Introduction

European Community since more than 15 years has developed wide-spreading policies focusing upon the importance for the youngest generations to improve skills and qualification in order to be able to respond adequately to accelerating technological, scientific and economic change in the societies in which they live. Over the past few decades young people’s transitions from education to work have become increasingly de-standardized and have been made an important focus of policy and research.

Although the changes have had an effect on all young people, it is clear that some young people are more vulnerable than others to risks of social exclusion such as unemployment, precarious employment and early school leaving. At the same time while the conception itself of the learning process has been revised and reconceived into a long life learning approach and wide population of young adults are turning back to schools or training courses, challenging programmes for the modernisation of social welfare and education systems have been undertaken.

In the countries members of the EU the transition paths of youth from school to labour market are becoming prolonged and more complex. The wane of clearly designed paths makes difficult and more individualized the trajectories for the transit. Even more dramatic has been the shift from the orderly controlled passages typical for large groups of young people living under the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe into the flexible and diversified trails in the developing market societies. Young people nowadays are facing more choices and greater risks under the influence of globalisation which destroys the clear markers of the past and creates insecurity and changeability. In this situation of common uncertainty and growing individualisation, young people can no longer rely on collective patterns and need more than in the past counselling and advice that take into consideration the complexity of (post)modern life.

The ambition for Europe to become ‘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, Lisbon, March 2000) has been a grassroots element encouraging national policies of Member States to improve educational and training systems toward the achievement of more specific standards of competences and the adoption of more selective and complex assessment and screening tools.

Making this happen means a fundamental transformation of education and training throughout Europe. This process of change is carried out in each country according to national contexts and traditions and is driven forward by cooperation between Member States at European level, through the sharing of experiences, working towards common goals and learning from what works best elsewhere.

Main aim of this study is to provide a general overview of the European dimension for the opportunities in favour of disadvantaged young people for education and transitions from school to work.

Despite there is a huge amount of documentations and researches in the field, a more synthetic and descriptive approach rather than analytic is adopted for the purpose of this study which is to provide an European framework for the national survey described in the next chapters.

In the next pages key indicators, policy approaches developed and applied within the enlarged EU context are briefly discussed through a chronological perspective. Afterwards programs and specific actions are described and displayed referring to projects already implemented or under implementation across Europe.

The study makes use of three main sources: national surveys and data from OECD and Eurostat mainly from the Labour Force Survey in 2006; ; information gathered from different researches and sources about EU policies on social integration of young people; consultations and interviews with education providers in different European Countries.