In this chapter I turn attention to how the young people attending the BSUs envisaged the future. Significantly, the fieldwork for the research coincided with the onset of a global financial crisis, widely referred to in the UK at the time as the ‘credit crunch’. This was a period where banks appeared to be teetering on the edge. There was much talk of fiscal meltdown and near apocalyptic coverage in the media. As a well-educated adult I struggled to make sense of events and listened with alarm to a predicted future of recession, job losses, welfare cuts and austerity. It was amidst the confusing terminology and violent metaphors of ‘crunches’, ‘cuts’, slashes and squeezes that the young people in this study looked to the future. The focus in this chapter is on their anticipated trajectories and on the ways in which educational marginalisation shaped their understandings of opportunities and prospects. I begin with a consideration of the political and policy context through which the future was framed as troubling at this time. While these discussions did not directly touch the pupils in the units, they infused a sense of insecurity and compounded articulations of risk management as the core function of ‘inclusion’.

Highlighting the significance accorded to educational credentials as a pathway to the good life, I draw out the meaning attached to contemporary school failure, contrasting this with the agentic resistance identified in Paul Willis’s classic 1970s study Learning to Labour. I show how, to all intents and purposes, today’s young people have had the tables turned on them and are now often struggling to remain in education rather than to escape to a workplace. In fact, for many, dislocation from educational achievement left them struggling to imagine how they would construct liveable futures (at least outside of highly risky criminal endeavours). I examine the particular strategies the young people devised for future survival and conclude with a focus on hopes and dreams as opposed to ‘aspirations’ to offer a different insight into the values and ethics that gave meaning to their lives.