From the "sexual behaviour of young people" in the 1960s to "youth and the great recession" in the 2000s a steady current running through the author's educational research career has been "youth". Although the early stages of his career supplied the foundations for the topic of this paper--starting in 1962 with a research assistant job with the Central Council for Health Education--the author's main reference point is the middle 1980s, 20 years later, from his base at the Open University as national coordinator for the ESRC 16-19 Initiative. This was a five year research programme starting in 1986 on the "economic and political socialisation" of young people, that is to say the ways in which young people were forming their adult identities under the conditions of the time. In this article, the author presents three sets of reflections on policy change and young people. First: more details about the transformation that occurred and the (Thatcher) government response--drawing on the evidence of its effects from the 16-19 Initiative and the associated Anglo-German comparative study. The second is the 1997 (Blair) government's Social Exclusion Unit agenda through Policy Action Teams (PATS) and the phenomenon of NEET. The third is the Skills Agenda developed most fully by the 2005-2009 (Blair, Brown) governments culminating in the Leitch report, subsequently to be endorsed by the Coalition government. Drawing out the relevant evidence will reflect another of the author's concerns--the need for longitudinal and comparative data to understand how young people's lives had been changing in response to economic change and what this meant for policies directed towards them. (Contains 4 notes.)