Youth unemployment programmes: a historical account of the development of ‘dole colleges’

The ‘new training initiative’ recently announced by the Secretary of State for Employment, Norman Tebbit, provides us with a perfect example of what Marx was referring to when he wrote that great events in world history occur twice: ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’. Certainly if one is to accept the Employment Secretary at his own words this is a ‘great event’: ‘the most farreaching and ambitious set of proposals for industrial training ever put before Parliament’ (‘Guardian’, 16.12. 81). The ‘newness’ of it is stressed again and again: ‘This new scheme breaks entirely new ground in the training of young people in this country’ (ibid.). My aim in this chapter will be to demonstrate the falsity of this statement and the seemingly all-pervasive view that the introduction of schemes for unemployed youth is an invention of the 1970s and 1980s.