Understanding Non-Take-up of NEETs in Brussels. The added value of fieldwork centred on youth

In European countries, youths labelled as NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) are at the heart of political concerns. The existence of a large number of institutions and organizations to fight against school dropout and give training to young people to integrate them into the job market bears witness to this. The public funding for these initiatives has been reinforced in the framework of the Youth Guarantee, a commitment by EU Members States towards the inclusion of NEETs. Nonetheless, despite the existence of this wide array of initiatives, figures indicate that the services offered and available to youngsters, precisely to avoid them from becoming “NEETs”, are not always or entirely “taken up”. In the Belgian capital, the available data indicate that the rates of school delay and early school leaving are much higher than in the other large cities of the country: 1 in 6 youngsters between 18 and 25 leaves school with at the most a lower secondary degree. Above that, the youth unemployment rate in Brussels (26,2% for the 3rd trimester of 2019) is the highest in the country (Statbel). These figures particularly concern young people from the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of Brussels and in particular young men. Unemployment and long-term unemployment particularly affect youngsters with a migration background (View Brussels 2019). In this paper, we analyze the processes through which part of youngsters from the most deprived areas of Brussels do not access their social rights in matters of education, employment, training and labour market. More precisely, our paper studies how their experience of discrimination, social exclusion and ethnic and socio-economical segregation affect their efforts to go back to school, start vocational training and enter/reinter the labour market. Our paper is structured into four sections. The first section reviews the literature, detects a main research gap and presents our theoretical framework. The second section describes the methodological and epistemological challenges in investigating the non-take up by NEETs, in particular regarding social groups with a subaltern position (deprived neighbourhoods, most stigmatized groups of immigrant origin) and presents how we addressed these challenges. In the third and fourth section we present and discuss our main results