Young school-to-work transitions

What measures and approaches are offered in Europe today to support young school-to-work transitions? What criteria of social justice come into play in the perspective of employability? What processes support the skills and capacities in young people’s school-to-work transitions? What added value can the application of the capabilities approach (CA) bring to these processes? These are the main issues dealt with in this chapter, which focuses on findings from a European research study carried out in nine European countries (Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden) (Otto et al., eds, 2015,). The analysis looks at programmes and interventions that deal with problems, risks, or failures in one or more of the following transitions: from compulsory school to further education, from education/vocational training to the labour market, and from unemployment/ being out of the labour market to employment. In identifying certain factors that sustain agency in young people’s transitions, the chapter confirms the importance of the institutional dimension, which the CA calls into question in two ways: on the one hand by highlighting the close and complex relationship between individual agency and the normative fabric of society; on the other hand by assigning to institutions an important role in the processes of converting formal entitlements into real, effective and demandable rights and resources (Bifulco and Mozzana, 2011).