Who are “Neets”, precarious dropouts without training or employment?

The appear­ance of the Neet dates back to the 1980s when the UK wanted to identi­fy young people who were pre­vi­ously invis­ible in labour mar­ket stat­ist­ics, i.e. school dro­pouts. This iden­ti­fic­a­tion was not feas­ible at the time through unem­ploy­ment stat­ist­ics, as these young people were not always look­ing for a job. It was then adop­ted by EU coun­tries who wanted to under­stand this phe­nomen­on, with the term Neet now becom­ing part of pub­lic debate. It refers to people aged 15–29 or 15–34, depend­ing on the nation­al or inter­na­tion­al stat­ist­ic­al insti­tute, who are not in edu­ca­tion, employ­ment or voca­tion­al train­ing. Their pro­por­tion in the pop­u­la­tion var­ies greatly depend­ing on the coun­try. Fig­ures are less than 10% in a few coun­tries such as Switzer­land (7%), the Neth­er­lands (7.2%) or Sweden (7.6%), but it is between 10% and 15% in most OECD coun­tries. It is, for example, 12.4% in the UK, 13.4% in the US or 15% in France. For some European coun­tries, it even exceeds 15%, such as Spain (18.5%), Greece (18.7%) or Italy (23.5%)¹.

One of the first factors is the eco­nom­ic situ­ation and the dynam­ism of the labour mar­ket. Young people are more affected by eco­nom­ic dif­fi­culties than oth­er groups. They are often unem­ployed when they leave the edu­ca­tion sys­tem and find them­selves in pre­cari­ous, often very vul­ner­able jobs. For example, the 2008 crisis led to a very sig­ni­fic­ant increase in the num­ber of Neets, espe­cially in South­ern Europe. In Greece, the Neet rate almost doubled between 2008 and 2013. A second factor is the lack of basic skills, espe­cially in numer­acy and lit­er­acy. The like­li­hood of becom­ing Neet is very high in the absence of writ­ten lan­guage and math­em­at­ic­al skills. Even for some gradu­ates, a defi­cit in basic skills can be a han­di­cap in access­ing employ­ment². Oth­er factors such as health prob­lems and fam­ily dif­fi­culties may also come into play.

Coun­tries with a dual edu­ca­tion sys­tem, such as Ger­many, Switzer­land or Aus­tria, have Neet rates gen­er­ally below 10%. A major­ity of young people go through appren­tice­ships to acquire the skills needed to prac­tice a trade. This facil­it­ates the trans­ition from the edu­ca­tion sys­tem to the labour mar­ket. How­ever, the sys­tem also ensures a good com­mand of lit­er­acy and numer­acy for young people who will leave appren­tice­ship after a long sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion. Ger­many has drawn the con­sequences of the so-called ‘PISA shock’ from the poor per­form­ance of its school sys­tem in the early 2000s. Of course, the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem do not explain everything: coun­tries’ choices in labour mar­ket legis­la­tion can also influ­ence access to employ­ment and the Neet rate. Nev­er­the­less, one of the major chal­lenges remains to try to secure their path­ways and to fight against poverty, which is high­er among young people and has been on the rise in France in recent years.

Over the past twenty years, France has made pro­gress in its policy to com­bat early school leav­ers. How­ever, young people without a dip­loma, of whom there are between 70,000 and 80,000 each year, find it very dif­fi­cult to integ­rate into soci­ety. Three years later, nearly 60% of these young people are still unem­ployed. This is a very dif­fi­cult pop­u­la­tion to reach, espe­cially for those who left after sec­ond­ary school or in the first year of a voca­tion­al train­ing cer­ti­fic­ate. Pub­lic policies, and in par­tic­u­lar drop-out schemes, are only par­tially suc­cess­ful in re-mobil­ising the most dis­ad­vant­aged young people. Because of their exper­i­ence in the school sys­tem, their rela­tion­ship with train­ing is dif­fi­cult and their pos­sib­il­ity of access­ing select­ive schemes such as appren­tice­ships is rel­at­ively low.

There is often an oppos­i­tion in employ­ment policies between « work first », i.e. the pri­or­ity giv­en to access to employ­ment, and « learn first » where the emphas­is is on train­ing. The two should not be opposed: it depends on the skills of young people and their need for sup­port. The struc­tures of integ­ra­tion through eco­nom­ic activ­ity can rep­res­ent an oppor­tun­ity: some offer both employ­ment and pre­par­a­tion for basic skills cer­ti­fic­a­tion through pre-train­ing. In France, for example, there is the CléA cer­ti­fic­ate, which is an inter­pro­fes­sion­al cer­ti­fic­a­tion. It guar­an­tees an employ­er a min­im­um com­mand of writ­ten lan­guage and num­bers, but also of what are known as soft skills: the abil­ity to work inde­pend­ently and in a team, the capa­city to learn new things or even respect­ing health and safety rules at work.

Oth­er more spe­cif­ic cer­ti­fic­a­tions exist, such as the Caces (cer­ti­fic­ate of aptitude for driv­ing safety equip­ment), a use­ful cer­ti­fic­a­tion for logist­ics jobs, for example, which allows the safe driv­ing of fork­lift trucks. But even for this type of basic skill, it is not easy to return to train­ing for the part of the Neet young people who have the most dif­fi­culty: the chal­lenge is to find act­ive and fun teach­ing meth­ods to devel­op these skills and access these cer­ti­fic­a­tions. Finally, in a more struc­tur­al way, one of the best ways to reduce the dif­fi­culties of integ­ra­tion of young people is to con­tin­ue to reduce the num­ber of dro­pouts upstream, with­in the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Redu­cing inequal­it­ies at school is a decis­ive chal­lenge for edu­ca­tion policies in order to enable the school sys­tem to be as fair as it is effect­ive, which often goes hand in hand in education.