England's early education and childcare system is at a turning point. Both major political parties have shown a significant interest in the early years, with the government recently announcing an expansion of funded provision for some one- and two-year-olds in the 2023 Spring Budget. But what can be done to ensure any changes to England's early…

This study explores the role of the welfare state in reducing young people not being in education, employment, or training (NEET)s across 15 European countries. Using data from the Survey of Adult Skills in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in combination with the Social Expenditure Database, we conducted…

Digital communication technologies play an important role in the social development of young people, but can create vulnerabilities to cyberbullying and other negative online experiences. The "Blurred Lives" project aimed to tackle cyberbullying innovatively using a co-participatory approach, collaborating with 14-16-year olds living in…

What impact did distance learning and education have on the most fragile students during the COVID-19 emergency? How is 'educational fragility' perceived by teachers and school educators, and how did this concept change during the school closure? How did children and young people perceive their remote learning experiences? The pandemic scenario…

Through a mixed methods approach, this article explores young people's perceptions about critical issues in secondary school and the improvements being made to prevent dropout risk. The empirical data were gathered from a representative sample of young people (14-24) in a socioeconomically disadvantaged region in the European Union. A principal…

PISA 2015 data show that, on average across OECD countries, as many as three out of four students from the lowest quarter of socio-economic status reach, at best, only the baseline level of proficiency (Level 2) in reading, mathematics or science. While in Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Ireland, Japan, Korea, the…

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the governments of most countries ordered the closure of schools, potentially exacerbating existing learning gaps. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention implemented in Italian middle schools that provides free individual tutoring online to disadvantaged students during lock-down. Tutors are…

Early School Leaving (ESL) is a complex phenomenon caused by multidimensional factors spanning personal, social and economic problems. We carried out two online surveys with 796 teachers and 900 students from Bulgaria, Italy, Malta, Romania and Turkey completed standard electronic surveys. The teachers' survey consisted of secondary school…

The health and social crisis caused by coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has had an especially strong impact on the academic prospects of the most vulnerable populations in society. This paper focuses on the consequences of the current crisis in terms of their potential to negatively impact school disengagement and early school-leaving rates. First,…

This volume brings together the work of a wide range of scholars to explore the long and complex history of the relationships between churches and education. Christianity has always been involved in education, from the very earliest teaching of those about to be baptised, to present-day churches' involvement in schools and higher education.…

How do the educational trajectories of young people develop differently at the transition between lower and upper secondary education and training--even amongst students labelled as disadvantaged with regard to social background, gender or ethnicity? The aim of the article is to understand the role of decision-making in the emergence of…

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture of social selectivity in higher education in Italy by focusing on enrolment and two alternative indicators of success: retention and timely completion. The existing literature has shown that young individuals of disadvantaged backgrounds have lower enrolment probabilities and higher chances of…

Academically resilient students are those students who are academically successful, despite coming from the socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds that have typically predicted poorer educational outcomes. These students are an important group to study because if policymakers can understand what factors may have contributed to their…

In the past decades, the importance of developing and validating informal and nonformal learning processes has been launched by several international organizations including UNESCO and the OECD, originally mostly focusing on adult learning experiences. Meanwhile, in recent years an increased focus has been evidenced on introducing informal and…

Of particular importance for education policy-makers is the possibility that teacher mobility adversely affects the quality of teaching in schools serving mainly disadvantaged and minority children. This paper examines the main drivers of the mobility of Italian teachers by using applications-to-transfer data. We find that teachers systematically…