Where Do Young People Belong Anymore? Skills for Life, Capital and the Social Spaces of Growing Up

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Class, cultural capital, and social reproduction Everyday life as performance Method

There is something slightly peculiar about the way we talk about young people and employability. Towards the end of adolescence, we begin expecting young people to demonstrate a range of characteristics that have apparently become essential for adult life: communication, collaboration, problem-solving, initiative, organisation, resilience, confidence and leadership. The terminology varies between employers, educational institutions and policymakers, but the underlying expectation is remarkably consistent. Young people are expected not simply to know things, but to arrive at adulthood able to negotiate social situations, work with others, make decisions, cope with uncertainty and respond productively when things do not go according to plan.

This is not merely fashionable language. The National Foundation for Educational Research’s Skills Imperative 2035 identifies communication, collaboration, creative thinking, information literacy, organising, planning and prioritising, and problem-solving and decision-making as six “Essential Employment Skills” expected to be heavily used across the future labour market (Bocock et al., 2025). Such capabilities are expected to become more rather than less significant as technological change alters the mix of work undertaken by people and machines. Yet identifying the skills employers require is considerably easier than explaining where those skills come from.

The conventional response tends to place responsibility somewhere within education. Schools should produce work-ready young people, colleges should develop employability and universities should ensure that graduates acquire transferable skills. There are perfectly reasonable arguments for all three. However, communication, judgement, confidence, cooperation and leadership are unusual kinds of competencies. They can be taught explicitly to some extent, but they are also developed through repeated social experience. A lesson can explain the principles of teamwork, but it cannot reproduce years of negotiating with other people. A presentation exercise can provide useful practice in public speaking, but confidence in unfamiliar social situations is unlikely to emerge from one workshop. Resilience is more difficult still to turn into curriculum content without reducing a complicated response to adversity into an individual characteristic that somebody either possesses or does not.

This suggests a sociological question that is easily obscured by the language of skills deficits. Before asking why some young people appear to reach adulthood with more of these capacities than others, we might ask where they have had opportunities to develop them, which kinds of experience subsequently count as evidence that they possess them, and whether access to those experiences is evenly distributed.

These questions move the discussion away from skills as individual possessions and towards the social environments in which young people grow up.

Skills have social histories

Pierre Bourdieu provides a useful starting point because his account of inequality is concerned not simply with what individuals possess, but with the relationship between resources and the social fields within which those resources acquire value. His familiar distinction between economic, social and cultural capital broadens the meaning of advantage beyond financial resources. Social capital concerns resources available through social relationships and networks, while cultural capital encompasses forms of knowledge, competence and disposition that can acquire value within particular institutional contexts (Bourdieu, 1986). Capital, in this sense, is not simply a collection of desirable personal qualities. Its value depends upon the social setting in which it is recognised.

That distinction matters when we start talking about skills. A young person may have spent several years caring for younger siblings, organising complicated domestic routines and managing considerable responsibility. Another may have chaired a youth committee, completed a recognised award or occupied a named leadership position within an extracurricular organisation. Both sets of experiences could plausibly involve organisation, judgement, communication and leadership, but they do not necessarily travel equally well into an application form or interview. One experience already carries an institutional label that makes its meaning relatively easy to decode, while the other may require the young person first to recognise its relevance and then to translate an everyday responsibility into the language through which employers or educational institutions recognise competence.

The sociological issue is therefore not only whether skills are developed, but whether they can subsequently be converted into recognised capital. Bourdieu’s wider analysis of classification is useful here because fields do not value all cultural practices and competencies equally. Certain experiences, styles of presentation and forms of knowledge acquire greater legitimacy than others, and this process of recognition is itself socially structured (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986).

Research in higher education illustrates how recognising, accumulating and mobilising capital can become classed. Bathmaker et al. (2013), drawing on the longitudinal Paired Peers study, showed how middle-class students were often better positioned to recognise which experiences might enhance their future labour-market position and to acquire and mobilise those forms of capital accordingly. Their argument moves beyond the relatively simple proposition that some students possess more resources than others. What matters is also knowing how to “play the game”: understanding which resources are valued, where they can be acquired and how they can later be deployed.

This is one reason contemporary employability research has increasingly questioned purely skills-centred accounts. Tomlinson (2017), for example, proposes a graduate-capital model incorporating human, social, cultural, identity and psychological capital. Employability, from this perspective, is better understood relationally than as a supply-side list of individual competencies. Knowledge and technical abilities matter, but so do networks, cultural familiarity, identity and the capacity to navigate labour-market transitions. Being capable of doing something and being able to turn that capability into an advantage are not necessarily the same thing.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus pushes the argument further. Habitus concerns the durable but adaptable dispositions through which people perceive and navigate the social world, shaped by accumulated experience rather than constructed afresh each time a decision is made (Bourdieu, 1990). It helps explain why characteristics such as confidence can appear natural even when they have substantial social histories. Someone who has repeatedly been encouraged to speak to adults, ask questions, take responsibility and enter unfamiliar environments may eventually experience these situations differently from somebody for whom they remain exceptional. What appears at eighteen to be an individual personality trait may partly reflect years of differential exposure to situations in which that disposition could be practised and reinforced.

None of this requires us to deny differences in temperament or individual agency. It simply makes the sociological point that dispositions develop in relation to experience. The relevant question therefore becomes not simply who is confident, capable of leadership or good at working with others, but what sorts of social experiences have made those behaviours more or less familiar.

The unequal organisation of childhood

Annette Lareau’s work is particularly useful at this point because it demonstrates how opportunities for developmental experience can themselves be socially patterned. Her influential account of “concerted cultivation”, developed through ethnographic research in the United States, described middle-class parents organising children’s lives around structured activities intended to cultivate talents, reasoning and interaction with adults. Working-class and poorer families in her study were more likely to follow what she termed the “accomplishment of natural growth”, providing care and support while allowing children greater control over their own leisure time (Lareau, 2002).

It would be a serious misreading of Lareau to translate this into a distinction between parents who develop their children and parents who do not. The sociologically important difference lies in the relationships children develop with institutions and authority. Organised activities provide repeated contexts in which children negotiate schedules, interact with adults beyond their family, perform for evaluation and become accustomed to institutions responding to them. Lareau argued that these processes contributed to different forms of institutional confidence and entitlement, differences that could subsequently matter in education and other formal settings.

British research complicates but broadly supports the importance of this relationship between class and organised childhood. Wheeler and Green’s (2019) research with middle-class families in northern England demonstrates the extensive parental labour required to sustain children’s organised activities. Participation may appear on paper as something undertaken by the child, but behind it sit journeys, fees, equipment, schedules, food, waiting, encouragement and the continuous coordination of family time. Their analysis also shows how organised participation can become incorporated into particular middle-class understandings of “good parenting”, partly in response to concerns about children’s future position in an increasingly competitive education system and labour market.

The Social Mobility Commission’s An Unequal Playing Field similarly identified substantial differences in extracurricular participation in England according to socioeconomic background, school and geography. Cost was an obvious barrier, but far from the only one. Availability, transport, awareness and perceptions about whether a particular activity was “for people like me” also influenced participation (Social Mobility Commission, 2019). The Commission therefore framed extracurricular access as a social-mobility issue precisely because activities associated with the development of networks, aspirations and so-called soft skills were themselves unevenly distributed.

This creates a potentially important circularity. Institutions increasingly reward young people for confidence, leadership, teamwork, broad experience and the ability to construct persuasive narratives about themselves, while the opportunities through which these capacities can be developed and recognised are unevenly available. The resulting differences can then reappear at the point of recruitment as evidence of individual potential.

That argument needs some caution. Organised extracurricular activity is certainly not the only environment in which useful capacities develop. Paid work, informal caring, family responsibilities, friendship groups, religious participation, online communities and numerous other settings can generate sophisticated forms of knowledge and competence. Nor should an extensively scheduled middle-class childhood automatically be regarded as developmentally superior. Lareau herself identified costs associated with concerted cultivation, while less structured childhoods could provide greater autonomy and stronger extended family relationships (Lareau, 2002). The relevant sociological issue is not that one form of childhood produces skills while another does not. It is that some experiences align more readily with the forms of competence that institutions subsequently recognise and reward.

What happens inside youth activities?

If unequal access is one side of the argument, we still need to establish what organised activities might actually do. It is too easy to move directly from participation to outcomes: a young person attends Scouts, plays sport or volunteers, therefore they acquire teamwork, confidence and social capital. Sociologically, that explanation is inadequate because membership itself is not a mechanism.

Boat et al.’s (2024) qualitative meta-synthesis is particularly valuable in making this distinction. Synthesising 33 studies of organised youth activities, they argue that participation can provide a context for social-capital development, but that participation should not itself be equated with social capital. Across the studies they reviewed, the mechanisms included relationally strong environments, connections with supportive adults and peers, organisational links to wider resources, opportunities to develop young people’s own capacity to form relationships, and opportunities to activate those relationships when pursuing educational, career and other goals.

This makes the process considerably more interesting. What matters may not be that a young person has attended something on a Wednesday evening for six years. What matters is whom they encountered, what they were trusted to do, what information travelled through those relationships, whether participation expanded their social world, and whether they learnt how to use the resources made available through it.

Miller et al.’s (2015) study of community youth-work projects involving young people classified as NEET in urban and rural Scotland offers a related account. The authors describe youth work as creating connections between young people and their communities, acting as a form of social “glue” through which relationships and social capital could develop. Their findings are based on a small qualitative study and should not be generalised indiscriminately, but the emphasis on relationships rather than participation alone is important. Youth work did not simply insert skills into individual young people; it created social settings within which new relationships and resources became possible.

Some evidence also suggests that these relationships can have consequences beyond the activity itself, although the empirical base needs to be treated cautiously. Mann and Percy (2014), examining school-mediated employer engagement among young people in Britain, reported an association between greater numbers of employer contacts during education and subsequent wage outcomes. Their sample was relatively small and does not justify strong causal claims, but their interpretation is nevertheless relevant. They argued that the relationship was more plausibly explained by a social-capital mechanism involving access to useful, trustworthy and non-redundant labour-market information than by the simple acquisition of generic employability skills.

This distinction between skill development and social-capital development deserves more attention than it normally receives. A young person may benefit from an activity because they become better at communicating, but they may also benefit because they now know somebody who explains how apprenticeships work, recommends a university they had not considered, tells them about an occupation they did not know existed, offers a reference or simply says, with enough credibility to matter, “I think you could do this”. These are different mechanisms, although they may operate together.

It is also important not to give bridging social capital more causal power than it can reasonably bear. Wider networks may provide better information about occupations, education or employment opportunities and may help young people identify routes that would otherwise remain invisible, but they cannot create suitable jobs where local labour-market demand is weak, make distant opportunities geographically accessible or compensate completely for wider inequalities in employment conditions. Social capital can expand the opportunities a young person is able to perceive and, in some cases, access, but it does not remove the opportunity structures within which those choices are made (Pavis et al., 2001; Roberts & Parsell, 1992).

A network can tell a young person that an opportunity exists, encourage them to pursue it and perhaps help them navigate a route towards it. It cannot make that opportunity affordable, geographically accessible or present within the local labour market. This qualification matters because otherwise social capital risks becoming another individualised explanation for structurally produced inequality. Bridging relationships matter, but they operate within labour markets, educational systems and geographical settings rather than above them.

Scouts, Skills for Life and the wider youth sector

Scouts provides an interesting example because it makes unusually explicit claims about precisely this kind of development. Its previous national strategy was entitled Skills for Life, and although its current Strategy to 2035 is framed around Place to Belong, the skills language remains integral rather than historical. The Scout Association describes its programme as giving young people both a place to belong and “skills for life”, with intended outcomes including greater resilience, connection, employability and active citizenship. Its current strategy continues to identify an ambition for more young people to gain skills for life and lead change (The Scout Association, 2026).

The temptation would be to take these claims at face value, particularly because activities in Scouts lend themselves so readily to an employability narrative. Planning an event becomes organisation, being a Patrol Leader becomes leadership, camping becomes resilience and working with a group becomes teamwork. Dawson and Harrison’s (2023) The Employability Badge, produced by Demos with support from Scouts, reported that former members commonly identified teamwork and leadership developed through participation as useful in later employment and were more likely than those reporting no extracurricular participation to say they had felt prepared when entering work. The findings are relevant to the discussion, but they rely substantially on retrospective self-report and were produced in partnership with the organisation whose benefits were being examined. They are therefore better understood as evidence of perceived value than as proof that Scouting caused the reported outcomes.

More useful for the wider argument is the independent evaluation of the UK Government’s Uniformed Youth Fund. The impact evaluation considered eight uniformed youth organisations rather than Scouts alone and used mixed methods, including a quasi-experimental comparison alongside qualitative and contribution-analysis approaches. It found evidence of positive differences in areas including teamwork and responsibility, although results were not equally strong across all outcomes and the researchers explicitly acknowledged that residual self-selection could not be entirely eliminated (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025). Qualitative evidence also highlighted opportunities to communicate with unfamiliar people, exercise responsibility, lead and undertake activities outside participants’ normal experience.

The significance of this evidence is not that it demonstrates a simple causal chain from membership to employability. It suggests instead that particular youth settings can provide repeated opportunities for practice. A young person can attempt to lead before leadership carries the consequences it might in paid employment. They can discover that a plan has failed and adapt it. They can interact with adults who are neither teachers nor parents, work with peers they did not necessarily select themselves and gradually take on greater responsibility.

Scouts is not unique in doing this, nor should it be presented as such. Sport, youth theatre, Guides, Cadets, Duke of Edinburgh, community projects, faith organisations, volunteering and part-time employment can all provide overlapping experiences. Some online communities can too. A young person helping to administer a large gaming community may be negotiating disputes, applying rules, developing technical expertise and coordinating people across different countries. Whether a future employer recognises such activity as leadership or organisational experience is a separate question, but the underlying competencies need not be trivial merely because they were acquired online.

Nor should organised participation be romanticised. Dean’s (2016) research on formal youth volunteering provides an important warning. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and cultural capital, he found that recruitment practices intended to widen youth volunteering could instead favour middle-class young people whose dispositions already fitted recruiters’ expectations. An activity presented as a mechanism of inclusion could therefore reproduce the class composition of the existing volunteering “civic core”.

This is an important corrective. Youth organisations do not sit outside society’s inequalities simply because their stated purposes are developmental or inclusive. They have cultures, expectations and assumptions of their own. Some young people enter them and feel immediately at home, while others may encounter precisely the mismatch between habitus and field that Bourdieu identifies elsewhere. A setting capable of building one young person’s social and cultural capital may feel alienating to another.

Place, opportunity and the problem of apparent choice

Class alone is not sufficient to understand access. Opportunities also exist in places, and their geographical distribution matters.

Youth-transition research has long challenged the increasingly individualised language through which educational and employment decisions are discussed. Roberts and Parsell’s (1992) longitudinal research followed young people in four British labour markets and found that, despite respondents commonly attributing considerable importance to their own choices, later outcomes remained strongly associated with social class, educational attainment and place of residence. Roberts’ broader account of opportunity structures was intended to capture exactly this tension: people make choices, but they do so within environments in which the range and accessibility of realistic opportunities are already structured.

Furlong and Cartmel (1997) described a related phenomenon through their analysis of individualisation. As traditional pathways became less predictable, young people were increasingly required to understand structurally produced risks as individual problems and individual choices. The appearance of greater personal freedom did not mean that class and other structural inequalities had disappeared. Their effects could instead become more difficult to see because biographies were increasingly narrated through the language of personal decision-making.

For young people in rural areas, the distinction between an opportunity existing and an opportunity being accessible can be particularly stark. Pavis et al.’s (2001) research with young adults in rural Scotland argued that meaningful opportunity depends upon both available resources and accessible arenas. The presence of employment, education or other opportunities somewhere within a region says relatively little about social inclusion if individuals lack the transport, money, information or other resources required to reach and use them.

The same reasoning applies to developmental activities. A young person may live ten miles from a Scout Group, sports club, theatre group or volunteering opportunity. Technically, the activity exists. Practically, an evening activity with no usable public transport may require a parent who owns a car, is available at the right time and is willing to spend perhaps an hour transporting somebody there and back every week. The activity that appears inexpensive or even free therefore carries hidden requirements in economic, social and temporal resources.

Geography consequently becomes part of the production of opportunity rather than simply background context. The Social Mobility Commission (2019) identified geographical variation alongside family income and school attended as an important influence on extracurricular participation. A rural young person without access to transport may face a substantially narrower set of opportunities to develop recognised extracurricular experience than somebody living within walking distance of multiple organisations, even where their aspirations and motivation are otherwise similar.

The contraction of parts of the youth sector gives this issue additional significance. Department for Culture, Media and Sport research estimated that real-terms local-authority funding for youth provision fell from approximately £1.06 billion in 2011 to £408.5 million in 2021, while the available data suggested that the number of local-authority youth clubs almost halved between 2011/12 and 2018/19. The researchers explicitly caution that the underlying data are incomplete, but the direction and scale of change remain substantial (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2024a). A separate systematic review commissioned by the department screened more than 25,000 records and included 77 studies, concluding that youth activities can have beneficial personal, social, educational and economic effects, while also emphasising substantial variation in the strength and quality of evidence across different forms of provision (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2024b).

Taken together, this makes the decline of accessible youth space more sociologically significant than a simple reduction in things for teenagers to do. If at least some of these spaces provide opportunities for relationships, responsibility, skill development and access to wider networks, then their uneven availability potentially affects the distribution of resources that can later be converted into educational or labour-market advantage.

Belonging, habitus and the possibility of change

This returns us to belonging.

Belonging is sometimes treated as a relatively soft outcome, important for wellbeing but conceptually separate from the harder questions of skills, education and employment. The literature on organised activities suggests that this separation may be misleading. Boat et al. (2024) identify a relationally strong climate as one of the conditions supporting social-capital development. Young people need not merely to enter an activity, but to develop relationships within it through which resources, information and support can flow.

Belonging may therefore matter because it creates conditions for sustained participation and experimentation. A young person who feels secure within a group can attempt something unfamiliar without every failure threatening their membership. They can lead badly and have another opportunity, ask questions, revise their behaviour, acquire informal knowledge about how the organisation works and gradually move from newcomer towards established participant. Through repetition, previously unfamiliar situations can become ordinary.

There is an obvious connection here with habitus. Experiences do not simply leave behind discrete competencies. Repeated experiences can also affect what people regard as normal, possible and appropriate for somebody like themselves. However, this is precisely where a Bourdieusian analysis requires care. If habitus is interpreted too deterministically, the argument collapses into social reproduction: people inherit dispositions from their social position, encounter opportunities aligned with those dispositions and reproduce the trajectory their background predicted.

Youth-transition research gives good reason to resist that conclusion. Evans (2002) uses the concept of bounded agency to describe young adults as active agents whose capacity to shape their lives is nevertheless conditioned by socioeconomic environments, social background and institutional settings. Baker’s (2019) work with Further Education students similarly draws on Archer’s theory of reflexivity to analyse how young people actively deliberate about higher-education choices while facing structural constraints. The usefulness of both perspectives lies in rejecting an artificial choice between completely free individual decision-making and mechanically determined social outcomes.

This opens an important possibility for understanding youth participation. New experiences and relationships may not simply reproduce an existing habitus; they can provide new information and experiences with which young people reflect upon their circumstances. Meeting somebody with a different occupation, travelling beyond a familiar locality, discovering competence in an unfamiliar task or receiving recognition from a trusted adult can make a previously remote possibility more thinkable. This does not mean that one encouraging adult transforms somebody’s life or that extracurricular participation dissolves structural inequality. It means that social environments can change the resources and experiences upon which reflexive decisions are made.

This also helps explain why the distinction between bonding and bridging relationships is potentially important. Close relationships within an existing group can provide security and belonging, while relationships that bridge different social worlds may provide access to information and opportunities not otherwise available. This is consistent both with research on social-capital development through organised activities and with evidence on employer engagement, where access to people outside young people’s established networks may supply forms of labour-market knowledge that family and close friends do not possess (Boat et al., 2024; Mann & Percy, 2014).

The structural qualification remains essential. Bridging relationships may expand the range of possibilities a young person knows about and may sometimes help them reach those possibilities, but they do not abolish the conditions governing whether those possibilities are realistically available. Networks matter because they operate within labour markets, educational systems and geographical settings, not because they provide a route around them.

A youth organisation might therefore matter not because it keeps a teenager occupied, and not even solely because it teaches them how to organise an activity, but because it places them in relationships with people and social worlds they might not otherwise encounter.

When a skill becomes capital

The question of recognition nevertheless remains central.

Suppose two young people emerge from adolescence possessing broadly similar levels of organisation, judgement and interpersonal competence. One acquired them through formal extracurricular activities; the other developed them through domestic responsibility, informal community life or online participation. They may still receive very different institutional rewards.

Bourdieu helps explain why. Fields possess systems of classification through which some cultural forms are recognised more readily than others (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). The conversion of experience into advantage therefore requires more than experience itself. An individual must also be able to make that experience legible within the field they are entering.

Bathmaker et al. (2013) demonstrate this process among university students accumulating and mobilising capital for graduate employment, while Dean (2016) shows that even access to formal volunteering can depend upon already possessing dispositions that organisations recognise as appropriate. The ability to acquire capital and the ability to have it recognised are therefore intertwined.

This suggests a more critical reading of the employability agenda. Asking young people to develop “skills” can imply that the labour market neutrally identifies valuable capacities and rewards those who possess them. In practice, labour-market advantage depends upon a more complicated interaction between capability, opportunity, networks, institutional knowledge and presentation. Tomlinson’s (2017) model makes this explicit by moving away from employability as a collection of competencies and towards the forms of capital individuals are able to develop and mobilise within particular labour-market contexts.

It may therefore be insufficient to ask whether a youth activity creates leadership skills. We also need to ask whether young people understand that they have developed those skills, whether they know how to describe them, whether somebody encourages them to value the experience, and whether the institution they subsequently encounter regards that experience as credible evidence of potential.

Some experiences arrive almost pre-packaged with recognisable status. Others remain socially invisible until somebody translates them. That process of symbolic recognition is not incidental to the skills agenda; it is part of how apparently similar competencies acquire different social values.

Skills for life, rather than simply skills for work

There is a risk that the argument so far accepts the employability agenda too readily. If every childhood experience has to justify itself through its contribution to future employment, youth development quickly becomes an exercise in producing economically useful adults. Sport becomes teamwork training, volunteering becomes CV enhancement, camps become resilience exercises, friendship becomes networking and every enjoyable activity acquires a learning outcome.

That would be a distinctly impoverished account of youth.

The attraction of the phrase Skills for Life is that, interpreted seriously, it can be broader than employability. The capabilities discussed throughout this article matter in employment, but they also matter in relationships, citizenship, community participation and the mundane business of managing adulthood. Communication is not valuable only because an employer requires it, nor are cooperation, judgement, confidence or the ability to cope when plans fail.

This is one reason the Scout Association’s current combination of Place to Belong and Skills for Life is sociologically more interesting than either phrase taken alone. The current strategy explicitly links belonging, participation and developmental outcomes rather than presenting employability as the sole purpose of activity (The Scout Association, 2026). The same principle can be applied much more widely. Youth organisations, clubs, voluntary settings, workplaces and informal communities may matter partly because young people enter them for reasons that have little to do with employability and encounter developmental experiences as a consequence of doing something they actually value.

A teenager learning cooperation because a group is attempting to achieve something meaningful together is engaged in a different social process from somebody completing a classroom exercise designed to demonstrate teamwork. Responsibility has greater substance when another person genuinely depends upon you. Failure is different when something mattered enough to fail at. Relationships become social capital not because an organisation schedules a networking session, but because familiarity and trust develop over time.

The skills agenda may therefore have the causal sequence partly backwards. We tend to begin with the competencies we want and design programmes intended to produce them. Yet some of the most important capacities may emerge because young people first have access to places where they participate, belong, encounter difference, acquire responsibilities and form relationships.

Skills may follow from meaningful social participation rather than participation being valuable principally because it delivers skills.

Where, exactly, were they supposed to learn?

Towards the end of adolescence, institutions increasingly assess what young people have become. Employers ask whether they can communicate, collaborate and solve problems. Universities value evidence of independence and engagement. Young people themselves are encouraged to assemble experiences into a persuasive account of who they are and what they can contribute. Contemporary labour-market research suggests that many of these so-called essential skills are likely to become more rather than less significant as technological change continues (Bocock et al., 2025).

What sociology adds is a suspicion of the point at which that assessment usually begins.

By eighteen, the differences in front of us already have histories. Young people have experienced different families, schools, communities and local opportunity structures. Some have spent years moving between organised activities in which they were repeatedly exposed to adults, institutions and responsibility. Others have developed substantial competencies in settings that carry less institutional recognition. Some have acquired broad networks containing people able to provide information about education and employment, while others rely on narrower circles through no failure of their own. Geography can expand or restrict the activities realistically available, while economic and family resources affect whether technically available opportunities can actually be used.

Across all of this, young people themselves interpret, choose, resist and act rather than simply absorbing whatever their circumstances provide. The resulting picture is therefore not one in which extracurricular activity straightforwardly creates employability, nor one in which social background mechanically determines adult outcomes. Particular social settings can provide opportunities for young people to practise capabilities, develop relationships, encounter new information and receive recognition. Those experiences may contribute to skills, social and cultural capital, and changing dispositions, but participation alone guarantees none of them. Access to these settings is uneven, the resources developed within them are valued differently across social fields, wider opportunity structures constrain what those resources can achieve, and young people exercise agency in deciding what to make of the opportunities they encounter.

That complexity is precisely why the language of individual skills can be misleading. When an eighteen-year-old appears confident, articulate, resilient and capable of leadership, those characteristics may be entirely real. They are simply unlikely to have appeared spontaneously. Likewise, when another young person struggles to demonstrate the same characteristics in an interview, describing the problem as a “skills deficit” tells us relatively little about how that difference arose.

Perhaps, before asking whether young people are ready for adulthood, higher education or the workplace, we need to examine the opportunities through which readiness is supposed to develop. If we expect young people to communicate confidently with unfamiliar adults, we should ask where they have had the opportunity to practise doing so. If we expect leadership, we should ask where they have been trusted to lead. If we value teamwork, we should consider where they have spent sustained time cooperating with people beyond their chosen friendship groups. If we expect resilience and judgement, we should ask where they have been allowed to encounter difficulty, make mistakes and try again without those mistakes becoming permanent judgements about their ability.

If these opportunities contribute to forms of capital that matter in later education and employment, then their distribution is not peripheral to questions of inequality. It is part of how those inequalities are produced, experienced and, sometimes, challenged.

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