How did people leave home at 15…

I did, claimed housing benefit and lived in a group home till 16

Back in the day, bands usually had a range of day jobs that were flexible or related to music. My other half was a graphic artist working for a studio that did almost all the advertising for all the clubs in NYC. The drummer's day gig was driving a limo; the bass player was a line cook. Our brass section filled in on Broadway shows when people were ill.

I actually didn't leave home but was working in the music industry at 15 part time in the 90s. I literally got the yellow pages out and called every number under the recording studio entries until someone gave me a job for 3 hours a week doing admin and cleaning mixing desks.
I got my next music industry job when working in a pub glass collecting and a regular had a small record label and I got talking to him and he gave me a job, i worked there doing all sorts, marketing, PR, posting out cds for a few years while i was at college. I moved out of home the day I turned 18 as I just wanted independance. I bought a flat by working three jobs to show income and getting a 100 percent mortgage on a 60k flat in london suburbs. I then went to uni whilst working and just paid for myself.

Both my parents left school at 14 and got jobs. I was talking to my mum about this the other day as we were talking about rental checks.
She said she used to just find a job ad for a room or flat, call the number, go in and say you wanted to live there and pay the month up front. There were no ID or credit checks. If you wanted the room you just said so and handed over cash.
Likewise with jobs, she said she would just walk into any store along the high street and ask if they had jobs, if yes then you can just start. Wages were weekly in cash in brown envelopes noone checked right to work or age etc.
also with council Housing, she said yoh just walked in to the council offjce and asked for a flat and there were loads of flats and you just moved in.
This was late 1960s

I read something ages ago, on here I think... that the biggest factor in previous social mobility was the availability of jobs due to a labour shortage. People could work their way up. Much more pertinent than the idea of social mobility via education.

It certainly seems to ring true.

I long for the days where you could just pick up work easily. My life would be quite different now. (Having had years out due to illness and never managed to start a proper career since.)

Re social mobilty
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

It was a lot more common in 1960s and 1970s to leave home very young. I think there might be a bit of truth stretching going on for 1980s onwards, unless in the case of running away from home etc. I’ve got a friend who claims that she left home at 15 in the 1980s which I don’t entirely believe. I heard my DB say recently that he ‘barely went to school’. I mean, he absolutely went to school on a very regular basis to the age of 17, I was there! But that’s become his story to himself.

It's fantastic that she used to live in a country where social housing was readily available.

Someone i know left home at 16, she said her parents had told the LA that they cant keep her at home anymore so the LAs duty was to find her a home,she got 2 bed apartment at 16, at 24ish? Got 2 bed newbuild house.

Sali Hughes has written about this before saying she became a make up artist in London after leaving home in wales as a teenager and then worked her way up to become a beauty journalist. She makes the point now that you have to be able to do an unpaid internship in this and similar industries so only people with very wealthy parents can afford to do this. It’s an example of how social mobility has gone backwards.

This was me too, at 17 - tho I had help from the state for a little while, unemployment and housing benefit (not many jobs where I lived, in Thatcher's 80s), then onto YTS for my first job, haven't stopped working since. Your last sentence describes it so well! I'm mindblown at how different things are now for my teenage DS, but then things were different again for my mum & dad - left school at 15, straight into factory jobs, married & buying own house at 19

I'm not in the UK but I left weeks before my sixth form exams. I just wanted to get away from school and start work. I had just turned 16 - in the mid 70s.

I was paid in cash for the first few months, then we got paid by direct credit into our bank accounts so I wandered into the nearest bank and opened a cheque account.

Yes, it was very different. All the CEOs of the business I worked for (I was there 26 years) started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top, none went to university. That's just how it worked then, and they learned all aspects of the job by actually doing it.

I left school just after my 16th birthday - the leaving age here was 15 - and lived with an 18 year old friend, her husband and baby, but lots of young people shared flats as we came from a very small town so moved to a bigger town to work. I started work in the school holidays and had to take a day off work to go back to school to officially leave!

In 1947, the school leaving age was increased from 14 to 15
▪ Between 1947 and 1973, the school leaving age was 15 in both nations.
▪ There were also ‘easter leaving rules.’ Under these rules, children could leave school at
Easter if they turned 15 between September and January (inclusive).
▪ From 1973 to 2013, the school leaving age was 16 in both nations.
▪ Easter leaving rules continued to exist up to 1996, when they were abolished.
▪ From 2013 onwards, the education leaving age was increased to 18 in England only.
I was born in ‘56 and could have left school at 15 but stayed to finish exam year (O levels as was) My sister was born in ‘58 and had to stay on until she was 16 even though she wasn’t taking exams

@Jamesblonde2 It's weird but I left home at 17 in the 90's although to go to university. I was from a working class background and certainly not wrapped in cotton wool but not especially savvy either, neither were most of the people I knew. I think kids today are loads more savvy about things than I was at that age.

I think affordability, opportunity and expectation play a huge roll now in keeping kids at home well into adulthood.

You would take a room/bedsit in a female house with a landlady. Completely normal. You could easily find a job in London then. Plenty of kids left school at that age.

And as kids weren’t wrapped in cotton wool like they are now, they were more savvy.

Simple.

As a teenager in the 90's I knew a few people living in pretty grotty bedsits and shared flats. Some worked others were on the dole and got housing benefit, some probably even got some housing benefit or even dole money while working if it was cash in hand.

I'm more interested in how Mariella Frostrup came to London at 16 and immediately started working in the music business? Her Wikipedia states she was a trainee tape op on the Rolling Stones mobile studio and worked on a Simple Minds Album!

I listened to desert Island discs the other day with celebrity photographer Richard Young, who in 1974 landed his first ever photography doing the photographs for a book by John Cowper Powys. At this point he doesn't even own a camera or know how to use one really so the first two rolls of film he shoots come back totally blank. Amazingly he is given a few weeks to learn how to use the camera and keeps the job. I'm a photographer and that would just be impossible these days, utterly impossible, you'd be laughed out of town and your name would be trash.

Apparently most of Richard Young's contacts came from working in a Saville Row tailors after leaving school and meeting some bigwigs through that.

I think opportunities must have been far more abundant back then for people than they are now. Along with much cheaper accommodation and cost of living.

Tell that to the miners 😭 social mobility isn’t the same as moving location though.

@CaptainMyCaptain
I squatted there in the early 80’s, we might have gone to the same pubs! Islington is still a very deprived borough

It's so difficult for them to get Saturday jobs and the like now. I was born in 1974, went to university in 1992- the first one in my family, but I'd had a Saturday / Summer holiday job in a shop (even cashing up the til and taking the money to the bank) from aged 14. I babysat as well. My daughter is desperate to get a job when she's 16 but no one takes them on

I left home at 15 and lived by the seat of my pants, not in London, but moved to another large European capital city. Earned little bits of money and lived in shared accommodation and essentially winged it until I thought better of my trajectory a few years later. It was not unusual.

I’m surprised more people aren’t mentioning council houses. By the 80s the estates had developed a reputation but even so I knew people who’d got themselves pregnant as teens and got a council house. Lucky so-and-sos got offered the place cheap under right to buy and made a killing selling high; they’ve made a total mockery of those of us who had to work.

London became an unaffordable place only in the 80s, before that it was not the world-beating famous celebrity place it is now. Other cities and towns were equally viable economically. The miners strikes only came in the 80s as the mines were shut. Celebrity culture then was very different with fewer divides between people and more accessibility to all, especially for men; it’s become very plastic and nepotistic now. Even by the 90s you had to be lucky and in London, meaning well-off, to do anything.

My mum left school at 15 in the 60s, and got a job with no qualifications, just in a local factory, and stayed at her parents’ home until she got married. She could barely read in fact. She always resented me staying in school and aiming higher, she never has recognized how much the world has changed.

I left school - quite legally - at 15 and 2 months. If my birthday had been in late July or August, I’d have left at 14 (still in the school year in which I turned 15). 16 became the minimum age in 1972, but all that meant was that my brothers effectively left at Easter, when they were both still 15, and were only supposed to go in to sit exams. One of them didn’t bother, one showed his face 5 times in the summer term, both were working full-time.

By 17, I was living in digs, which was essentially a room in someone’s house. Some people rented out multiple rooms, some just one to help make ends meet. I was in the latter, and shared the bathroom and kitchen with my landlords (a youngish married couple, then a single mum and her young son) It was mostly great.

I lived between home, shared houses and squats when I was 15 and moved to a different city at 16. This was 99/2000! I claimed income support and my boyfriend worked.

as an Irish teenager I worked a summer in London with lots of people from my home town , the boys lived in squats and signed on and did labouring work , my friend and I weee chambermaids and lived in in a terrible hotel basement in Euston .
a fact my kinds use against me whenever I wouldn’t let them do something as teenagers. I actually don’t know
what my parents were thinking