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A Gap Year is a break in an educational career, principally taken between leaving school and beginning university. Previous research on the Gap Year has suggested it is a form of social class positioning or forum for undertaking transitions in identity during young adulthood. This paper extends this research into the context of higher education itself. The paper illustrates, by a detailed analysis of interview data, that significant identity work is undertaken by young people in their accounts of their Gap Year. It demonstrates that this identity work, involving talk of confidence, maturity and/or independence, is related to two forms of distinction: a life course distinction and a social distinction. The paper discusses the significance of this identity work for our understandings of the Gap Year, its place in young people's transitions to adulthood and for future research.

Extensive research has shown that working-class young people often struggle in school. There has been a lack of research that explores young people’s institutional experiences of education and support outside of the school context, however. This paper presents some of the findings from a qualitative study with 10 young people in Scotland, which addresses this gap by exploring young people’s experiences of support and education beyond the school gates. It found that the participants had troublingly negative and strikingly unproductive school careers, and instead accessed support and education in one or two settings: through youth work and/or college-based further education. The more individually tailored and informal nature of these institutions, combined with what was widely felt to be a more relaxed and personal relationship dynamic between staff and young people, were highly valued by the participants, all of whom began to make concrete progress towards forming or achieving their aspirations in these settings, often for the first time.

Across many advanced economies, changing housing dynamics have destabilized traditional adulthood transitions. This article examines how such transformations, especially in the aftermath of the economic crisis, affect fundamental societal expectations and aspirations surrounding tenure choices and home leaving. Through a series of discussion groups and interviews among young adults in Spain – a salient context of embedded homeownership culture – the study reveals how the crisis has undermined life-course transitions and upended discourses surrounding tenure norms. Homeownership has transformed from a dominant symbol of stability and security to one of dispossession and financial risk. Conversely, where pre-crisis discourses dismissed rental, the tenure is portrayed as providing more security in the face of necessary flexibility. Our research reveals that, although traditional ‘homeownership culture’ has not disappeared from the collective imaginary and appears nuanced by social class, it has become increasingly detached from leaving the parental home. The paper exposes the extent to which dominant housing discourses may be upended even within the context of a particularly embedded Southern European homeowner society. We contend that when housing dynamics are coupled with underlying transformations in aspirations and norms, there may be significant societal outcomes., This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, [grant number FPU14/ 02756]; MOVITRA IV Spanish National I+D+I Plan Subproject: RECSOC ‘Procesos de reconfiguración social metropolitana’ [grant number CSO2014-55780-C3-3-P].

This paper revisits the work on youth cultures and subcultures that emerged from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS) during the 1970s. I engage with a number of recent critiques of the 'youth sub/cultures project', including Thornton's influential work on rave and club cultures and its troubled engagement with class. I argue that the focus of the youth sub/cultures project on mediated cultural practices through which young people constitute themselves and their (gendered, classed and racialised) positions remains of value, especially the emphasis on a 'symptomatic reading' that locates these processes in a 'conjunctural analysis'. I end by exploring the legacy of this project for understanding youth, class and culture in contemporary late modern society.