Drawing lessons from early school leavers in a social justice context: Introductory comments

Early leaving from education and training in the European context

This special issue brings together a diverse range of national perspectives on the trajectories of people who leave education and training early as well as those who are not in education, employment or training (NEET). It draws on the results of the Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe (RESL.eu ¹ ) project, which were discussed in three Network 7 symposia at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), an annual event hosted by the European Educational Research Association (EERA).

EU Member States have already been seeking to reduce early school leaving (ESL) since the launch of the 2000 Lisbon Strategy. More recently, European education policy and experts have broadened their focus and are now also working to reduce early leaving from education and training (ELET). In doing so, they recognise education gained outside mainstream schools and bring additional (and alternative) education institutions into the equation, thus taking into consideration that young people leave not only school but also other forms of education and training.

The term early school leavers (ESLers) generally refers to young people between the ages of 18 and 24 whose highest education qualification is below upper secondary level. The 2019 Eurostat survey defines early leavers from education and training as young people who had ‘completed at most a lower secondary education and were not in further education or training during the four weeks preceding the survey’ and is thus a more realistic depiction of the diverse education offers that are available to this age group. In this special issue, we follow the Eurostat (2018, 2019) conventions and use the terms ESL and ELET interchangeably.

The RESL.eu project studied schools and alternative learning arenas in nine countries ² and analysed ESL from a holistic perspective rather than looking at individual aspects of the problem in isolations. Such an approach views national perspectives as part of the ‘Europeanisation’ process and brings different interpretations of the European guidelines to the fore (Araújo et al., 2018). This is important because we can ultimately only really understand ESL if we explore its many causes and consequences on the macro, meso and micro levels. Deconstructing these factors according to their contexts also reveals the specific conditions (and combinations thereof) that influence the ESL process and provides insights into the mechanisms and processes that prompt some ESLers to enrol in learning institutions unrelated to mainstream schools or to leave education and training early. It likewise allows the formulation, development and implementation of context-based measures and policies to prevent, compensate and intervene in ESL.

The project also examined the measures used to develop viable support systems in the participating countries, i.e. the prevention, compensation and intervention measures, which helped to keep young people in education or training even when they exhibited a high (theoretical) risk of ESL. The trajectories and measures highlighted in the articles in this special issue stem from these analyses and are supported by comprehensive data obtained using a mixed-method approach. The articles thus illustrate the diversity of ESL-related questions and demonstrate that these are burning issues in modern-day society with individual, social and economic consequences.

This is confirmed in the Eurydice and Cedefop ³ Report ‘Tackling Early Leaving from Education and Training in Europe: Strategies, Policies and Measures’ (European Commission, EACEA, Eurydice, Cedefop, 2014: 17), which states that

Early leaving is highly challenging, not only for young people, but also for societies. For many, early leaving will lead to reduced opportunities in the labour market and an increased likelihood of unemployment, poverty, health problems and reduced participation in political, social and cultural activities. Furthermore, these negative consequences have an impact on the next generation and may perpetuate the occurrence of early leaving.

ESL also has social and economic consequences because ESLers are frequently deemed to not have the appropriate skills for ‘today’s knowledge intensive means of production’. The high rates of unemployment in this group also lead to a general reduction in economic growth (European Commission, EACEA, Eurydice, Cedefop, 2014). Accordingly, ESL/ELET is a significant issue within the strategic framework for European Cooperation in Education and Training (ET2020), which includes the target of reducing ELET to below 10% (COM, 2010).

The delineation, extent and dimensions of the ESL problem differ from country to country. In the RESL.eu project countries, for instance, ESL rates were highest in Spain and lowest in Poland. The current ESL rates demonstrate the setbacks and breakthroughs both in the individual countries as well as in Europe as a whole. According to the Eurostat data for 2019, the average ESL rate for young people between the ages of 18 and 24 in the EU-28 countries lay at 10.6% (slightly less than in 2018). Of the RESL.eu countries, Spain, Portugal and Hungary remained significantly above the EU-28 average with 17.9%, 11.8% and 12.5% respectively, the United Kingdom was slightly above the EU-28 rate with 10.7%, while Poland (4.8%), the Netherlands, Austria (7.3%), Sweden (7.5%) and Belgium (8.6%) were all below the average. It is also worth mentioning that between 2013 and 2018, the largest reductions in the percentage of ESLers was found in Portugal, Spain and Greece, each with a drop of more than 5.0 points (Eurostat, 2019). Given these figures, it is evident that ESL/ELET is a political and social challenge that cannot be solved by educational institutions alone. While these can develop measures that have the potential to reduce the problem, national and European policies are equally necessary.

ESL/ELET in the political agenda

In March 2000, the EU Member States committed themselves to the Lisbon Strategy, which set the goal of making the EU ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (European Council, 2000). The Lisbon Strategy has had a visible impact on education and social policy in the EU Member States and brought education to the fore in the European agenda by aiming to improve the ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’ of education and ensure social inclusion for all (European Council, 2000). It calls on Member States to commit to a system of goal setting and evaluation processes that would assess and compare their performances and the extent to which they had reached their educational objectives.

This process of ‘Europeanisation’ also resulted in a common language that reflects the Member States’ adaption of the education paradigm introduced by the EU. This is in line with Dale’s (2001, 2005) interpretation of Europeanisation as part of a ‘globally structured agenda for education’ in which education is analysed in the framework of global economic competition, as a key factor for economic development and in the struggle for the educational and social inclusion of young people. As summarised in the RESL.eu project (Araújo et al., 2014), the mandate for education is based on a neo human resources approach, with implications for citizenship and individual development. The EU guidelines for growth and employment thus include policies aimed at the social and professional inclusion of young people and recommend that Member States develop policies to address ESL. These include, above all, (a) incentives to complete secondary education, (b) tighter coordination between general education and vocational training, (c) the elimination of barriers that prevent the return of ESLers to education and training, (d) creating conditions for lifelong learning, (e) the early identification of young people at risk of ESL and development of strategies to support them in education, and (f) adequate teacher training.

However, when it comes to this guarantee of education rights to youth, a gap still exists between the political intentions and effective change, not least because education can be approached from a range of perspectives. Tikly and Barrett (2011), for example, organise these into three main groups: social justice, human rights and human capital. We see the social justice and human rights approaches as complementary and of particular relevance in our context.

The social justice approach is based on redistribution, recognition and participation – in line with the work of Nancy Fraser, who defines justice as “parity of participation” (Fraser, 2008: 16) – thus implying a set of social arrangements that foster the participation of all as equals in social life on the basis of the principle of equal moral worth. Following this line of thinking, education should constitute one of the social arrangements that supports the dismantling of institutionalised barriers such as the denial of access to resources through economic structures, cultural hierarchies within institutions as well as exclusion from the community. This is supported by Tikly and Barrett (2011: 6), who add obstacles to playing a powerful role in discourse to the list. Interestingly, the construction of ESL as a statistical concept (Macedo et al., 2015) conceals its political dimensions by veiling its inherent conditions of inequality and thus constitutes an institutionalised obstacle at both European and national levels.

Concerns about social justice in education are present in national education systems throughout the EU. While all Member States comply with EU guidelines and provide ‘school for all’, many have not yet achieved the necessary democratisation of education that would reduce inequality. In other words, the path to equitable education as a human social right – in the sense intended by T.H Marshall (1950) and Nancy Fraser (2008) – still appears to be long.

The UNESCO-led SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee’s statement (2018) points out that ‘education continues to be denied to about 263 million – or one out of five children, youth and adolescents worldwide, while many more leave school without having acquired the skills they need’. The Committee therefore maintains that countries have to assume greater accountability as educational stakeholders and should include the right to education in their domestic legal frameworks and policy documents. It also recognises that the UN’s Agenda 2030 goal to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (SDG 4) cannot be achieved if responsibility is not shared among all countries. Accordingly, ‘the EU has set Europe 2020 headline targets on the number of early school leavers and on tertiary educational attainment [. . .] to actively support Member States in improving the quality of education and training to guarantee opportunities for young people’ (COM, 2016: 5). However, while reinforcing the value of people as Europe’s ‘greatest asset’, the EU also recognises that the 2.5% decrease in its investment in education and training between 2010 and 2014 (COM, 2016: 8) may jeopardise achievement of the Horizon 2020 targets for education, which include the need to tackle ESL at its core.

Tikly and Barrett (2011: 5) highlight the contrast between a human rights (including social rights) and a human capital approach centred on economic growth (as the dominant approaches to understanding education quality), asserting that the former focuses on multifaceted human development ‘involving a spectrum of economic, political and cultural dimensions and linked to the realisation of peace, human security and environmental sustainability’. They also emphasise its importance ‘in securing rights to education, rights in education and rights through education’ (Tikly and Barrett, 2011: 5).

Picking up on these concerns, and reinforcing our own arguments, the SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee emphasises that ‘[e]ducation has been formally recognized as a human right since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948’ (2018: 1), which sees education as a tool for the full expansion of the human personality and the reinforcement of rights (Art. 26). Similar statements can likewise be found in other key documents including the Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960), which was adopted by UNESCO as the first major instrument with binding force in international law that aims to promote collaboration among nations to foster equality in education opportunities and urges them to prohibit any form of discrimination based on individual characteristics, social settings or belief systems (Daudet and Eisemann, 2005). It constitutes ‘one of the pillars of UNESCO’s standard-setting activity in education’ and implies the use of a monitoring mechanism, a complex undertaking which has faced certain operational problems, i.e. ‘technical obstacles encountered by many States in gathering the information that they have been asked to provide’ (Daudet and Eisemann, 2005: 66). In Portugal, for example, it has proved difficult to identify the paths young people take after leaving school and determine how they are constructed – a particularly challenging endeavour given that these (trajectories) can often be turbulent. In their study of the situation in Poland, for instance, Marchlik et al. (2018) describe people on these paths as ‘struggling against the waves, saved by someone, taking another course, cast away, falling in the hands of pirates’ – a set of metaphors they created through their involvement with the RESL.eu project.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; OHCHR 1989) extends the right to education by establishing ‘three core principles: non-discrimination; the best interests of the child; and the right to life, survival and development of the child to the maximum extent’ (SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee Secretariat, 2018). Free compulsory primary education and the progressive development of secondary and higher education with the assurance of increasing accessibility to all number thereby among the UN’s ultimate goals.

The main objective of the European Commission’s White Paper New Impetus for European Youth (COM, 2001) was to provide the European Union with ‘a new framework of cooperation in the field of youth that is both ambitious [. . .] and realistic’, i.e. one that meets the aspirations of young people and sets priorities based on consultation with them throughout Europe, while ‘being mindful of the various levels of responsibility’ (COM, 2001: 14). This White Paper highlights the paradoxical situation faced by young people in the early 21^st century, who are expected both to fulfil their roles as active citizens in Europe and engage in its construction and aims, yet are also affected by difficult challenges that endanger their social and work opportunities as individuals and as a group. Despite their diverse life conditions, young people share similar values and ambitions and are confronted by similar difficulties. As a group, they face the challenges brought about by the move to and from education to the labour market on increasingly individualised pathways and are confronted with a weakening of traditional institutions that has led to a sense of fragility, loss of confidence in decision-making systems and a certain disaffection from the traditional forms of public participation such as youth organisations and school (COM, 2001; Macedo, 2018). In recognition of this, the White Paper proposes that diverse committees and organisations design guidelines and intervention plans to increase the engagement of young adults in the construction of Europe, a plan that would require ambition, enthusiasm and compromise (COM, 2001: 4–5). It also emphasises that the diverse educational institutions ought to benefit most from the matching of formal and informal learning and from the life experience that young people bring to the education arena.

Yet almost twenty years after its publication, many of the national education policies and institutions in Europe still do not seem to be fulfilling their responsibilities towards young people. There is an increasing gap between the declaration of and commitment to educational rights and the ability to effect concrete responses that address the real needs of young people – both on a European, national and institutional level. This is also evident in the persistent social segregation that is visible in so-called precarious neighbourhoods in many European countries. This gap between aspiration and reality makes this special issue particularly pertinent since it focuses on the educational trajectories of young people, the ways in which they themselves perceive and assess their educational experiences, the challenges faced by ESLers and what schools, researchers and education policy makers can learn from listening to their voices.

Illustrative measures for tackling ESL/ELET

As a phenomenon, which in many cases constitutes the final stage in a long process of school disengagement and failure, ESL/ELET is shaped by a multiplicity of intersecting structural, institutional and personal factors that go beyond individual life conditions. Diverse measures to reduce ESL have therefore been developed at different levels. The measures identified in the RESL.eu project include school-based early warning systems for ESL (e.g. student counselling services), various forms of academic support (e.g. tutoring or mentoring, active educational teams for students with special needs), flexible learning pathways or grouping (e.g. the ‘classroom as a workshop’), emotional and behavioural support (e.g. students’ ombudsman), truancy and disciplinary measures (e.g. the division of students into small groups instead of classes), social skills training and extracurricular activities (e.g. inclusion teams) or career guidance. Other courses of action target contextual preconditions and seek to address basic needs and the necessity for social cohesion, encourage parental involvement, promote professional development, support staff, build supportive student-teacher relationships, empower student voice and ownership or apply a holistic multi-professional approach.

However, while action has clearly been taken and progress has been made, ESL/ELET remains a negative symptom of the education landscape and affects not only Europe but also the rest of the world (for an analysis of the situation in the USA, Canada and Australia see Lamb et al., 2011; for an analysis of policies and measures in Europe see Araújo et al., 2018).

Articles in this issue

In this section, we outline the individual articles in this special issue and highlight how the different contributors interpret and focus on ESL/ELET in their own country contexts. By applying their respective national perspectives, these articles provide a review of the main country-specific research results and introduce the dominant ideas on the topic. Accordingly, the special issue as a whole affords a deeper understanding of the contours of ESL in the diverse realities analysed. It also provides insights into the constraints faced by young adults in their lives and education pathways and outlines a range of measures that have been developed in the different countries to support those of them who are at risk of ESL and/or social exclusion. The theoretical framework, which is informed by classic and influential works in educational sociology, and the comprehensive empirical data presented in the various articles indicate how the institutional domain of education and the professionalisation of teachers and principals would need to change to tackle ESL and improve social justice in education and society. Concerns about education rights, social justice and their opposites, segregation and deprivation, are taken into account. The theoretical foundations of the papers are diverse and cover key aspects of ESL/ELET as a political and statistical concept and also address the topic of NEETs, which is of particular relevance in the UK.

Erna Nairz-Wirth and Marie Gitschthaler’s article Relational analysis of early school leavers: A habitus typology looks at the situation in Austria and contains important conceptual and empirical implications for the study of ESL in other countries. By building on the work of Bourdieu, Goffman and their followers, Nairz-Wirth and Gitschthaler have created a strong body of conceptual tools to tackle qualitative materials on how ESLers manage and structure their lives after leaving education. They emphasise that the causes of the exclusion of ESLers from the labour market point first and foremost to the expansion of education, which has led to displacement processes both in the education system and on the labour market. Their analysis of narrative interviews with ESLers allows the construction of an informative typology of education and work habitus. Their discussion of this typology departs from the theoretical perspective that focuses on the social positioning of ESLers and argues instead that the deterioration in the situation of ESLers cannot be ascribed simply to the displacement process and changes in the labour market: it is also a consequence of the widespread stigmatisation faced by this group. Nairz-Wirth and Gitschthaler’s empirical findings were obtained from a total of 123 narrative interviews with actual ESLers, which were then analysed by grouping cases with similar patterns of social practice and perception. This classification process identified seven types of habitus: the ambitious, the disoriented, the escapist, the resigned, the status-oriented, the nonconformist and the caring. The common thread that runs through these seven habitus types is young people’s experiences with stigmatisation. While offering well-fitting categories, the typology also illustrates that ESLers are not a homogeneous group of low achievers. Hence, the study contributes to overcoming the common prejudices against ESLers, who are frequently still considered to come from ‘worthless’ social backgrounds and show deficient behaviour and intellectual capabilities. Since few qualitative studies provide insights into this topic, the article aptly fills a research gap that extends well beyond its own national borders.

Louise Ryan, Magdolna Lőrinc, Alessio D’Angelo and Neil Kaye’s article Schools don’t teach you how to cope with life. The school experiences of NEETs in the UK explores ‘the processes and mechanisms in schools that contribute to young people becoming NEET after leaving education’. While many of these issues were presented by those affected as personal difficulties, the article rejects the individualisation of the ‘NEET problem’. Instead, the authors argue that negative school experiences need to be understood in the context of structural conditions, including funding cuts in education and support services, transformations in the labour market and socioeconomic deprivation. Their article builds on the results of a five-year mixed-method study of young NEETs’ experiences of school in the UK, the inputs from which provide a basis for exploring how unfulfilled support needs contribute to a person becoming NEET. The larger-scale collection of data for this study was complemented by a series of in-depth interviews with 53 young NEETs, who provided detailed accounts of the life, family and school events that had put them on the track to marginalisation and ultimately led to their falling out of both education and work. The article also draws on a wide body of literature and an impressive collection of official data on NEETs as well as the related educational and employment statistics. By mobilising this rich collection of data and information, the authors develop a solid body of knowledge that stresses important but usually underestimated factors behind becoming a NEET, such as the feeling of being unprepared for ‘real life’ and the world of work. They point out that these shortcomings are due for the most part to an education system that focuses too much on academic achievement, does not provide adequate career advice and guidance and allows only limited work experience. The authors of this article conclude that the devastating impact of discrimination and stigmatisation makes it very difficult to strengthen the self-confidence of young NEETs and emphasise that doing so would constitute an important step towards helping them out of the trap of being neither in education, training nor work.

In their article Feeling at home in school. Migrant youth’s narratives on school belonging in Flemish secondary education, Rut Van Caudenberg, Noel Clycq and the late Belgian sociologist, Christiane Timmerman analyse the persistence of inequalities in education opportunities in an elaborate case study of students with migrant backgrounds in secondary education in Flanders. The authors follow their carefully constructed review of the latest results of sociological work on education inequalities and the intergenerational transference of disadvantages with a detailed discussion of the notion of ‘belonging’. Their aim thereby is to show the complexity of the relations and emotions that come into play in the subjective sense of belonging/non-belonging and demonstrate how this complexity informs education achievements and the process of integration. Focusing on this enriched concept of belonging, the authors draw on three in-depth case studies that build on the individual stories of actual young people to identify and present the differences and similarities in the schooling and education experiences of migrant youth. To situate these cases in the broader social and educational context, the authors apply new statistical data obtained in the cross-country comparative project RESL.eu that contextualise the problem and discuss the related broader questions of meritocracy, deficit thinking, streaming, segregation and educational success and failure. One of the findings of their analysis points to the importance of the sense of belonging as an often neglected yet crucial element of the educational success of migrant youth.

In their article Reversing the trajectory of school disengagement? Lessons from the analysis of Warsaw youth’s educational trajectories, Hanna Tomaszewska-Pękała, Paulina Marchlik and Anna Wrona examine the role of various forms of support in avoiding/correcting ESL in Poland. Drawing on the larger pool of data from the RESL.eu project, they develop a typology of ESLers that assigns the long-term process of school disengagement into the following six categories: unanticipated crisis, parabola, downward spiral, boomerang, resilient route and shading out. Their in-depth analysis identifies two trajectory types in the Polish data: the parabola (youngsters who increasingly disengage with school are provided with substantial support causing their trajectories to move in the opposite direction) and the downward spiral (school disengagement increases despite support leading to ESL). In their subsequent discussion, the authors use the notions of school disengagement and educational trajectories to highlight the process-driven nature of becoming alienated from education and accumulating educational disadvantages, stressing thereby that the two processes evolve in unison in informing education trajectories. They used semi-structured interviews to analyse the educational biographies of four (former) secondary school students in Warsaw, which closely followed the triad of indications of disengagement, educational trajectories and the forms of support (or lack thereof) that the students had received during their years in education. The four cases demonstrate the cumulative role of social and educational disadvantages that evolve within a young person’s educational trajectory. However, they also show that family and school support are crucial factors in increasing the resilience of young people and their capacities to (re)turn to education in the future. The authors provide detailed guidance for schools and other educational actors on how to improve and enrich their institutional support and imbue it with intensified pedagogical work.

The article by Sofia Santos, Cosmin Nada, Eunice Macedo and Helena C. Araújo, on What do young adults’ educational experiences tell us about early school leaving processes? has close links to its counterpart on Poland in certain aspects. With its focus on improving school-based measures and provisions to combat ESL in northern Portugal, it argues for the potential advantages from a service perspective of considering the education trajectories of young adults and listening to their accounts of their experiences at school, their personal crises and the disadvantages they face. Drawing on a series of longitudinal biographical interviews with young adults between the ages of 17 and 20 (six male and six female; all in secondary education), the authors highlight descriptions of the critical moments in their trajectories that might constitute obstacles or incentives to remaining in school. These meaningful moments afford a better understanding of school (dis)engagement processes and can be used in the development of improved measures to reduce disengagement and ESL. The focus of this particular analysis lies on the school level, with some of the interviewees attending mainstream schools and others studying in alternative learning contexts. The experiences of ESLers are also brought in to the discussion to shed light on how school practices can influence their decision to leave school early. The findings indicate that at-risk trajectories and ESL are marked by many challenges and struggles. The development of socio-emotional support measures and a flexible and individualised learning environment were found to be crucial for tackling ESL. The narratives of young adults also emphasise that they must have a say in their school experience and trajectories and that education systems would benefit from taking students’ views into account.

With its strong theoretical and empirical foundations, this special issue is aimed at teachers and researchers working in the field of education, where concerns about social justice may well play a role. The articles it contains cover a broad range of topics and are thus also relevant and inspiring for education policymakers in general as well as other stakeholders at the regional, national and European level.