There were considerable differences between the early careers of men and women. While more young women entered employment on leaving school they had much lower levels of participation in training programmes. This may reflect gender-segmented training and employment opportunities. The longer-term consequences of low attainment for young women seemed particularly severe. Of those who experienced an early spell of unemployment, a significant proportion had children early.
Low attainment appears to be much less of a handicap in the labour market for young men.
This suggests that personal characteristics may have been relatively important predictors of unemployment for young women. We found limited evidence to support the widespread view that disaffection is a principal cause of low attainment. Our results would suggest that tackling neighbourhood deprivation and countering educational disadvantage associated with a young person's family background at an early stage, rather than focusing on disaffection, is likely to be the way forward in reducing low levels of attainment among young people of both sexes. This conclusion underlines the importance of recent initiatives aimed at early intervention, family literacy schemes, study support and New Community Schools, especially for Scotland's most deprived areas. Our findings highlight the need for flexibility in the provision for the post-16 age group.