimes be cutting himself off from the best opportunities. The need for a dynamic rather than static approach to maintaining files of job vacancies in all youth employment bureaux is evident. Of course, the best yeos have always done this. What is needed is for this to become standard. One of the causes of the weakness in placing techniques is that some yeos believe it is an unimportant aspect of their work and leave it to clerical staff. We have been told of cases where Central Youth Employment Executive inspectors have actually recommended yeos to do this as a means of saving time. This policy is seriously misguided. The yeo who knows well the industries in his area and the nature of the vacancies that exist can give a degree of personal attention to placing young people in jobs suited to their needs that a clerical assistant working under general instructions cannot provide. To encourage yeos to delegate placing to clerical staff in order to conserve yeos’ time is dangerous and must not be allowed to become official policy. Other yeos simply do not have the knowledge of industry that enables them to do this kind of work adequately. The extension of training facilities should be a major factor in overcoming this weakness.
Equally important is the unwillingness of possibly the majority of yeos to allow officers from neighbouring districts to have access to “their” firms. We were appalled to discover that many yeos have great difficulty in finding out about vacancies in areas other than their own. This is a purely administrative weakness on which the Central Youth Employment Executive can and should take firm action. Finally, acute staff shortages have, until quite recently, made it difficult for yeos to find time to make visits to local firms.
collaboration with employers
A further very important reason why placing should be treated as an essential aspect of the work of a fully qualified yeo is that employers may often need
advice on job requirements. In many small firms the employer does not always know precisely what qualifications, aptitudes, etc., he really requires of candidates for a particular vacancy. As a result of this he may seek qualifications which are either not applicable or in excess of real requirements. This can result in serious problems of misplacement and job frustration.
The yeo can offer useful help here, in the interests of both the young person and the employer. Obviously, before firms can be expected actively to seek the assistance of the service on this score, they must have considerable confidence in the value of its advice. This will be particularly so if the yeo is to tell an employer that he does not need for a particular vacancy someone with the educational qualifications he has requested.
It is very important that the yes should perform this function. Individual yeos must therefore prove their ability to help by taking the initiative in contacting employers over specific vacancies. No doubt several have been doing this for many years. The important point to note is that if placing is delegated to clerical assistants, inappropriate job specifications will go unchallenged and unseen by the responsible yeo. This further illustrates the importance of an active, resourceful approach to placement, yeos have to be ready to delve into the facts behind the cards in their vacancies files. The yeo who takes this approach can become a valuable adviser to employers on various aspects of recruitment and training.
parental influence
When young people have reached the stage where they need to be introduced to prospective employers, parents begin to play an increasingly important part. Unless they have been made aware of the work of the yes and have some confidence in it, they may begin to try to place the child themselves. Many a son (though a decreasing number) still follows his father into “the firm” without
2.4
much thought about the nature of his job when he joins the firm. Many parents who have memories of the thirties, when getting a job (any job) was of vital concern, are quite unaware of the many opportunities available to children today and may unwittingly restrict their children’s freedom of manoeuvre.
The Albemarle Report showed an acute awareness of the need for parents to be involved in their sons’ and daughters’ vocational choices, and also pointed out the difficulties involved: “It is difficult for even the best parents to advise their own children objectively. Their own assessment of their children’s potentialities may not be unbiased. Their knowledge of careers is likely to be patchy. And sometimes, as research has shown, their advice may be stronger on the negative than on the positive side: they tend to influence a child against occupations which they want him to avoid, for health or social reasons, rather than towards occupations for which he would be suitable by capacity and inclination (para 83).
Parents should not only be involved during the final stages of guidance. Their help and confidence is needed from the outset, and they themselves may need as much help as their children in understanding the vocational field that will eventually be open to the young people. The Albemarle Report called for a regular review of the relationships between the service and parents in order to work out new methods for increasing contact and publicity. An important responsibility falls on the schools, for it is they who have considerable scope for keeping in touch with parents. This is a problem that must be given urgent attention, and is consequently yet another argument for closer relations between service and schools.
careers advertising
The yes may be handicapped in its placing work by the fact that many larger firms prefer to recruit by other means, such as advertising. This need not be a
disadvantage provided all ye,os make vigorous efforts to contact the firms in their area so that they have full knowledge of all employment opportunities. Firms are rarely hostile to the yes and are usually glad to explain the nature of their openings for school leavers to the yeo. If they then reserve the right to use all available methods of recruiting, the yeo must work within this context. Sometimes a yeo may hear of vacancies that have not been officially notified to him. If he advises some of his interviewees to try for these jobs firms will have found their staff via the yes without realising it. In this way placement records of a local bureau can be distorted in that they do not take into account the enterprise of the yeo. However, where such enterprise is missing, it might well be that young people using the bureau and relying on it alone are shutting themselves off from some good vacancies. More enterprising yeos are needed.
Careers advertisements raise a second problem. Whilst industry must be free to advertise its vacancies, we are concerned lest the important choice of career should be swayed by the more disingenuous type of advertisement. All too often advertisements directed at young people who are about to leave school are couched in vague terms and give little idea to the school leaver as to the real nature of the job being advertised. Many a youngster, perplexed by the problem of choosing a career, may turn with relief to an advertisement whose main apparent merit is an unjustified simplification of the issue. Perhaps worst of all are the glamourised pieces of recruiting propaganda put out by the Armed Services.
The information which industry and commerce should give in its careers advertisements should be factual and of a fairly basic kind. It should contain a brief description of the actual duties involved in the job, the nature of the formal training which will be given, the minimum qualification required and a statement of the average wages earned by an adult in that specific job. If the prospective employer feels able to give
25
some further advice on the personal qualities he is seeking he should be encouraged to avoid such words as “bright”, “willing”, “alert”.
Would it not be possible to introduce legislation requiring the inclusion of the basic facts we have listed in all careers advertisements? The principle has already been recognised in law that in certain circumstances goods offered for sale must have their ingredients clearly specified. The prospective employer is trying to “sell” his vacancies to potential employees. He should specify in his advertisements the contents of his “product”. But whether or not such legislation could be devised, the yeo has a very important role to play in drawing the attention of young people to misleading advertisements. He should remind them of the dangers of accepting glibly what an advertisement has to say.
adult guidance
in arguing for the extension of the age limit of the yes from 18 to 21 we have already discussed the need for continuing guidance. There is no reason to assume that once people reach the age of 18 or 21 they cease to have any problems of vocational choice or that there are no services of this nature which the community can provide for them. Many people feel the need for a change of surroundings and vocation in middle life, and at present there is little to help them. There is also the problem of men made redundant in declining industries, which will assume greater importance if and when the Government carries out its intentions to re-orientate the country's economic xesources, as it has attempted to do in the case of the aircraft industry.
Our main concern is with guidance for young people. However, since we see vocational guidance as a continuing process it is necessary to give an indication of how the adult employment services would need to be reshaped in keeping with an improved youth guidance service. The Government agency for providing an employment service for adults
is, of course, the Ministry of Labour's employment exchange service, still commonly and incorrectly known as labour exchanges. It is a service, it is generally believed, for unskilled workers who cannot find a job by any other means. To a certain extent this image is justified. The employment exchanges aim at providing information and advice on jobs and do not yet claim to give vocational guidance. They do not have the qualified personnel needed for vocational guidance work. The service is still mainly for skilled and unskilled manual workers.
Now that the days of chronic unemployment are passed, it is time that the role of the exchanges was re-examined. The need today is not just for jobs, but for particular jobs suited to a man’s needs. It is not enough to assume that because a man comes into an exchange and asks for a specific kind of employment, that this is the most suitable work for him. He might be better suited to a different job which he has never considered, or he might be a suitable candidate for a training scheme of some kind. The Ministry of Labour is at present considering the establishment of an adult advisory service. Experimental adult vocational guidance units are being set up to provide vocational guidance. They will be staffed by personnel trained in counselling, depth interviewing and psychometric techniques. The Ministry intends to see how successful these experimental units are before committing itself to an extensive service.
The Ministry’s experiment should be welcomed. However, should the scheme eventually be extended nationwide, it will be essential for the Ministry to make the position of an adult careers advisory officer a career post, and not treat it as merely a rung in the general civil service ladder, as it does the yes.
If such units are to be established successfully, they will have to be based on a recognition of the different labour categories involved in placement. That these categories exist is already recognised in the registers kept by the Ministry, such as the professional and execu-
26
tive register and the clerical and commercial register. These registers should be extended to cover the whole range of employment, and become the basis of a vocational guidance programme geared to the requirement of adult workers. A particular problem arises with the clerical and commercial register. This is in competition with the innumerable secretarial agencies, which, because of the acute shortage of this kind of labour, are able to charge high fees for personnel, and also pay personnel on their books above normal wage rates. The Ministry has recently set up a separate office for this register in Holborn as a prototype for future development within this field of placement. The service is free and the accommodation matches that of the private agency. This attempt to provide an employment service free from the old “labour exchange” image is a positive step in the right direction. The Ministry would do well to carry out an intensive survey of the records of the people using this agency. In as much as they will represent a typical cross section of the people using the private agencies, they will be a guide to the vocational problems, if any, experienced by this kind of employee. It may well be that it is just a question of women who want secretarial jobs being given secretarial jobs, in which case the private agencies have as much claim to a continued existence as any other private enterprise. If, on the other hand, it is found that several vocational problems arise in this group and that they need more than just placing in vacancies, the Ministry should consider seriously whether it should follow West Germany’s example in not permitting private employment agencies.
The professional and executive register presents another aspect of job placement which is relevant to the question of specialisation in vocational guidance. At the present time the register has about 10,000 vacancies on its books (a small percentage of the jobs advertised in the press) but these do not extend beyond a salary ceiling of £2,000. No vocational guidance is given, and, although close liaison with the University Appointments Boards is laid down as policy, there is
little contact with higher management training centres. The kind of vocational guidance required by this kind of person has not been carefully studied, and such a study would be relevant not only to efficient job placement, but to the yeo’s task of assessing the type of experience, qualifications and temperament required by jobs at this level. It is a function of vocational guidance to see the whole spectrum of a career and not just its initial stages.
5.	conclusion
We believe that a compi ehensive and effective system of vocational guidance for young people is an essential part of a welfare state. At present Britain does not have such a service. If the reforms outlined below were implemented, it would be well on the way to acquiring one. Several of them would require money and some would take time to achieve. Nevertheless, if a service is considered worth providing at all it should be provided as efficiently as possible, It is false economy to impair the value of a service which is in any case costing money by withholding the resources it needs.
summary of proposals
1. The Youth Employment Service must be expanded until it is possible for every child to have at least a half-hour interview with the yeo and as many more as he requires. This means recruiting many more yf.os than are at present employed.
2. There must be a major advance in the integration of vocational guidance within the educational system. Experiments such as that being carried out in Fife and elsewhere to bring about an intimate working partnership between yeos and the schools must be actively encouraged. The raising of the school leaving age provides a good opportunity for this.
3. Section 44 of the Ince Report should be implemented forthwith. This called for all schools to be required to register all their pupils with the yes. This is already done for pupils leaving school at the statutory age.
4. Skilled guidance should be available to pupils as and when they need it during their school career. In addition, every school should have a designated careers teacher whose functions and relationship with the yeo will be clearly defined, and who will be given an adequate allocation of time to discharge these functions.
5. As a matter of priority ihe age limit
of those having access to the service should be raised to 21 or the age at which full time education is completed, whichever comes later.
6.	A more determined effort must be made to make the yes known to parents. This duty rests on the service and the schools working together.
7	The placing work of the service needs to be greatly strengthened and any tendency towards parochialism by local services should be checked. Placing is not a job for clerical assistants.
8. There must be an extension and intensification of the follow up work carried out by yeos to help young people in their first lew years at work.
9. The service should take an impartial look at the adequacy of training arrangements for yeos, which would lead to the conclusion that vocational guidance is work requiring specific skills. The Albemarle Report’s recommendation that pre-entry training of one year should be compulsory should be acted upon. Beyond this there is a need to attract postgraduate students to specialise in vocational guidance, and to this end university based post graduate courses in vocational guidance should be introduced on a wide scale. The distinction between Ministry of Labour and education authority training courses should disappear (see 16 below).
10. The service must take full advantage of the various psychological techniques that can make guidance more accurate and individual. In particular we should like to see an extension of psychometric testing and more thorough going follow up techniques.
11. The salaries of fully trained yeos should be based on those of the organisers and organising inspectors of local education authorities. This would mean higher salaries throughout the professional grades of the service.
12. The University Appointments Boards should be united under the same organis-
28
ational umbrella as the yes, in order to	specialised skilled	service,	then it is right
ensure that there is full co-operation and	that it should be	treated	as such at all
exchange of information between the	levels,
two services.
13. The Public Schools Appointments Boards should cease to exist as bodies giving privileged access to careers for a minority.
14. The inspectorate should assume a major responsibility for examining difficulties between schools and the service, particularly when such an examination could lead to the remedying of faults in the local service. It should also carry out detailed and regular analyses of the placement records of local bureaux to check.. whether any of the possible failings of the placement service are weakening the effect of the bureau’s work.
The analysis should go much further than mere studies of statistics, and must involve detailed research including interviews with employers and young people.
The inspectorate must be staffed by professionally qualified, trained and experienced officers.
15. The Central Youth Employment Executive should set up an expertly staffed research council which would advise the executive of subjects requiring research, ensure that the results of research were applied in practice, and sponsor research projects in universities and other centres.
This council could ensure that units such as the Vocational Guidance Research Unit at Leeds University received the financial support needed.
16. Ministerial responsibility for the yes should be transferred from the Ministry of Labour to the Department of Education and Science.
17. On a local level, the youth employment committee should be made a major committee of the county borough or county council. At present it is a subcommittee of the education committee, which means that the youth employment officer never has direct access to a main committee; his spokesman on the education committee is the chief education officer. Tf it is accepted that the yes is a
young fabian the authors group
The Young Fabian Group exists to give socialists not over 30 years of age an opportunity to carry out research, discussion and propaganda. It aims to help its members publish the results of their research, and so make a more effective contribution to the work of the Labour movement. It therefore welcomes all those who have a thoughtful and radical approach to political matters.
The group is autonomous, electing its own committee. It co-operates closely with the Fabian Society which gives financial and clerical help. But the group is responsible for its own policy and activity, subject to the constitutional rule that it can have no declared political policy beyond that implied by its commitment to democratic socialism.
The group publishes pamphlets written by its members, arranges fortnightly meetings in London, and holds day and weekend schools.
Enquiries about membership should be sent to the Secretary, Young Fabian Group, 11 Dartmouth Street, London, SW1 ; telephone Whitehall 3077.
This pamphlet as written by a group of three Young Fabians—a youth employment officer, a marketing officer and a sociology student.
The authors would like to thank the many youth employment officers, school teachers and other persons and organisations concerned with vocational guidance, who have given them so much help and advice in the preparation of this pamphlet.
Cover design and typography by Geoffrey Cannon. Printed by The Walrus Press Ltd. (tu), 769 Harrow Road, Sudbury, Wembley, Middlesex.
recent fabian pamphlets
research series
180	Arthur Skeffington	Leasehold enfranchisement (revised)	3s 6d
233	Frederick Singleton		
	Anthony Topham	Workers’ control in Yugoslavia	3s
235	Jack Cooper	Industrial relations: Sweden shows the way	3s
236	Laurie Pavitt	The health of the nation	3s 6d
237	Michael Armstrong		
	Michael Young	New look at comprehensive schools	2s
243	Cedric Thornberry	The stranger at the gate	2s 6d
245	Sidney Pollard	The Co-operatives at the crossroads	4s
247	a Fabian group	A plan for incomes	3s 6d
248	Richard Pryke	Why steel	3s
249	John Darker	Long distance road haulage	2s 6d
250	a Fabian group	The unprotected protectorates	2s 6d
251	Peter Odell	Oil: the new commanding height	2s 6d
252	Peter Mittler	The mental health services	3s
253	Keith Openshaw	The remoter rural areas	2s 6d
254	Michael Posner		
	and Richard Pryke	New public enterprise	3s
255	Jebs	Personal taxation	2s 6d
256	Elizabeth Allsopp		
	and David Grugeon	Direct grant grammar schools	2s 6d
tracts
62	Michael	Pease
321	Audrey	Harvey
346	Thomas	Balogh
349	Lisl	Klein
353	Brian	Abel-Smith
355	a	Fabian group
356	a	Fabian group
359	Somerville Hastings
and Peggy Jay
361	L. J. Sharpe
362	Jeremy Bray
363 K. W. Wedderburn
364	David	Downes
and Fred Flower
365	a	Fabian group
366	Norman	Ross
367	Roderick McFarquhar
368	George Cunningham
Parish and district councils (revised)	Is	6d
Casualties of the welfare state	2s	6d
Planning for progress	4s	6d
The meaning of work	2s
Freedom in the Welfare State	Is	6d
The administrators	4s
New patterns for primary schools	2s	6d
The family and the social services	Is	6d
Why local democracy	3s	6d
The new economy	4s
Company law reform	2s	6d
Educating for uncertainty	2s	6d
Britain and South-East Asia	2s	6d
Workshop bargaining: a new approach	3s	6d
Chinese ambitions and British policy	Is	6d
Rhodesia: the last chance	3s	6d
young fabian pamphlets
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
David Steele Howard Glennerster and Richard Pryke a study group a study group a study group Ralph Oppenheimer and Harold Lind James Goudie
More power to the regions
The public schools General practice Strangers within Womanpower
Whatever will happen to the National Plan? House agents
3s 6d
3s 6d 3s
3s 6d 3s
3s
2s