This book concerns how we might best describe and theorise the transitions to adulthood of working-class young people in the UK – and the problems of current policy and practice.

At its core are the accounts of twenty-four young people who are making these transitions with greater or lesser degrees of ‘success’. The book situates these alongside a social and economic history of transitions, changes and continuities in education and post-16 policy and of the deindustrialisation of Old Industrial Regions and the marginalisation of working-class youth. One of the achievements of the book is doing justice to the truth of individual life stories at the same time as conveying the realities across the breadth of 24 young people's lives – and locating all of this in a suitable theoretical context (‘the bigger picture’). The method the authors use – substantive, thematic chapters interspersed with shorter case study chapters – is very effective. It makes the book useful and readable. The substantive topic-based chapters can be used as stand-alone references for students. They are expert, detailed, up-to-date. There are other aspects of the book and research which are worthy of note.

The methods of research employed are commendable and rare. The approach is qualitative and longitudinal. Qualitative interviews are combined with ethnographic reflections and observations from field-notes. The qualitative case study chapters – of Danny, Hailey, Sean, Isla, Saheera and Cayden – are entirely captivating. The writing and ethnographic description is beautifully done: subtle, lucid, respectful, convincing. Thus, not only do the researchers get close to their research participants to find out the complexities of their lives as they leave school and look for work, they also successfully follow them on their journeys over two years. The whole process – as well as questions of history, geography, epistemology, ontology, reflexivity, relativism, realism and so on – is dealt with in a commendable methods chapter (which my PhD students will be advised to read!).

Substantively, the book extends knowledge in the field. For example, as with my own work, the book rejects not just underclass theory but also a simple notion of social exclusion. Simmons and colleagues also prefer to theorise these transitions as being more about economic marginality wherein young workers are used or not used – exploited – as employers’ needs demand. Another example is their analysis of the UK labour market and how it has changed and is changing, and how this relates to assumptions in education policy. This is up-to-date and convincing, particularly the way that the authors add to the demolition of the myth of the high skills economy. I hadn't come across the concept of ‘social congestion’ before (as an alternative to social mobility). This is the idea that young people in transition are caught, stuck, in a bottle neck; with too many people possessing high qualifications and too few opportunities in which to use them.

There is also plenty which is familiar from earlier studies (my own included). If discrete, qualitative case studies each come to very similar conclusions this increases the validity and power of the findings. Let me give examples. There's an early one, where they discuss how practitioners in Job Centres talk of multiple generations of families where no-one has ever worked. Simmons et al. are rightly skeptical of this idea (see MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Shildrick and Furlong2013). A second example – and a major contribution of the book – is the authors’ demonstration of the futility of much of what is provided for working-class school leavers under the name of training and education. Young people are churned around low level options in the post-16 education and training market. They start on courses that lead nowhere. They often return to the same training provider years later, to repeat the same sort of course they passed straight after school. They get qualifications that have little value. Sometimes these courses are actually detrimental to their prospects. This is a national scandal. Remembering a phrase from the 1980s, these are the sorts of schemes that are designed for ‘other people's children’. We might ask, ‘has any Eton graduate ever been on YTS or done an NVQ2 in Business Administration’?

I highly recommend this book, particularly for people interested in youth transitions and the reproduction of social class inequalities. It is a strong antidote to the orthodox rubbish – about how young people lack ambitions, aspirations, skills or whatever – that usually gets spouted by politicians, think tanks and the like.