Introduction

Since the inception of the European Employment Strategy (the Luxembourg Strategy) in 1997, if not earlier (Field, 2006), policies developed in Europe have re-configured adult education in favour of lifelong learning for the economy – responding to fears of unemployment, social exclusion, marginalisation of the unemployed and under-employed, and anxieties about an emerging two-tier society. A critical feature has been a blurring of boundaries between conventionally separate policy fields: youth education, adult education, the labour market. Adult education has been increasingly conceived as compensating for failures in the school system – evidenced by high drop-out rates, poor learning outcomes, lack of employment opportunities, and skills mismatches. A key element in justifying this has been a discourse of ‘learning to be productive’” (Biesta, 2006, p. 171), reiterated continuously since the 90s by national, European, and international organisations.

Seeing lifelong learning as developing human capital lay at the heart of this. One participates in learning in order constantly to update one’s skills for the changing global economy (OECD, 1996). The Luxembourg Strategy shifted the discourse of ‘disadvantage’ to the individual ... from the aim of employment to a new one of employability: the ability to become employed, rather than, necessarily, the state of employment itself. Thus, individualisation became linked with the concept of employability: a state of constant becoming, of readiness for employment. (Brine, 2006, p. 649)

This emphasis on employability marked a significant shift in discussion of vocational learning. The concept of employability now conferred the responsibility for becoming employed to the individual, rather than focusing on the state of employment. Constant readiness for the labour market was required: this was to be achieved through repeated training and retraining, and to develop the new economic identity – even when labour market conditions made finding employment virtually impossible. Employability became the ‘private trouble of constant retraining’ (Coffield, 2007, p. 8).

Broader definitions of adult learning were available: for example, UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning emphasises ‘learning and education across the life-course’ and the variety of ways – formal, non-formal, informal – in which learning can be acquired. It also stresses the need to focus on disadvantaged people: ‘adults and young people who are marginalized and disadvantaged’ (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2016, p. 28). Yet the policy mainstream has focused resolutely on skills and employability, taking a ‘human capital’ approach which

postulates that the bigger the investments in education, the greater the income people receive, and economic growth will follow suit. Within this theory, the main responsibility for (non) participation in any form of education as well as its benefits is placed on the individual. (Boyadjieva & Ilieva-Trichkova, 2021, p. 47)

Such an approach avoids examining power dynamics and conceptions of knowledge, and their impact on inequality, and has the net effect of blaming the individual for failure to flourish within this system:

The theory of human capital, like the rest of neoclassical economics, ultimately locates the sources of human happiness and misery in an interaction of human nature (preferences and ‘abilities’) with nature itself (technologies and resources). This framework provides an elegant apology for almost any pattern of oppression or inequality … for it ultimately attributes social or personal ills either to the shortcomings of individuals or the unavoidable technical requisites of production. (Bowles & Gintis, 1975, p. 82)

Within Enliven, we have argued that improving policy implementation has become the default response among European ‘policy makers’, enabling them to ignore deeper consideration of the aims of lifelong learning. It also avoids asking whether the structures we use to manage the crisis in educational markets are the right ones, and how far we have individualised the problem.

From Bounded Agency to Empowerment and Belonging

Bounded agency can be seen as an application of the long sociological debate over structure and agency: individual, group or organisational agency is exercised within particular institutional and societal frameworks, and within national and international policy contexts. As a theoretical paradigm, it allows for multilevel approaches to understanding participation in education. As Evans expressed it, “agency is a socially situated process, shaped by the experiences of the past, the chances present in the current moment and the perceptions of possible futures” (Evans, 2002, p. 262). Bounded agency points to the complex interplay between personal, or individual, motivation and the social and territorial structures in which individual adults are located when they decide to engage in forms of learning: ‘structural factors are centrally involved in individual motivation, since a person’s sense of their ability to actively construct their life is shaped by the economic, social and cultural resources they are able to mobilize’ (Róbert, 2012, p. 88). The theory argues that the broader structural and cultural conditions in which individuals are raised – specifically the institutional and labour market settings and the social support available – are as important in shaping their responses to work, to education, and to future life chances and opportunities as dispositional factors, internalized conceptual frameworks or personal agency. In other words, as Evans has expressed it, bounded agency requires a ‘re-conceptualisation of agency as a process in which past habits and routines are contextualised and future possibilities envisaged within the contingencies of the present moment’ (Evans, 2007, p. 86).

Rubenson and Desjardins focus on how structural and individual factors shape adult participation in learning, drawing on data about welfare state regimes. Their bounded agency model

is premised on the assumption that the nature of welfare state regimes can affect a person’s capability to participate. In particular, the state can foster broad structural conditions relevant to participation and construct targeted policy measures that are aimed at overcoming both structurally and individually based barriers. (Rubenson & Desjardins, 2009, p. 188)

Despite this, policies remain dominated by mantras of economic productivity and human capital. In EU and national policies, employability is emphasised as the single most important outcome for education. This is part of a wider discourse that work-related measures and outcomes are the only relevant objectives of skills-oriented interventions, and the only way to evaluate impact (Bowles & Gintis, 1975). This circularity discounts any other means of judging human value. Yet ‘good jobs’ may be beyond the reach of young learners in vulnerable positions.

‘Every society,’ Narayan (2005, p. 3) remarks, ‘has local terms for autonomy, self-direction, self-confidence, self-worth.’ The literature of adult education, as Koulaouzides (2017) points out, often refers to ‘empowerment’; Enliven researchers see this notion as a basis for new thinking about adult education. Empowerment, Narayan argues, ‘refers broadly to the expansion of freedom of choice and action to shape one’s life. It implies control over resources and decisions.’ This freedom is ‘severely curtailed’ for disadvantaged people ‘by their powerlessness in relation to a range of institutions, both formal and informal’, continuing with this definition:

Empowerment is the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives. (Narayan, 2005, pp. 4–5)

Empowerment is thus about the ability to take action and to work towards change, not necessarily only for oneself, but also for the wider community.

Marmot started with concerns about health but came to see education as a critical means of taking some control over one’s life. Health outcomes, he has found, are significantly more influenced by social than by clinical determinants (Marmot et al., 2020, 2010); he has highlighted the social gradient of health inequalities and the damaging impact of lower social and economic status on individuals’ overall health (Marmot, 2015). Health inequalities, he argues, arise from a complex interaction of factors – housing, income, education, social isolation, disability – all of which are strongly affected by an individual’s economic and social status. To address them, empowering individuals – and communities – is essential. And ‘education,’ he writes, ‘is not a bad proxy for empowerment’ (Marmot, 2015, p. 153).

Marmot draws strongly on Sen’s model of human capability, which challenges mainstream human capital theories. The latter, Sen writes, focus on ‘the agency of human beings – through skill and knowledge as well as effort – in augmenting production possibilities’. Capability, however, emphasises the ‘ability of human beings to lead lives they have reason to value and to enhance the substantive choices they have’. For example, when education makes someone more productive, it enhances human capital; but

even with the same level of income, a person may benefit from education, in reading, communicating, arguing, in being able to choose in a more informed way, in being taken more seriously by others, and so on. The benefits of education, thus, exceed its role as human capital in commodity production. (Sen, 1997, p. 1959)

For Sen, human capability is about creativity and agency, but he also describes how individuals in deprived circumstances form ‘adaptive preferences’ in response to their restricted power and limited options. Agency is interlinked with power structures: ‘what citizens can or cannot do, or feel allowed to do’; people act in contexts ‘marked by a constant interplay of autonomy and domination, of liberating forces and structures of control, of possibility and limitation’ (Schugurensky, 2006, p. 72). For Evans, this echoes Sen’s capability approach: ‘an individual’s capabilities feed back into defining structural conditions, especially situational ones such as job and family’. As with Sen’s notion of ‘positive freedom’, this is a dynamic relationship, combining ‘the idea that people are free to define, choose, and control what is good for them’ with awareness that ‘they can only be really free if they have the basic level of capability needed to define, choose, and control what is good for them’ (Evans, 2002, p. 197).

A bounded agency model allows us to examine how far people are constrained and defined by their economic and social circumstances, and by the agents of control and surveillance – at local, domestic and supranational levels – as well as by their self-concepts, their levels of confidence and their internalised ‘habitus’. Habitus is Bourdieu’s concept of the socialised norms or tendencies, the lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities that guide our behaviour and thinking. Bourdieu argued that habitus is created through social, rather than individual, processes, leading to patterns that are enduring and transferrable from one context to another; but it also shifts in relation to specific contexts and opportunities, and over time (Bourdieu, 1984). As Rubenson and Desjardins suggest, this is consonant with Sen’s notion of human capability, which not only considers what internal and external resources are available to an individual, but provides a normative theoretical framework: individuals must know about ‘the range of possibilities of how these resources can be used to realize things that matter to them’ and ‘how to do so’. In relation to adult education, therefore, a person’s dispositions may restrict their ‘capability and hence freedom’ to participate (Rubenson & Desjardins, 2009, p. 196). As Boyadjieva and Ilieva-Trichkova (2021, p. 51) point out, from Sen’s perspective, we should be ‘evaluating justice, not in terms of what people achieve or what they are, but in terms of the freedom which they actually have to lead their life in the way they value.’

Deficit models, however, rather than focusing on issues of social and structural justice, tend to locate attention on the individual and rarely acknowledge structural barriers such as social class, race, gender, or physical or mental health. As Beck expressed it, in ‘the individualized society’, the individual must learn, ‘on pain of permanent disadvantage, to conceive of himself or herself as the center of action, as the planning office with respect to his/her own biography’ (Beck, 1992, p. 135). This relates closely to Nussbaum’s concept of practical reason: our capacity to use our reason to decide how to act. Social isolation can disorientate us and occlude this capacity, especially when our very structural vulnerability, our exclusion from a functioning society can become ‘obscured by a universalized belief in competence and this is most advanced in market-oriented environments [where] questions of “competence, will and moral resolve” permeated and often dominated the discourse’ (Evans, 2002, p. 264).

Nussbaum went on to develop Sen’s capability approach, determining the key factors, or capabilities, necessary for human beings in a healthy, functioning democracy. Among these, education is central. Critical thinking is the means by which we move beyond a focus on ourselves as defective, unreasoning, and incompetent, and become aware of our conditions – not only those that surround us structurally and socially, but also what we have internalised. One crucial way of achieving this is through affiliation or belonging, the connection to like-minded individuals or communities with whom we associate and share values and experiences – ‘above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings’ (Boyadjieva & Ilieva-Trichkova, 2021, p. 51).

Belonging is, of course, distinct from empowerment. Empowerment is often used in two senses: first, that of an authority conferring the capacity on us to do something; second, the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s rights. Belonging relates most closely to the latter, which is why it has crucial agentic value. In contrast to the dehumanising and individualising aspects of human capital theory, belonging is associated with collective ways of interpreting and transforming our reality.

Vulnerability and ‘NEETs’

Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, while youth unemployment rates were reaching their all-time highest levels within the Union, the long-established way of depicting labour market conditions (employed vs unemployed) was shown to be inadequate in capturing essential nuances associated with youth unemployment. At a political level, the need emerged for a better understanding of young people’s vulnerability. Thus the acronym NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) entered the European policy lexicon: primarily, as a response to the need to know the many facets of a phenomenon taking on alarming dimensions. It soon became the key feature of discussion about youth policies (Vatrella & Milana, 2020). In 2014, 7.1 million young people aged 15–24 across the EU were estimated to be NEET (a rate of 12.5%) (Hadjivassiliou, 2016, p. 1). Such figures elevated policymakers’ and researchers’ concerns about how the crisis was affecting young people’s training opportunities and employability, and led to a common measurement strategy for both EU policy makers and scholars.

Though taken up in EU policy following the financial crisis, the concept itself first emerged in the 1990s to identify unemployed young people perceived as not investing in their human capital. These have been called the ‘working dead’ (Rosina, 2015): people wandering aimlessly, disenchanted and disillusioned. They are vulnerable ‘because of the transitionary life periods they are going through, their lack of professional experience, their sometimes inadequate education or training, their often limited social protection coverage, restricted access to financial resources, and precarious work conditions’ (Council of the European Union, 2013). They face additional barriers in terms of visibility (social and economic), opportunities, and the outcomes they achieve in the labour and employment markets. They contend with physical, emotional, and psychological problems (sickness, disability, poor mental health, dependence, and so forth), challenging material circumstances (poverty, homelessness, inadequate or uncertain access to health care or education). Their social environment is also often difficult: lack of support from family or peer group, or of advice on how to confront difficult situations; immediate risks from the physical environment.

A substantial body of research has also shown that ‘post-industrial’ economic restructuring – flexibility, the so-called ‘gig economy’ – is generating a ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) for whom insecure jobs, work with little embedded formal or informal training, no annual or sick leave, and no superannuation benefits, are the norm. People working in such precarious conditions are likely to be more vulnerable to, and less resilient against, deteriorations in their economic and personal circumstances. They are also likely to focus on what Maslow described as ‘deficit needs’ (1954), the requirements for adequate food, housing, clothing – physiological and social security – which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines as ‘fundamental human rights’ (United Nations, 1948, Art. 25). As Marmot pointed out in relation to the British labour market:

Patterns of employment both reflect and reinforce the social gradient and there is inequality of access to labour market opportunities. Rates of unemployment are highest among those with no or few qualifications and skills, people with disabilities and mental ill health, those with caring responsibilities, lone parents, those from some ethnic minority groups, older workers and, in particular, young people. When in work, these same groups are more likely to be in low-paid, poor quality jobs with few opportunities for advancement, often working in conditions that are harmful to health. Many are trapped in a cycle of low-paid, poor-quality work and unemployment. (Marmot et al., 2010, p. 68)

In this light, Enliven researchers took a dynamic view of vulnerability, looking on it as a transition space between social inclusion and exclusion, reflecting a person’s level of participation in economic, political and cultural life (Castel, 2000; Silver, 2015; Verlage et al., 2019). We reject the notion of vulnerability as characteristic of individuals or social groups – an idea with normative implications, likely to stigmatise the individual. In contemporary societies, the risk of being vulnerable is relational and structural. As Karen Evans argues: ‘Social biographies of individuals are linked to social structures and institutions and changing conditions. They are also linked to cultural norms and expectations and how these intersect with institutional structures’ (Evans, 2002, p. 251).

The social, political and policy environments in which learning takes place are critical. The desire to reduce public spending (or restrict its growth), and to take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in market-based allocation systems, constrain the policy tools available to governments and state agencies. This is particularly salient in countries where welfare state regimes emphasise markets, minimal income protection, and general skills and competences, and where relationships between trade unions and employers’ associations are weak.

Belonging and Agency

We have suggested that ‘belonging’, connection to those with whom we associate or share common values, can be an important source of empowerment. In this section we provide an example of how this can happen. It is organised around a brief case study of the search for belonging ‘in action’, based on interviews conducted in England. (These are reported in more detail in Boeren et al. (2019).) Rubenson and Desjardins (2009) argue that welfare regimes not only shape societal systems and structures but also seep into people’s consciousness. England has an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ welfare regime, dominated by highly individualised welfare to work policies, and an emphasis on modest, often highly stigmatised, means-tested assistance. Two decades ago, Evans argued that in the United Kingdom young people felt ‘forced’ into unemployment schemes and therefore not ‘in control’, while at the same time feeling individually responsible for their predicament. They believed it was down to them to get out of their situation, despite the negative environment’ (Evans, 2002, p. 261). Whilst they clearly held agentic beliefs, they had completely bought into the idea that ‘opportunities are open to all’, that they needed to be more proactive, and that success or failure was attributable to themselves alone – though in fact, as Evans put it, ‘their progress depends on how well they are equipped, the help they can call on when they need it, whether they go alone or together and who their fellow travellers are’ (2002, p. 265).

At its best, adult education provides not only improved professional skills and training for employability, nor just better cultural habits, but intellectual growth, transformation, and change. Its benefits typically include personal development, increased confidence and self-efficacy, better health, and progress in the labour market. These, in turn, are associated with increased social capital and ‘belonging’ – a renewed emphasis on the networks, communities and ties that locate and bind us, and which constitute ‘a positional asset that people can use to pursue their own advantage and consolidate their own position’ (Field, 2005, p. 28). Social capital is also associated with better health. Learning as a form of empowerment and belonging, therefore, creates a virtuous circle.

Despite this, 9 million people across the United Kingdom lacked essential literacy or numeracy skills in 2017, and a further 13.5 million lacked basic digital skills. Those with poor literacy or numeracy tend to be more socially isolated or excluded; half were out of work. Those with these skills, by contrast, are more likely to vote and to be active citizens (Learning & Work Institute, 2019). Learning confers a sense of belonging – to a learning group, a community of interest, place, space or area.

Post-compulsory education should offer pathways for all, including ‘second chance’ education for people with low skills, whom school has failed, and those from culturally diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds – flexible learning for part-time or mature learners to suit their wider life demands. Marmot emphasised the importance of a broad range of post-compulsory education provision. Though a strong focus on work may help individuals in work,

it may perversely increase the disparities between those in work and those out of work. Given that the latter include the most socially disadvantaged, non-work-based lifelong learning policies need to be available to the unemployed and economically inactive to have any effect on tackling health inequalities. A comprehensive policy is required that would encourage people not in work to participate in learning activities in greater numbers. (Marmot et al., 2010, p. 109)

This report called, in effect, for increased, more generous, and more broadly-conceived adult learning provision, supporting confidence-building and self-efficacy. Ten years on, however, Marmot found that ‘austerity’ had made matters worse. Social protection and education spending declined by 1.5% of GDP over the decade to 2019. Education for those aged over 16 had been ‘particularly hard hit’; even within this, funding for further education had declined most: ‘in 1990–91, spending per student in further education was 50% higher than spending per student in secondary schools, but was about eight percent lower in 2018’ (Marmot et al., 2020, pp. 9, 56).

Participation rates mirrored spending. In 2019 the Learning and Work Institute’s Adult Participation in Learning survey recorded (for the third year in a row) ‘the lowest participation rate in the 23-year history of the survey’, and a 10 percentage point fall (from 43% to 33%) between 2010 and 2019. Adult participation in learning is profoundly unequal between different social groups; those most in need participate least. While 40% of those who left full-time education at the age of 21 or later reported in 2019 that they had participated, only 18% of those who left school at 16 or earlier said they did so; 41% of those in the highest social classes reported learning, twice the figure for the lowest social classes (21%) (Smith et al., 2019). Based on government figures for participation for the total number of learners taking various educational qualifications, the Institute for Fiscal Studies recorded similar trends, and a similarly disproportionate impact on those most in need:

The total number of learners has fallen substantially over time, from a high point of 4.7 million in 2004 to 3.2 million by 2010, and to 2.2 million in 2016 at the latest count. A large part of this 2.4 million fall can be accounted for by a reduction in the numbers taking low-level qualifications (Skills for Life, English and maths; below Level 2; and no level), which fell by 1.9 million from around 3.6 million in 2004 to 2.2 million in 2010 and 1.7 million in 2016. (Belfield et al., 2018, p. 43)

The Social Mobility Commission also reported nearly half of people (49%) from the lowest social classes doing no learning after leaving school (2019, p. 26). In short, the number of adults participating in education and learning plummeted over 15 years: beginning before the 2008 financial crash, the collapse continued through the recession and austerity years. Although all groups participate less, the well-educated, and the financially secure, remain the main beneficiaries of adult educational opportunities.

It may not be coincidental that the focus of adult education policy on work and employability – in the United Kingdom as in Europe – has dramatically intensified over the last two decades. The United Kingdom government’s primary welfare-to-work programme under the Coalition government (the Work Programme, introduced in 2011) was persistently criticised for failing to address exclusion, and access for the most disadvantaged (Comptroller and Auditor General, 2014; TUC, 2017). Following its closure in 2017, the Conservative government launched a new Work and Health programme, initially in North West England and Wales. This aimed to provide specialised employment support for people with health problems or disabilities, and for the long-term unemployed: ‘we want to see one million more disabled people in work over the next ten years’ (Department for Work & Pensions and Department of Health, 2017, p. 8).

Unfortunately, such programmes offer little for those furthest from the labour market. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Youth Unemployment (2018, p. 40) concluded: ‘A one-size-fits-all approach does not work. Education, employment and welfare services must begin to recognise the unique potential of each young person and that what works for one does not necessarily work for all.’ This is no new insight. Between 2006 and 2011, for instance, ‘Activity Agreements’, piloted in eight areas of England, showed that localised, personalised programmes were best for the most vulnerable young people – they incorporated a financial incentive, to secure young peoples’ engagement and participation and give them some degree of autonomy, impartial personal support, and tailored learning over a specified period of time (Maguire & Newton, 2011).

‘It Felt Like Family’

A more recent programme, Talent Match, adopted a similar tailored approach in regional partnerships across the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2019 (Damm et al., 2020). A major £108 million investment by the Big Lottery Fund, it involved a ‘test and learn’ approach to understanding what interventions are most effective in supporting young people’s employability. Its target was young people aged 18–24 who were long-term unemployed and furthest from the labour market, in geographical areas with pockets of significant deprivation. In contrast to government-funded programmes, participation was voluntary. Each regional partnership was autonomous, developing solutions in response to local needs. The young people had multiple barriers to employment, including low self-confidence, mental ill-health, caring responsibilities, and poor educational experiences. Their sense of self-worth and ability to shape their own lives had often been damaged and undermined, and the support provided tried to respond to their needs as individuals.

This meant involving young people in co-designing and co-delivering the programmes. This ‘crucial component … strengthened the design and delivery of the programme’. ‘It needs to be an integral part of programmes and not an add-on element’ (Damm et al., 2020, p. 13). Talent Match took an ‘asset-based approach’, offering one-to-one mentoring, taking time to establish trust and rapport, helping young people recognise their own skills, address barriers, and make progress towards the labour market. The duration and focus of mentoring were not standardised, reflecting a person-centred approach. Mentors worked from community-based ‘micro hubs’ within agencies known locally, and had local knowledge.

We undertook research on one local Talent Match project: ‘Young and Successful’ in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, an area with significant deprivation but pockets of wealth. Employment is concentrated in and around the area’s two largest cities (Nottingham and Derby) which together account for 26% of the population but 36% of employment (D2N2 LEP, 2014, p. 22). Several of its towns and cities have ‘relatively large proportions of neighbourhoods in the 10% most deprived’ nationally (D2N2 LEP, 2021, p. 53). Some rural areas are marked by poor local transport infrastructure, precarity of employment and inter-generational worklessness. Around 30% of those in work in the D2N2 area in 2014 earned less than the official ‘Living Wage’ (the national average was 25%) (Black et al., 2017). Our interviews took place in some of the most deprived areas.

Most of the young people we interviewed (all ‘furthest from the labour market’) described feelings of impotence and futility about seeking work. They were often incapacitated by poor skills and fear of a seemingly hostile and punitive employment system. They also showed lack of awareness about their options, and uncertainty about shaping their own future, particularly in relation to employability and – what they often saw as an unattainable goal – securing employment. Recurrent unsuccessful job applications and unmet needs threated to leave them trapped in a cycle of declining confidence and poor mental health.

It was here that a supportive mentor was so crucial. Testimony from mentors, young participants and programme managers showed the value of real understanding and trust-building in one-to-one relationships:

We are interested in trying to find out what the young person has a talent for – what job they really want to do. We are not pushing them to take any job … in fact, I sometimes advise them not to take a job – knowing full well they’d last a day, a week, but it would be devastating to them longer-term (Mentor, Derby area).

A Programme Co-ordinator thought offering each young person a detailed initial assessment – listening to them, building rapport, understanding their skills and their dreams – was critical to fostering a sense of ‘belonging’ and ‘being listened to’:

you need to know those things about that individual … don’t presume what they need, what skills they have – because then you’re creating an inappropriate action plan – well, you may as well do it blindfold (Programme Co-ordinator, Derby area).

Staff emphasised how the person-centred approach supported vulnerable young people with anxiety and low self-confidence, and the young people themselves valued their relationships with mentors and practitioners:

Normally I’m really nervous when I’m meeting someone but if it’s someone who’s going to help you, you’re more talkative, you’re more bubbly … if you were to meet them at a stranger’s house, you’d be really quiet, you wouldn’t want to tell them anything about yourself … Talent Match was a life changer … someone being honest with me helped me to trust them. This is the best place for a young person to be (Participant).

It was the fact that I could talk to her, she was always there when I needed her. And it was more along the lines of the trust and everything else, like she was always there. If I needed anything, I could ask her, if I needed anything to fall back on, she was there (Participant).

Social learning, collectivism, and sense of belonging comes from ‘lived experience of participation in specific communities’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 151). The Young and Successful programme was described by several young people as ‘feeling like a family’. The group came together to develop the programme, generating a sense of respect, dignity and belief in their own skills. They received training in areas such as the media and interviews; they were encouraged to contribute as interviewers on interview panels for staff; all engaged directly with our research by participating in an Enliven Youth Panel.

Four of the young people also agreed to be filmed about barriers and enablers to participation, and spoke generously – and with heartfelt conviction – about the support they gained not only from Young and Successful staff, but from each other. Camaraderie, empowerment and authority came from belonging to a group of people experiencing the same issues; weekly meetings, group work, and shared social activities, enabled them to recognise their own shared capacity to act as agents in their own lives.

Conclusion

‘Policies’, Evans argues, must ‘ensure that the greatest demands to ‘take control of their lives’ do not fall on those who are the least powerfully placed in the ‘landscape” (Evans, 2002, p. 265). Brokerage, mentoring and advocacy are crucial for young people who have been made to feel defective. Welfare systems have a profound impact on the external pressures young people furthest from the labour market face, and are often profoundly internalised. Some welfare states, particularly in the Nordic countries, ‘promote adult learning, foster favourable structural conditions, target various barriers to participation, and ensure that disadvantaged groups have equal opportunity to take up adult learning’ (Rubenson & Desjardins, 2009, p. 203). They recognise that adults who do not engage must overcome barriers to participate: what distinguishes Nordic and non-Nordic countries is ‘not the existence of barriers to participation but the conditions that allow a person to overcome these’ (Rubenson & Desjardins, 2009, p. 203). Belonging and group identity are crucial in this process.

Our own research findings show the value of approaches that emphasise personal and group belonging as a way to overcome individual barriers to participation. The most successful adult educational strategies across Europe provide safe environments and establish relationships of trust among participants and practitioners. Yet across countries and welfare systems, programmes aimed at young people considered vulnerable incorporate objectives and pedagogical strategies that reflect what Littler (2017, p. 89) calls ‘a psychologising discourse which vest[s] not only power but also moral virtue in the very act of hope, in the mental and emotional capacity to believe and aspire’.

So while regional and national contexts differ, there is something universal in how young adults in vulnerable positions should be approached. National histories and cultures make a considerable difference in the access (disadvantaged) individuals have to learning opportunities. But within programmes, the learning experience must empower through drawing on and developing the sense of belonging. This is especially important when, as in the European Union, employability is stressed as the most important outcome. As Evans (2002) concluded, we need to explore learners’ life course perspectives, recognise the skills they have (rather than emphasising what they lack), and the importance of their participation in dimensions beyond the purely economic – in communities of belonging, across social, political and cultural domains.