New Opportunities for the Not in Employment Education or Training

Youth unemployment has gained unprecedented economic and social relevance over the past 60 years so as to be placed at the heart of the European policy agenda. More specifically, the NEET group, encompassing those young people aged from 15 to 29, not being involved in either employment, education or training, have been targeted as a main priority. Despite their wide heterogeneity, over 50% of the young people labelled under the term “NEET” are inactive. That means that these young people are not seeking a job, mainly because they are discouraged and unmotivated. In the literature, the transition from inactivity to social exclusion, economic deprivation and long-term if not permanent marginalisation is demonstrated as questionlessly simple, when not guaranteed. As these young people are not registered at job centres, they are excluded from training actions such as the Youth Guarantee.

To address this issue it is essential to firstly identify, test and validate suitable strategies and tools to boost these young people’s self-confidence and restore their trust in institutions and in the labour market. For these targets to access training, to be regarded as the essential tool to overcome their condition, they are to first enter a reactivation spiral.

For reactivation to take place, these deprived targets shall access a set of appropriate tools and schemes that may take their social and psychological condition into consideration. The reactivation process should build on appropriate, non-conventional and non-scholastic based learning and training schemes also aimed at rebuilding these young people’s basic life skills. Only then will they be ready to be successfully integrated into ordinary schemes, such as the Youth Guarantee.

In this framework, the project objectives build on the need to identify shared strategies and tools to initiate reactivation and to prepare the NEETs to concretely access ordinary training schemes aimed at reinforcing not only professional but also life and active citizenship skills.

The project aims to:

1. Raise awareness and build capacity among the stakeholders of the training and labour systems.
2. Develop a shared framework of guidelines on the use of schemes and approaches to reduce the quantity and length og the NEET status.