This book draws attention to an area of great policy concern in relation to young disabled people. Currently a priority for action (under the auspices of the Government's Aiming High for Disabled Children) and a programme of work to support young disabled people as they make a transition to adulthood (backed by £19 million of new money), there has never been such a concerted effort to respond to the barriers faced by young disabled people in relation to their aspirations relating to work. The research evidence is compelling: 18 and 19 year old young disabled people are three times more likely to be unemployed than their non-disabled peers (Burchardt, Reference Burchardt2005). Aside from the socio-economics, we also know from research that young disabled people often have social lives characterised by a poverty of opportunity and exclusion from the range of activities enjoyed by their non-disabled peers. Although all youth transitions are lasting longer than in previous generations (Jones, Reference Jones2002), young disabled people often remain incredibly reliant on parents and other family members for care, support, financial security and as the primary source of social interaction – all issues compounding an on-going process of transition to young adulthood.

Shah's book recognises these barriers and attempts to contextualise and understand the aspirations of young disabled people and how they are shaped by the people and structures that shape aspiration for everybody – disabled or non-disabled. Her hypothesis is that the voice of young disabled people has not been given sufficient attention and that we have not understood enough about how schools, peers, families and society shape and potentially constrain the aspirations of young disabled people. There is an interesting reflection by the author about her own position as a disabled woman and as a researcher in disability studies in a section headed, ‘The researcher and the researched’.

Shah contends that for many young disabled people the effort and attention has gone into creating ‘special’ (or segregated) services for those who ‘fail’ their transition to adulthood in relation to one crucial marker of adulthood – work. What this means is that, instead of removing the barriers young disabled people face in achieving their goals, they get sidelined into colleges and social care services to spend years doing courses such as independent living skills. This is a helpful and insightful suggestion and reinforces work by others, including Hudson (Reference Hudson2006) and Beresford (Reference Beresford2004), who suggest that the starting point has to be ensuring that young disabled people have real choices and destinations at adulthood, rather than being ‘held’ for a few years in a vacuum labelled ‘transition’ before most statutory services withdraw and leave disadvantaged young people to their own devices.

To compound matters further, the author highlights how families, schools and other services can reinforce low expectations in young disabled people who then have a limited landscape of choices. Shah discusses how special and mainstream schools may affect the frame in which young disabled people make and form their choices. She suggests that both special and mainstream education have positives and negatives for different disabled children and contends that young disabled people should be the architects of the educational systems that affect them. She is right to highlight how exclusions around work start early on for a lot of disabled young people who are often left out of work experience, sending an early message that different things are expected of, or open to them.

The book is informed by empirical work with 33 young people with physical impairments, but I was not sure that we ever really got a full flavour of the data. In fact, the young people's voices seemed a bit distant in a book that sometimes seemed to me to be suggesting that if we can just listen to young disabled people more, then things will work out. Inclusion, integration, social and medical models all get discussed, but I'm not sure that the way disabled children's voices muddy some of these debates gets a thorough, conceptual examination. Sometimes Shah's tone is rather categorical, for example stating on page 95 that, ‘Education policies for disabled children are driven by non-disabled professionals who make important decisions about the education of disabled children without consulting them.’ I'm not quite as sure as that. There's also a ‘strong social model’ approach in the book which describes children's dissatisfaction with their impairment as a medical model view of the world. Allan, aged 13, had become a wheelchair user and said he'd like to walk again and the author labels this (with implicit critique) medical model. Sabrina, 14, doesn't like to be patronised and wants to fight back (she gets full marks for her social model approach). I imagine that Allan shares Sabrina's desire for a different world, while at the same time wishing things were different for himself, and I do wonder if the social model could capture and include this?

There's a good and very important central point: young disabled people continue to face important structural and attitudinal barriers in relation to how they are allowed to imagine their future selves and how they can go beyond that imagining and take their rightful and equal place alongside non-disabled peers. This book makes a useful contribution to that debate.