Call for papers: Achieving success and equity in the post-16 transitions of young people who don't go to university: A cross-European symposium

We are pleased to announce a call for contributions to a cross-European symposium to take place in Belgrade (immediately after the ECER conference) on 13-14 September 2025.

The symposium will focus on themes of quality and equality in the school-to-work transitions of young people who don’t go to university and will include discussion of both normative and empirical questions. Across the symposium as a whole, key questions to be addressed will include:

What ought to count as a successful non-university school-to-work transition, and what should equality look like in this context?
How do differently positioned young people exercise their agency as they navigate the opportunity structures they encounter, and what resources are they able to access and activate to help them do so?
How do they experience their transitions?
What are the conditions which enable or impede successful and equitable school-to-work transitions for these young people?
How do the factors that shape transitions – such as labour market characteristics, VET and welfare systems and entitlements, and cultural values concerning conceptions of a successful transition - interact with each other in the country or countries under consideration to produce more or less successful transition experiences or more or less equitable transitions?
What policy alternatives might be developed and how?

Contributions could look at one country or a group of countries, they could be more or less explicitly comparative and they could focus predominantly on normative or empirical issues or combine both. The symposium will involve discussion of up to 10 papers.

We’re hoping that this symposium will also be linked to a special issue on the same theme and that some of the papers presented at the symposium, in a refined form, will feature in that issue.

The symposium is one of the activities of the Young Lives, Young Futures study, a UK ESRC-funded project being conducted by a team of researchers based at King’s College London and the Edge Foundation. We have some funding to cover travel and accommodation costs for those who need it.

Deadlines

Please submit an abstract of 750-1000 words that sets out the aims, background, methods, key questions addressed, and core argument of the paper together with authors’ names, affiliation and emails. This should be sent to Sharon.Gewirtz@kcl.ac.uk by 11th May. (Feel free to provide references but please don’t include these in the wordcount.)

The organising team will then select up to 10 abstracts by the 15th May and ask contributors to submit an extended outline of their paper of at least 2500 words by 31st August to be circulated among all contributors in advance of the symposium.

Please see the attached document below for an extended overview and guidance for contributors.

Sharon Gewirtz, Andrea Laczik and Chris Winch (on behalf of the Young Lives, Young Futures research team)