This 5-year study will investigate how England's vocational education and training (VET) system can better support the school-to-work transitions of the 50% of young people who do not go to university. Routes into further education, training and employment for these young people are often characterised by complexity, instability, uncertain prospects and drop-out. Around 13% of 18-24 year olds are not in any form of education, employment or training. The research will focus on the 16-20 age group and will have a particular emphasis on engaging with the perspectives of young people themselves, including those who are marginalised and whose input is often not heard in policymaking. These young people are more likely to fall between gaps in the system and not be in education, employment or training, which is associated with a range of negative outcomes and lifetime costs. The research will compare the opportunities for young people living in different places and the resources they are able to draw on to help them make and exercise meaningful career and employment choices. It will explore young people's values, how differently resourced young people experience their transitions and the implications for equality, policy and professional practice. The research is guided by the principle that, to make transitions more equitable, we need to fully engage with: different dimensions of equality and the challenges of realising equality in practice; combinations of different kinds of advantages and disadvantages experienced by young people, including those often neglected in VET research, e.g. those associated with sexuality, gender identity, disability, academic attainment and place, alongside those of class, 'race' and gender; and how the range of possible opportunities interacts with young people's life experiences, values and agency. The project will use national-level statistical analysis of student destinations and a longitudinal survey of c.17,000 young people to establish who is getting access to which opportunities and provide a large-scale mapping of young people's values, aspirations and trajectories. In-depth research consisting of 500 qualitative interviews with policymakers, practitioners, young people and their parents/carers across four contrasting local authorities will provide more detailed insights to elucidate the quantitative findings. Towards the end of the project we will convene international VET scholars to bring cross-national comparative insights to bear on our findings. The research will be co-produced with key stakeholders. By helping policymakers develop greater insight into young people's lives and perspectives and supporting reflection on how the tensions involved in simultaneously addressing different kinds of inequality might best be managed, the research will help ensure that policy is more sensitive to the complexity of both young people's experiences and inequality; and hence more likely to be successful in creating more navigable and equitable transitions. The project will also help build capacity in the effective use of research to inform policy and practice development, help young people develop their advocacy skills and produce two major new datasets that will be of value for substantial future research by other teams. The research addresses pressing national policy priorities as England is currently engaged in fundamental reforms to its VET system. These have been fuelled by linked concerns about equality and productivity, in particular the disparities in education and skill levels that can prevent those from disadvantaged regions, those categorised as black or minority ethnic, as well as women and disabled people from accessing high-skill employment. This project will provide new understandings of how these disparities are produced and how they might be reduced. In doing so, it will generate insights of critical relevance to the government's equality and productivity agendas.

The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) will address emerging challenges of digital citizenship, taking an inclusive, participatory approach to the design and evaluation of new technologies and services that support 'smart', 'data-rich' living in urban, rural and coastal communities. Core to the Centre's work will be the incubation of sustainable 'Digital Social Innovations' (DSI) that will ensure digital technologies support diverse end-user communities and will have long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the Centre. Our technological innovations will be co-created between academic, industrial, public and third sector partners, with citizens supporting co-creation and delivery of research. Through these activities, CDC will incubate user-led social innovation and sustainable impact for the Digital Economy (DE), at scale, in ways that have previously been difficult to achieve. The CDC will build on a substantial joint legacy and critical mass of DE funded research between Newcastle and Northumbria universities, developing the trajectory of work demonstrated in our highly successful Social Inclusion for the Digital Economy (SIDE) hub, our Digital Civics Centre for Doctoral Training and our Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC). The CDC is a response to recent research that has challenged simplified notions of the smart urban environment and its inhabitants, and highlighted the risks of emerging algorithmic and automated futures. The Centre will leverage our pioneering participatory design and co-creative research, our expertise in digital participatory platforms and data-driven technologies, to deliver new kinds of innovation for the DE, that empowers citizens. The CDC will focus on four critical Citizen Challenge areas arising from our prior work: 'The Well Citizen' addresses how use of shared personal data, and publicly available large-scale data, can inform citizens' self-awareness of personal health and wellbeing, of health inequalities, and of broader environmental and community wellbeing; 'The Safe Citizen' critically examines online and offline safety, including issues around algorithmic social justice and the role of new data technologies in supporting fair, secure and equitable societies; 'The Connected Citizen' explores next-generation citizen-led digital public services, which can support and sustain civic engagement and action in communities, and engagement in wider socio-political issues through new sustainable (openly managed) digital platforms; and 'The Ageless Citizen' investigates opportunities for technology-enhanced lifelong learning and opportunities for intergenerational engagement and technologies to support growth across an entire lifecourse. CDC pilot projects will be spread across the urban, rural and costal geography of the North East of England, embedded in communities with diverse socio-economic profiles and needs. Driving our programme to address these challenges is our 'Engaged Citizen Commissioning Framework'. This framework will support citizens' active engagement in the co-creation of research and critical inquiry. The framework will use design-led 'initiation mechanisms' (e.g. participatory design workshops, hackathons, community events, citizen labs, open innovation and co-production platform experiments) to support the co-creation of research activities. Our 'Innovation Fellows' (postdoctoral researchers) will engage in a 24-month social innovation programme within the CDC. They will pilot DSI projects as part of highly interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams, including academics and end-users (e.g. Community Groups, NGO's, Charities, Government, and Industry partners). The outcome of these pilots will be the development of further collaborative bids (Research Council / Innovate UK / Charity / Industry funded), venture capital pitches, spin-outs and/or social enterprises. In this way the Centre will act as a catalyst for future innovation-focused DE activity.