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. To meet these objectives which are demonstrated to reflect a European scale main concern, it proves fundamental to act within a STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP. To this regard, it is relevant to be noted that some European Member States have already tested and developed a set of REACTIVATION, REMOTIVATION, COACHING and TRAINING TOOLS SPECIFICALLY ADDRESSED to VULNERABLE young people. Despite the bright sides, or the room for improvement, these tools and schemes currently prove to be INFLUENCED by the social, cultural and political environment they have been developed in. To raise them to a best practice level, they will need to be “decontaminated” so as to make them benchmarkable and assessable. NO NEETs is ultimately aimed at RAISING AWARENESS and BUILDING CAPACITY among the STAKEHOLDERS of the TRAINING AND LABOUR SYSTEMS, and at developing a shared framework of GUIDELINES on the use of SCHEMES AND APPROACHES to reduce the QUANTITY AND THE LENGTH of the NEET status. INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING AND EXCHANGE OF TOOLS will be tackled using the peer-reviewing method, the “peers” to be partner Organisations representing different European welfare schemes and having CONCRETEY DEVELOPED outstanding practices. More specifically, the autonomous Province of Trento, Piedmont, the Netherlands, Germany and Catalunia boost a set of best practices in the field of REACTIVATION AND SUPPORT TO WORKPLACEMENT, while the autonomous Province of Trento, Germany, Castilla la Mancha and Denmark boost relevant performance in the field of INCLUSIVE METHODOLOGIES FOR THE NEETs. The project outcomes are expected to have an impact on system level, that is, in terms of reduction of the inactive NEETs rate, activation of SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE SCHOOL-TO-WORK AND YOUTH TO ADULTHOOD TRANSITION SCHEMES. In line with the EU 2020, ET 2020 and all the strategies for an economic and fully INCLUSIVE growth, the guidelines deriving from this project will be disseminated at European level so as to be beneficial to all the other Member States.