Under embargo until: 00.01hrs Friday 16 November 2007
JRF Journalist Fellowship £50,000 prize awarded
Author and freelance journalist, Fran Abrams, has been awarded the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) Journalist Fellowship to explore how and why so many young people in Britain fall outside of our education, employment and training systems.
Given every two years, these £50,000 bursaries enable experienced journalists to take time out from their deadline-driven schedules to write a book about challenging areas of social policy.
Abrams was awarded the Fellowship for her creative proposal which will go behind the headline figures to analyse the underlying causes and potential solutions. Despite rising staying-on-at-school rates, university expansion and a large injection of cash over the past ten years, the number of young people who fall out of school remains a continuing cause for concern. Today there are one and a quarter million 16- to 24-year-olds in England who are currently out of education or training and without a job.
Fran Abrams has been reporting on social policy for more than 20 years. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Times and other national newspapers. Her most recent book, Seven Kings, featured a year in the life of a successful urban comprehensive school and seven of its pupils. She says: "In many respects I saw it as a picture of how children succeed. This book will present the other side of this coin – looking at how our education system and society are failing so many young people. The book will also give a voice to ordinary parents and youngsters to capture what they think would transform young people’s struggles to find work, education or training into success stories."
Notes to Editors:
- The JRF Journalist Fellowships are awarded every two years and have given rise to a series of successful and authoritative books. Writers previously awarded bursaries include Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Madeleine Bunting, Polly Ghazi, Jeremy Laurence, Nicholas Schoon, Christian Wolmar and, most recently, Richard Tomlinson.
- Fellowships can be used to cover full-time work on a book for a year, or on a part-time basis for up to two years.
- The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is one of the largest social policy research and development charities in the UK. It supports a research and development programme that seeks to understand the causes of social difficulties and explore ways of overcoming them.
Issued by Nasreen Memon, JRF Head of Media Relations: 020 7278 9665 / 01904 615 919 / nasreen.memon@jrf.org.uk
