When nurturing is conditional: how NEET practitioners position the support they give to young people who are not in education, employment or training

Abstract

Jo's background is in social psychology, and she has been working in educational research since 2001. Her research interests lie in the areas of educational partnerships and collaboration, and young people's trajectories through the educational system with a particular focus on young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. When nurturing is conditional: How NEET practitioners position the support they give to young people who are not in education, employment and training. This paper explores the perceptions of professionals working with young people who are NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) about their role in young people's trajectories. The issue of professionally and educationally inactive young people is a growing concern in Western economies and has been at the forefront of government agendas for the last 30 years. However, policies designed to re-engage young people position them as lacking in qualities sought by employers. Meanwhile, the educational provision dedicated to NEETs is often described as providing low-value qualifications, and practitioners who work with NEETs are considered to have a lower status than other teaching professionals. A mixed-methods study was conducted including six semistructured interviews and an online survey completed by 25 professionals working with NEETs. The findings highlight that professionals working with NEETs are positioned in a contradictory role. On the one hand, they are tasked with delivering courses based on educational policies that place the responsibility for employment within the individual. On the other hand, they perceive NEET young people's circumstances as the result of structural inequalities. Practitioners seem to reconcile these contradictions by construing their own role as the provision of a safe space in which young people can develop.

Strategic Mapping of Youth Unemployment With Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant Fuzzy DEMATEL Based on 2-Tuple Linguistic Values

“…In this study, it is emphasized that young people became unemployed as a result of participating in inappropriate training. In addition, Reiter and Schlimbach [47] and Avila and Rose [48] reached similar results in their studies. On the other hand, Kraak [49] emphasized that these trainings could not be completed because of preferring wrong trainings by young people.…”

State level agreed-upon factors contributing to more effective policymaking for public sector services for effective local-level work with NEETs

“…In other ways, this will lead to bureaucratic functioning of the system where young people are redirected to another service simply to register that the young person has moved to the next level, and that the funding objectives and indicators have been formally met. Avila and Rose (2019) highlight that the work of professionals is guided instead by funding rules and structures more so than youth needs. Increased risk is seen in terms of increased performance requirements, which focus on the implementation of indicators and which thus may lead young people to become trapped in the system (Görlich and Katznelson 2018).…”

“…Therefore, NEET youth require a complex, multi-faceted approach since gender, place of residence, manner of intervention, possible financial support, disability, and other temporal factors can all significantly impact upon whether young people are in employment or education (Luthra et al 2018). Beyond the young person's own life situation, NEET status may be an outcome of structural factors such as globalisation and neo-liberalism (Holte, Swart and Hiilamo 2019), economic recession (Scandurra, Cefalo and Kazepov 2021), normalisation of flexible labour market opportunities (Nielsen et al 2017), liberalisation of the workforce (Katznelson 2017), and the structure of the educational system and labour market in specific locales (Avila and Rose 2019;Kelly et al 2019).…”

Policy responses to real world challenges associated with NEET youth: a scoping review

“…It has been found that policy-makers can underestimate the interactions between micro, meso and macro levels (Sergi et al, 2018), with several studies indicating that the NEET category is directly affected by structural changes (Kelly et al, 2015;Holte et al, 2019;Amendola, 2021), notwithstanding changes in the demographic structure (Kelly et al, 2015). In particular, globalization and neoliberalism (Holte et al, 2019), the previous economic downturn (Scandurra et al, 2021), economic policy decisions (Simões, 2018), normalization of flexible labor market opportunities (Nielsen et al, 2017), labor liberalization (Katznelson, 2017), as well as the education system and labor market structure (Kelly et al, 2015;Lambert et al, 2015;Ryan and Lórinc, 2015;Novkovska, 2017;Avila and Rose, 2019) are considered such structural changes.…”