Full Report

Introduction

This project is about young people in the Northern Fells of Cumbria. Being young has never been easy as individuals grapple for independence and a sense of identity, make choices that can have repercussions for the rest of their lives and cope with others' perceptions of them. Today, being young in Britain is no easier. Pick up a newspaper and young people are often described as 'yobs' or 'hooligans' who are to be feared, loathed or dealt with. These references are fuelled by reports of behavioural trends for British teens who 'rank among the worst in the world for obesity, binge drinking, cannabis consumption, sexual health problems and teenage pregnancy rates' (Rice-Knight, 2004: 25). Accounts for such teen behaviour and problems usually focus on family breakdown and women working longer hours away from home. More sophisticated explanations detail not only the limited state support for parents around such issues as the hours they work and childcare (especially when compared with EU countries with much better state support), but also include the pressures on young people to stay at school and to be academic achievers and the lack of specialist provision in everything from health services to prisons.

Young people living in the Northern Fells of Cumbria are not removed from the pressures that affect these trends and the policy changes and failures of the state. In this project when we refer to young people we are writing about 14-24 year olds. Whilst this is a big age range, it encompasses young people in the Northern Fells as they attempt to make the transition from childhood to adulthood and independence. In recent years the route to independence has stretched as young people are dependent on, say, their parents for longer to provide them with affordable accommodation and to support them through university. Sometimes achieving independence in the Northern Fells of Cumbria is particularly hard. Mediating the broader pressures that young people face today are concerns specific to the Northern Fells with agricultural restructuring and labour market changes, the escalating cost of houses and the erosion of local services, particularly transport. Changes in the private and state systems affect the choices available to young people with regard to their livelihood strategies and ambitions.

Whilst common themes emerge from our research and will be a platform for taking action, it is important to recognise that young people in the Northern Fells of Cumbria are not a uniform category. Policy changes regarding, for example, education or transport services affect young people in different ways according to, amongst other things, their age, gender, background, interests and networks. It is important to young people, and this project, that their individuality is recognised and valued.

This project emerged from concerns in the Northern Fells about the out-migration of young people and a need to know why young people are leaving the area, especially the extent to which they are being pushed away by the problems they face 'at home'. Sitting at its core from the outset was the livelihood strategies and ambitions of young people and their perceptions of economic and work opportunities. Other issues, such as affordable housing and transport issues, became important to the project as young people introduced them. The project attempted to make no presumptions about the needs of young people.

The objective of this project is two fold. The first phase of this project is research based, working with young people to examine the extent of the pressures and opportunities they face and their perceptions of these. The second part to the project aims to relieve some of the pressures that young people identify in their lives. In a context where others (especially concerned adults) are in danger of speaking for, and on behalf of, young people, this project is about young people speaking for themselves about their lives, aspirations and concerns. For this reason, the project devised an innovative methodology, employing a young person to help with the research. This means that the findings embrace the wishes, hopes and concerns of young people and not adults.

1.1 Defining youth

Pivotal to the project are young people as they begin to negotiate the transition from childhood to independence through, for example, education, employment and setting up home. The period identified as youth is historically and socially variable and not sharply defined by boundaries that mark the end of childhood and the start of adulthood (Furlong 1997; Valentine 1998). Young people, for example, are allowed to leave school and work full-time at sixteen, but are unable to marry (without parental permission) and vote until they are aged eighteen and are not entitled to full adult social security benefits until they are twenty-five (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997). Clearly, youth, then, is:

A period of social semi-dependency which forms a bridge between the total dependence of childhood and the independence of adulthood.

(Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, 41). Ni Laoire (2000) writes that:

Youth (adolescence and young adulthood) can be understood as a process of transition from childhood to adulthood, from school to the labour market, to household and family formation.(1999, 234)

At a general level, this process is happening later in life in comparison to previous generations as young people in rural areas, for example, continue to live with their parents and remain dependent on them for longer as they manage loans for higher education and are confronted with escalating house prices (Shucksmith, 2004). The transition to independence, though, is not a simple process and young people differ in their experiences of it as structures and processes bear upon their lives in different ways (Ni Laoire 2000). Class, educational status, gender and membership of particular networks inter-sect and inter-relate to affect opportunities open to young people.

The age of a young person is important regarding their particular concerns. Although the project worked with 14-24 year olds, patterns emerged relating to the issues they raised depending on whether they were under or over the age of seventeen. According to their age then, two groups of young people form the bedrock of this project. Within those two groups other factors, such as educational attainment, mediate age to influence particular experiences and concerns.

For this project, issues of individualism and social exclusion are important regarding young people’s transition to independence. Underpinning these issues are material and cultural processes that mediate the lives of young people to impact upon their outmigration. All of this means that there are young people who want to (temporarily) leave rural areas and do, whilst others are unable to leave because of a lack of human, social and financial capital. Then there are young people who would prefer to remain in rural areas but are forced to leave because of a lack of local opportunities or they choose to stay despite these problems because of a strong sense of belonging to a community. The next section introduces material processes, followed by a section that explores cultural issues.

1.2 Material realities: Pathways to independence or social exclusion

Dealing with those material processes first, critical research has drawn attention to the material realities of social exclusion which systemically work at many levels to hinder the life chances of some young people and affect their ability to leave or stay in rural places like the Northern Fells. Shucksmith (2004) identifies the following key systems of social exclusion:

• Private
• State
• Voluntary
• Family and friend networks.

These mediate one another to make young people a heterogeneous group where experiences and choices differ depending on, for example, their qualifications, skills and family and social networks. Those young people then who are not socially excluded have skills and qualifications or access to good educational opportunities, leading to favourable jobs facilitated by helpful family and social support along the way. The systems of social exclusion also mean that young people in rural areas become integrated into one of two quite separate labour markets. Those with good qualifications and skills have access to a national (well-paid with career opportunities) labour market enabling them (if they so choose) to be ‘committed leavers’1. Those who fail to do well at school are frequently limited to the local labour market where jobs are relatively poorly paid, insecure, unrewarding and with fewer prospects (Kraack and Kenway 2002; Shucksmith 2004; Rugg and Jones, 2000; Storey and Brannen, 2000; Furlong and Cartmel, 2000; Pavis et al, 2000). These young people are the ‘reluctant stayers’, who, despite their employment, experience social exclusion in jobs with limited prospects and low pay. Social exclusion is a relative concept with ‘reluctant stayers’ feeling excluded in comparison to the committed leavers and stayers who are also in paid work but have many more choices open to them (Pavis, Hubbard, and Platt 2001)). Underpinning systems of social exclusion, then, are social class and levels of education that divide young people and mediate the (lack of) opportunities open to them (Jamieson 2000). Gender is also significant, affecting, for example, cultural expectations and the sorts of jobs into which young people are encouraged, with repercussions for their out-migration (Stockdale, 2002; Ni Laoire, 1999).

Research has also shown how systems work to exclude young people from owner occupation with low incomes and the cost of private sector housing excluding some young people from the purchase of affordable accommodation (Pavis et al., 2001). Furthermore, private rental markets are dependent on social networks and local knowledge, with those young people outside of such networks excluded from the best properties rented at affordable prices.

Identifying those who are (not) socially excluded requires difficult value judgements. Young people on relatively low wages, but living with their parents and with adequate disposable income and social life, might feel included for a certain period of their life, but socially excluded once they start considering setting up their own home. Single parents with no paid work might not feel socially excluded in a place where motherhood is valued and jobs are menial and low paid. Clearly attention needs to be paid to both individual resources of young people and their social arenas and, most importantly, their perception of these.

1.3 Cultural processes

This project is not just about structural factors that militate against young people staying in rural areas. It is also about the agency of young people and explores issues of identity, community and senses of belonging to explain the decision-making of young people and why some choose to stay and others leave (Jones 1999). Dynamic globalising processes mediate young people's experiences of living in the Northern Fells. These processes are characterised by flows of information, signs and people across locales, bringing about socio-cultural changes and mediating many of the resources and symbols for identity historically available in the locality (Kraack and Kenway, 2002). Local cultures are the product of endless interaction as global influences infuse local cultures and young people’s experiences of these (Massey 1998). This project explores how young people identify themselves in 'new times' and what this means for their aspirations and intent regarding their livelihood strategies and leaving or staying in the Northern Fells. A key part of these new times is a growing sense of risk and insecurity which has to be managed at an individual level as people rely more upon education and the labour market than traditional institutions such as the family and class affiliation (Furlong 1997). This has given rise to the concept of individualism.

Important to many young people is belonging to a sense of community, the boundaries of which are more symbolic than they are real. Cohen writes:

"Community exists in the minds of its members and should not be confused with geographic or sociographic assertions of 'fact'. By extension, the distinctiveness of communities and thus the reality of their boundaries, similarly lies in the mind, in the meaning that people attach to them, not in their structural forms" Cohen 1985: 98 in Jones

The symbolic boundaries of communities are most evident when they are under threat by, for example, in-comers who challenge the identities of communities with their alternative experiences and knowledges. A sense of community, then, plays a big part in whether or not people feel included or excluded. Closely entwined with a sense of community in rural places is the cultural context of rurality which embraces ‘systems of meaning and relations that provide resources, constraints and points of resistance through which young people live out their lives and construct knowledges of rurality, society and space’ (McCormack, 2002). Sometimes young people sit uncomfortably with cultural constructions of rurality, upsetting imaginings of rurality as they behave in ways deemed (culturally) unacceptable that challenge the expectations and rules of ‘traditional’ community life (Jones, 2002; Kraack and Kenway, 2002). Similarly women can feel uncomfortable in the local pub, a symbol important to rural community life, as their behaviour is subject to surveillance in a way that that of men is not (Kraack and Kenway, 2002). Cultural issues help explain why, on the one hand, young people seek to escape the surveillance and constraints of rural life and why, on the other, communities are anxious about the out-migration of young people.

The project exposes material processes and structures that lead to the exclusion of young people and hinder their ambitions. It is, though, careful to appreciate cultural processes that identify young people and mediate decisions to leave or stay in the Northern Fells. With dynamic globalising processes fuelling flows of information, signs and people across places, there is much leverage for young people to engage in a free-flowing project of identity construction. Those young people who are keen to disassociate themselves from the rural areas where they have been living, leave for other places that promise alternative lifestyles and consumption practices. These new places free young people from the surveillance of others sometimes keen to enforce their sense of ‘traditional’ community and rural idyll upon them. Whilst much has been written about identity practices in ‘new’ times and the ways in which ‘new’ forms of stratification around consumption are replacing the ‘old’ associated with social class, the agency of young people continues to be restricted by their qualifications and social class (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Jamieson, 2000). Plenty of research on the out-migration of young people details how those with fewer qualifications are less able to move to new places and can end up being one of the ‘reluctant stayers’ (Jamieson 2000; Pavis, Hubbard, and Platt 2001; Stockdale 2002). There is considerable affiliation between educational attainment and social class (Jamieson 2000).

Of course not all young people want to leave rural places and some are keen to return ‘home’ or at least to a re-consumption of a rural lifestyle and all the cultural practices that imbue a sense of this. Other young people choose not to leave their home area in the first place as they strongly identify themselves with a sense of community shaped by networks of friends and family, cultural practices and symbols that are important to them. These young people consider the positive factors of staying at home to outweigh anything that they might gain from leaving. Failures in the state and private systems that affect such issues as housing and job opportunities can force young people to leave places such as the Northern Fells against their wishes. When this happens, it is time to act.