EDUWEL · Education as Welfare - Enhancing opportunities for socially vulnerable youth in Europe

The ITN 'Education as Welfare - Enhancing opportunities for socially vulnerable youth in Europe' aims to consolidate research on education and welfare and evaluate its capacity to tackle the multiple challenges and pressures a large proportion of young people in Europe faces. In examining the welfare dimensions of educational settings and the educational dimensions of welfare services, it integrates welfare and educational perspectives into a coherent approach for theoretical analysis and public policy. By focusing on universal conditions of human development, this approach warrants international applicability. It produces knowledge that facilitates the enablement and social integration of young people facing economic, social and personal barriers after leaving compulsory schooling. The scientific objective of the research and training programme is to identify factors with which to extend young people’s opportunities and capabilities in work, autonomy and participation -- the central dimensions of welfare. The ITN will combine and synergise the interdisciplinary research experience and professional capacities of leading European university departments and social, economic and political actors. Alongside their own research projects, the Early-Stage Researchers will design and conduct a comparative Education-as-Welfare survey that will serve as one fundament of their methodological training. The five non-university partners will especially ensure the dissemination of the findings to education and welfare policymakers. The added value of the ITN consists in promoting a new type of governance of education and welfare that transcends traditional national borders. It will develop a theoretically advanced, empirically measurable and internationally comparable conception of education as welfare that the excellent experts in human service provision it has trained will be able to apply from an innovative, analytically sound and practically applicable perspective.