Reducing educational failure and early school leaving 1 (ESL) is a top priority in European educational policy agendas. Local, regional, and national governments, as well as various international organisations (the European Union , OECD , UNESCO, etc.) have highlighted this key concern as urgent. This emphasis is unsurprising as, despite the considerable amount of time and effort spent on achieving reductions (NESSE 2009), educational failure and ESL continue to be major educational and social challenges.
This is despite ESL rates having fallen in most European countries as a consequence of the global financial crisis of 2007â2008. According to the latest EUROSTAT data, the average ESL rate in the EU -28 dropped from 14.9 to 10.6% between 2007 and 2017. In Spain , where the empirical research and analysis for this book were conducted, rates during this period fell from 30.8 to 18.3%. This is certainly reason for hope. However, this raises the following questions: Is the fall in ESL rates sufficient? Is there any reason to believe that this rate of improvement will continue once the most harmful effects of the economic recession have abated? Can we allow these levels of ESL to hold without jeopardising current standards of social equity, development, and cohesion?
As a matter of perspective, it should be noted that quantitatively the level of ESL in some European countries and particularly in Spain is still far higher than the European average (10.6% in 2017) and the European Unionâs declared target for 2020 (10% for the EU-28 and 15% for Spain). In fact, Spain is second in the EU only to Malta in ESL rates, making it a particularly relevant case for social and sociological study. At the same time, it should also be noted there is as yet no firm evidence that the fall in ESL rates will continue at the same pace after the recession. Qualitative research carried out on this issue in Spain (SalvĂ 2011) has revealed that one of the main reasons why young people continue with or decide to return to their studies is due to the lack of employment opportunities in low-skilled jobs (in contrast to the situation before the recession) rather than to any overarching structural changes that might have been made in the nature of the education system .
Moreover, it is essential to highlight the qualitative relevance of this data beyond its obvious quantitative improvement. In a knowledge society , young peopleâs life opportunities are increasingly determined by the accumulation of academic credentials . Thus, while school qualifications by themselves are plainly insufficient for a personâs social and occupational inclusion , it is also recognised that they are increasingly necessary for facilitating these processes. Additionally, the demands of an increasingly knowledge-intensive labour market and consequent educational expansion have devalued the worth of educational credentials and have progressively increased the educational attainment needed for social inclusion. In fact, international organisations such as the OECD (2012) and the European Commission (2014) have identified access to and completion of post-compulsory secondary education (either academic or vocational) as the entryway to inclusion in advanced societies.
Therefore, an education system that aims to be fair and inclusive cannot accept as normal or standard that close to 20% of its young people become early school leavers. This level is even more unacceptable when considering that the risk of ESL is not evenly distributed throughout the population. As indicated by specific studies (Rumberger 2011) and recent statistics in this field ESL is profoundly influenced by studentsâ sociodemographic characteristics and in particular by their socioeconomic and cultural status , gender , and ethnic and/or migratory origin. Thus, young people from less-privileged families âin terms of their economic , social , and cultural capital âand those of migrant origin are the ones who are persistently overrepresented in ESL statistics. Accordingly, ESL is a fundamental issue in educational equity and in ensuring fundamental educational rights that reveals the failure of European education systems to ensure that all students progress along successful educational pathways .
Furthermore, ânormalising discoursesâ in this field that assume there will always be a certain number of students who will not meet the standards established by schools cannot be accepted. They usually run along these lines: âThere have always been people who have left their studies earlyâ, âNot everyone is suited to studyingâ, âThere are those who would rather work than studyâ, and so forth. In fact, this type of discourse, so present in contemporary social imaginaries, specifically ignores the fact that ESL is a question of inequality and that inequality is not natural, but rather the result of social actions and relations. Precisely for this reason, due to their social nature inequalities can not only be transformed, but must also be at the centre of all political action that does not assent to simply perpetuating the parameters of contemporary social inequality .
The purpose of this book is to analyse contemporary processes of educational failure and ESL from the perspective of educational exclusion and educational justice . This perspective examines these phenomena through three primary lenses: a social and relational approach that extends beyond the individualisation of the phenomenon; a processual approach that is able to grasp its different expressions and manifestations, over and above extreme cases; and a subjective approach that aims to capture the subjective experiences of the phenomenon and not just its objective, material, and quantifiable expressions.
Additionally, while the concept of educational exclusion has different dimensions and forms of expression, the book focuses specifically on the exclusion processes that arise during the period of secondary education , which is a critical stage in the emergence and consolidation of educational failure and ESL . The analysis focuses on schools as active agents in providing or denying educational opportunities to young people , with the view that they are neither neutral agents in relation to social inequalities nor mere reflections of broader socioeconomic dynamics. On the contrary, whether active or passive, through action or omission, explicitly or implicitly, schoolsâdepending on their practices, their staff, and their day-to-day operating structuresâengender different processes of educational inclusion and/or exclusion that translate into different structural opportunities for their students .
As previous research has demonstrated (Tarabini et al. 2015), schools indeed play a key role in educational failure and success , including in dropping out and ESL . Of course, while they cannot bear all responsibility for studentsâ educational success, neither can it be denied that they are âkey institutional fieldsââas advanced by Agnès Van Zanten and AmĂŠlia Legavre (2014)âfor comprehending the configuration of young peopleâs experiences, decisions, and educational pathways . Furthermore, while schools acting alone cannot eliminate social inequality, they can contribute significantly to mitigating or amplifying its effects, turning socioeconomic and cultural disadvantages into processes leading to educational failure and ESL (NESSE 2009). It h...