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Labouring and Learning: Part-Time Work and Full-Time Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

John Micklewright ,
Najma Rajah  and
Stephen Smith
John Micklewright
Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence, and Queen Mary and Westfield College, London
Najma Rajah
Affiliation:
Institute for Fiscal Studies, London
Stephen Smith
Affiliation:
University College London and IFS
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Abstract

The labour supply of teenagers in full-time education has been largely neglected in analyses both of the UK youth labour market and of educational decisions and policy. The teenage years have been seen as when a single transition takes place from full-time education to employment (or unemployment), in the form of a ‘school-leaving’ decision. The possibility that the transition from school to work may be more gradual, and involve a phase when school and work overlap, has been less discussed. Yet there are indications that the part-time work of teenagers in full-time education is a far from trivial aspect of teenage labour supply; an analysis of data from the Labour Force Survey for autumn 1992 (Sly, 1993) found that about one third of 16 and 17 year olds in full-time education also had a job, and that there were as many 16 and 17 year olds in full-time education who had jobs as there were school-leavers in work in the same age group.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 148 , May 1994 , pp. 73 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

∗

This research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and the ESRC Research Centre at IFS. We are grateful to Lucy Chennells for research assistance, and acknowledge the contribution in the initial stages of Mark Pearson, formerly a Senior Research Officer at IFS. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version. The views expressed and any remaining errors, are the responsibility of the authors alone. Data from the Family Expenditure Survey made available by the CSO through the ESRC Data Archive has been used by permission of the Controller of HMSO. Neither the CSO nor the ESRC Data Archive bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here.

This article analyses the part-time working patterns of 16-18 year olds still in full-time education in Great Britain. Drawing upon pooled Family Expenditure Survey data, it shows that participation rate for this group is high, and rising over time. On average, during the period 1968-71, around 40 per cent of 16-18 year olds still in full-time education had some source of income from employment, this percentage had risen to 59 per cent by 1988-91. Participation rates tend to be higher amongst girls than boys. In a multivariate analysis, participation rates appear to be unrelated to household income, although they are affected by the employment status of other household members. Whilst the incomes of most of this group are relatively small, approximately 15 per cent contributed at least 10 per cent of the total income of the household in which they lived.

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