Catalogue description Ministry of Labour and successors: Youth Employment, Registered Files (JV, ETJ, IA and YE Series)

Responsibility for providing vocational guidance for young people was created under both the Labour Exchanges Act 1909 and the Education (Choice of Employment) Act 1910, thus dividing responsibility both at central and local level. When the Ministry of Labour was created in 1916, it took over responsibilities previously vested in the Board of Trade, but continued to dispute central control with the Board of Education. Following the recommendations of the Malcolm Committee, central responsibility was vested in the Ministry of Labour in 1927. The Employment Department and Training Department co-ordinated the work of the Youth Employment Service. At local level, however, the ministry's officials acted in close co-operation with local education authorities.

During the Second World War, juvenile employment was separated from industrial training, the latter being absorbed by the Director General of Manpower, a divorce rendered permanent by the Employment and Training Act 1948 following the recommendations of the Ince Report. The Act widened the scope of the Service, tried to remedy defects of local administration and created a new central body (the Central Youth Employment Executive), to determine youth employment policy and supervise the work of local youth employment committees. The four-man executive remained responsible to the minister but included two outside representatives: one from the Scottish Education Department, the other from the Ministry of Education. The latter was also Secretary to the National Youth Employment Council, set up as successor to the National Advisory Council for Juvenile Employment to advise the minister, and consisting of representatives of education authorities, teachers, employers and workers as well as a number of independent members with an interest in juvenile welfare.

During and immediately after the Second World War, the ministry ran an interrupted apprenticeship scheme to help young people whose working lives had been disrupted by the war. A separate department was created to undertake this work, as well as to supervise the main functions of the Youth Employment Service: the provision of advice and vocational guidance for school leavers, their placement in suitable employment and their subsequent after care. After 1948, it was called the Youth Employment and Disabled Persons Department which incorporated the Central Youth Employment Executive. The executive became part of the Employment Services Division of the Department of Employment in 1968, and issued information on careers, and ran its own inspectorate which visited the youth employment offices and the youth employment departments in the ministry's local offices.