Educational disadvantage is a complex problem. It can have multiple causes at individual, family, and community levels that often interact with each other. For example, research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found the following individual and family risk factors, among others: long-term unemployment and poverty in the family; a migrant, ethnic or linguistic minority status; inadequate housing; low educational attainment characterised by repeating classes and home-school breakdown; an often ‘negative’ choice of vocational training at the end of primary education and/or a secondary education track leading to early dropout with no qualifications. Community risk factors include limited healthcare and leisure facilities, and the use of many different first languages among school friends. If a young person does find a job, it is often short-term, offers few opportunities for continuing training, and is highly likely to lead to future unemployment – thus closing the cycle of disadvantage (for further discussion, see Evans, 1995).

With such multiple and interconnected causes, a piecemeal approach is unlikely to address young people’s educational disadvantage successfully. Improving local education and training provision without, for example, simultaneously promoting employment options and enhancing the quality of housing will ultimately not erase the educational disadvantage. Instead, integrated approaches are required; approaches that address both individual young people and services by creating:

• • coordinated transitional pathways: to consider young people’s needs over time, both within the day (home, school, play) and throughout their lives (transitions from primary to secondary to post-secondary education and training);

• • integrated services: to address organisational arrangements, made at local/regional level, to ensure that the ‘transitional pathways’ are delivered in a coordinated and integrated way. More generally, integrated services “… maximise the possibilities that children and their families could obtain the services to which they are entitled or which they need”. Such services must be ”… conveniently located, accessible and offered in a way that facilitates addressing the needs of the entire family” (OECD, 1996a, p 8).

The objectives of integrated services

Five tenets underlie and connect these two aspects of integrated approaches:

• 1. All young people must be adequately prepared for adult and working life. All young people should be able to acquire the ‘equipment’ they need to enter adult and working life successfully at the end of the education and training process (see also OECD, 1996b, p 39).