It was, after all and the first comprehensive Welfare Act

It was, after all and the first comprehensive Welfare Act directly intended for adolescents (14–17), although previous legislation had specified hours and conditions of labour for children and young persons, and young adolescents were included in several of the clauses in the Children Act 1908.
Broadly speaking the interest of the State in vocational guidance and registration and placement, and after-care, marks the beginning of its concern with wage-earning youth, which was to develop over the next twenty years with the formation of the Juvenile Organizations Committee in 1916 and the various measures to ameliorate juvenile unemployment between the wars, and the inauguration in 1939 of The "Youth Service", each of which was a response to economic and social pressures, and all of which refined and extended the image of youth.
Furthermore, it was the role of the adolescent as worker which first introduced the State into this area of collectivism, proof of the importance with which the juvenile labour-market was regarded in relation to the social problem.
But in what ways did the creation of the exchange system, and those elements of continuity and change, actually affect the image of youth?
In the most obvious sense the establishment of special facilities for young workers emphasized their distinctiveness and their separateness; it also suggested that by virtue of their ignorance and incompetence they needed to rely upon "professionals" for assistance in choosing and finding an occupation.
In effect and the service portrayed the adolescent as essentially a dependent person.
The capacity of the young worker for rational and thoughtful, and informed actions was brought into question by the new identity that was bestowed upon the transition process.
The legislation turned the transition into a public activity, performed to certain rules, clothed in the rhetoric of advice, guidance, and protection which, it was claimed, could only be given by "experts" and selected voluntary "helpers".
The procedures of the system made it seem overwhelmingly complex: the visits and the record cards of teachers and helpers and the correspondence with  employers and the labour exchange forms and the committee structure, and their numerous meetings.
This input of detail, with the emphasis on the need for guidance and care made the transition appear to be a period of effort, anxiety, and danger; and such a representation was convenient at a time when social scientists, and others, were "discovering" adolescence as a stage of life characterized by "storm and stress".
The purpose of the labour exchanges, as Churchill said, was to curtail the "haphazard and unorganized state of our industrial life".
The principal aim of the Juvenile "Rules" was to continue "the supervision of the boy or girl, when placed, with a view to his or her further education, both technical and humanistic"and to bring to bear on the life of the adolescents "all the influences making for industrial efficiency, for enlightened citizenship and self-realisation".
It is beyond doubt that the service was meant to be a social institution with aims in addition to those of an economic nature.
As Dearle wrote in summarizing what he called "The Needs of the Future": the "supreme necessity" was not merely to "establish certain regulations and forms of control", but to "encourage and develop good industrial and social habits".
Reformers continually blurred the occupational role of wage-earning youth by fusing economics with "character", and in presenting youth as "raw material" for the future.
Perhaps the prevailing attitude towards adolescents was most plainly and simply described by the objectives of the Birmingham CCC: "To bridge the gulf between the disciplined life of the school and the comparative freedom of the industrial world; to ensure that care of the young shall not cease with the end of school life; and to provide the means for the guidance of young persons through the difficulties and perils of adolescence."
All in all and the juvenile labour exchange legislation served to institutionalize the transition from school to full-time employment, and in so doing provided it with priests and  rituals; the transition became a rite de passage and and therefore, brought this aspect of the adolescent's life into a formal arena where it was subject to critical scrutiny.
Prior to the legislation and the transition was obviously in the hands of the young people themselves, and of their parents and relations, and friends.
The significance of the service lies in the attempt to take the process away from them and place it under the control of national and local welfare élites.
Of course, it might be objected that while the description given here is theoretically accurate, in practice the exchange officers and "helpers" were never able effectively to guide and supervise, influence, and control the school-leavers (and their parents) who continued to deviate from an "ideal"behaviour pattern.
The strength of a social institutional ideal, however, is not that it always attains its stated objectives, but that it establishes itself as the desirable norm.