Young People, Education and Inequalities: An Introduction

This special section of Sociological Research Online emanates from the ‘Youth 2010: Identities, Transitions, Cultures’ conference, organised by the British Sociological Association’s Youth Study Group and held at the University of Surrey in 2010. The conference brought together youth researchers from many parts of the world to explore a diverse range of issues facing young men and women in contemporary society. An important theme, which has long constituted a focus of youth research and was addressed by many of the conference presentations, was the extent to which social inequalities continue to pattern the lives of young people. This special section comprises eight articles, each of which are based on papers at the conference, which provide robust new empirical evidence about the relationship between young people, inequalities and education, specifically. Taken together, these papers enhance our understanding of the ways in which social inequalities are played out in schools, colleges and other educational institutions and the extent to which such inequalities may be changing over time. Although they focus on different aspects of inequality and make different arguments, a number of common themes emerge across the papers. These are discussed briefly below, following an introduction to the papers themselves.