Between Two Worlds: Aspects of the Transition from School to Work

This book presents research into the transition from school to work, and into career counseling as it affects the ‘non-academic’ child. The work was carried out over several years in the 1970s by John M. Hill, Psychoanalyst and Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research, and by David Scharff, MD, for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, working under John Hill’s direction.

The study presented here arose through a growing awareness that the needs of young school leavers were not being matched by the right kind of help. While teachers, parents and children themselves recognized the crucial importance of this stage of life, support and guidance were too often inadequate, resulting in lack of confidence, anxiety and other forms of disturbance.

Between Two Worlds focuses on the dilemma of the non-academic adolescent through close work with schools, and a large number of clinical interviews with children and their families of those who were on track to leave school at the earliest legal opportunity. The book is saturated with a psychoanalytic developmental perspective that illuminates the challenges facing these non-academic children and their families as they face the wider world.