Low level of education and labour market inequalities are critical issues that affect individuals, societies, and economies. School dropout, less educated, and unqualified young people often face significant challenges for the Labour market integration. Young people leaving school have a high risk of unemployment or inactivity, leading to long-term social and economic disadvantage. Inequalities in educational field are a key challenge across European Countries. This critical issue is linked to different factors such as low participation rates in early childhood education and low parental educational levels.

In 2022, the average early dropout rate (18-24 years old) from education and training in Europe is at 9.6 percent, and the NEET[1] rate is 11.7% (from 4.2% in the Netherlands to 19.8% in Romania).

In Italy 11.5 percent of 18-24 year olds dropped out of school early, stopping at the junior high school diploma. Early school leaving, is more consistent in the South, where for middle school the highest rates are found in Sicily, Calabria and Campania. For high school, the picture is similar.

Starting from this analysis and whit reference to the Eurostat Data on “Early leavers from education and training in EU in 2022”, this paper will analyse the relation between the less educated young and their integration in the labour market. We will focus on Countries with the higher school-leaving rate; specifically, we will exam and compare three European countries (Spain, Germany and Italy) between 2012 and 2022.

The paper purpose is also to identify the similarities and differences between these three countries, in order to better understanding the labour market inequalities and with the perspective to identify appropriate policies and interventions. In addition, a special focus will be devoted to the Italian situation.

The current study will carried out as a desk research. The literature review was designed primarily as a descriptive study to provide a comparative analysis of the scientific literature produced in recent years on early school leaving.

[1] 15-29 year-olds were neither in employment nor in education and training in 2022

In the field of NEET studies, some authors have defended the need to integrate educational inequalities into analyses of school-to-work transitions in order to highlight so-called NEET situations (Not in Education, Employment and Training). This article attempts to respond to this challenge, to better integrate the inequalities structuring education systems into the analysis of school-to-work transitions, by taking into account the complexity of educational inequalities.

Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus has proved useful in highlighting the way in which structural inequalities in education systems linked to social class are then translated into the labour market. However, in the context of urban education systems, where social classes, ethno-racial, gender and spatial divisions are intertwined, Bourdieu's theoretical framework is insufficient. In the American sociology of migration and race relations, the attitudes and policies of the 'host society' have been seen as crucial in determining how immigrant and black populations have been able to integrate into mainstream society (Myrdal 1944; Portes & Zhou 1993). However, members of ethnic and racialised groups also exercise power over these social relations which influence their social position. Similarly, feminist theories have shown how social relations and systems of gender norms, representations and prejudices affect the social position of all groups in society, but women are relatively more disadvantaged and assigned to subordinate roles in society. Nevertheless, women have been able to mobilise and capitalise on these inequalities to (re)gain recognition and legitimacy in certain areas. Thus, being intimately linked to questions of recognition, legitimacy and symbolic violence, this article proposes to theorise race/ethnicity and gender as specific embodied (i.e. not transferable or given) forms of symbolic capital that affect individuals' habitus, social position and the volume and structure of their capital in different domains (the educational field, the labour field, informal fields remote from power, etc.).

On the basis of this theoretical framework, we will analyse the ethnographic data gathered during extended collective fieldwork with around a hundred young people from disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods in Brussels. We will study the strategies used by young people from the urban working classes in their transition from school to work in order to stabilise their professional situation and, more broadly, to achieve their position in the wider society, in particular their quest for recognition and respectability across the various fields of social space. Our analysis will shed light on the complex, intersecting and cumulative processes of domination and recognition across different types of social space. It will provide a better understanding of the processes and the interweaving of the processes of educational inequality at the root of a diversity of 'NEET situations'.

The crisis that Europe is going through, which concerns the development model, but which is also a crisis of democracies, shows a series of particularly demanding criticalities requiring decisive action on adult education, to encourage the reduction of economic and social inequalities and promote social cohesion and democratic coexistence. The translation of this objective into policies encounters several obstacles, not least the difficulty of agreeing on strategies to avoid burdening all costs on the public budget.

In a recent study, D'Agostino and Vaccaro (2023) have analyzed the evolutionary trajectories of adult learning policies in France, Germany and England in the last two decades, investigating how they have been restructuring in response to the challenges posed by global mega-trends and economic and social crises. In recent years these trajectories seem to be oriented more decisively towards the support of adult education and training, with an increasing activism of public bodies in promoting larger-scale initiatives, mostly concentrating financial resources on the most vulnerable workers and those who are most at risk of losing their job due to innovation. The French experience of Individual Training Account remains unique in EU, but the awareness of the importance of a universalistic model, based on the affirmation of an individual right to training, is gaining ground in other countries, as a driving factor to nurture a lifelong-learning oriented culture as well as a catalyst for implementing a plurality of interventions to adapt the education and training offer to the different needs of adults.

The study highlights that inequalities in access to learning opportunities persist, adding to those existing in the labor market, and are all the more dangerous in times when economic and social gaps are widening across Europe. The fight against these inequalities - especially in the participation of weakest adults in learning initiatives - requires the enhancement of the individual dimension of the learning, without forgetting the relevance of the collective sphere in supporting or denying the right to education and training. In this sense it seems important to recognize the centrality of the individual as well as the community and institutions, which are responsible, through adequate public policies, for removing the obstacles that can prevent people from freely and consciously accessing education and training.

Recently, Italy has shown a renewed public activism in the adult education and training sector, with the establishment of the New Skills Fund, the approval of the National plan for adult skills and the launch of the GOL project funded by the NRRP. However, these interventions seem to respond more to specific objectives and targets, and do not define a single strategy for all, with a universalistic approach. Likewise, the need to establish a single venue of governance, involving all institutions acting in the arena of adult education and training at different levels remains unanswered. This venue could be the lieu for designing interventions and tailoring them to the specific needs of people and territories, with the aim of contributing to the reduction of inequalities and territorial gaps.

Since 2005, INAPP (formerly ISFOL) carries out the INAPP-Plus Survey (Participation Labour Unemployment Survey), promoted by the Labour Market Structure, through a large survey (45.000 interviews) on several topics and with a longitudinal dimension. INAPP-Plus is a national sample survey on job supply which is currently in its 10° edition. The survey is of public interest, having been included in the National Statistical Plan since 2006. Through the submission of a structured questionnaire, the INAPP-Plus survey is designed to capture some latent phenomena (job placement of young people, extension of active life, participation of the female component, territorial distribution, etc.) present in the Italian labour market. In the 2022 issue of the survey, some specific items were added, aimed at highlighting the difficulties that young people (18–29-year-olds) encounter in the transition from school to work and, if they are employed, what these difficulties were. Therefore, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of the data and information relating to the obstacles faced by the young population when it finishes its education and wants to enter the labour market. Data and information that describe the phenomenon from multiple and different points of view, related to gender, geographical distribution, urban dimension, use of guidance and support services for job placement and so on. Starting from the difficulties faced by young people in entering the labour market, collected through the INAPP-Plus questionnaire, in addition to reporting the main results in qualitative and quantitative terms, the contribution also intends to offer an updated and careful reading of social and territorial inequalities in Italy, especially in relation to some recent research on low paid and poor quality of jobs. The greatest difficulties encountered by Italian young people in the transition from school to work refer to the perceived poor quality of the job offer with short or underpaid employment proposals or with modest tasks and at risk of under-classification, with different distributions linked to geographical areas and qualifications. Hence, starting from the national and European socioeconomic context, this paper illustrates some important data relating to the relationships among educational, social and territorial dimensions which generate inequalities, collected through the INAPP-Plus Survey. In particular, when compared with other European young people, the situation of Italian population highlights greater problems in solid access to the job market and, within global trends in youth employment, low valorisation in the production system. In summary, the contribution is intended as the presentation of the articulated and structured picture of the problems that relate to the world of education and training as well as young people's work, through a lens on territorial inequities, in order to be able to identify and highlight the factors that can be crucial in overcoming and transforming the current difficulties into opportunities for future generations.