1. Preventing and activating NEETs in Slovenia: Assessment and recommendations
This chapter provides an overview of the main findings from the review. It starts with a brief description of the profiles of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs) in Slovenia. The chapter then discusses how the education sector can help to better prepare young people for the labour market and how the support for young people who became unemployed or inactive can be improved. The chapter ends with a list of concrete recommendations that may contribute to improving the prevention and activation of NEETs in Slovenia.
In 2019, around 29 000 Slovenian young people were neither in employment, nor in education or training (NEETs). With 9.5% of all 15-29 year-olds in 2018 (Figure 1.1), the Slovenian NEET rate is lower than in many OECD countries (where the average stood at 12.8%), but it is still higher than before the financial and economic crisis hit the country at the end of the 2000s (8.9% in 2007). In addition, the Covid-19 crisis pushed the youth unemployment rate upwards, from 7.5% among 15-29 year olds in the last quarter of 2019 to 10.4% in the same period a year later. Among NEETs, the increase in inactive NEETs is lasting longer than the increase in unemployed NEETs, pointing to the importance of outreach strategies for those who are not registered with the Employment Service of Slovenia. NEETs who were already inactive or unemployed prior to the crisis are also among the ones who will remain most vulnerable in the years to come, making it important to understand who they are to design better support.
Note: The reference year is 2014 for Japan and 2017 for Chile, Israel and the United States. The values for Australia, Israel, New Zealand and Turkey are from Education at a Glance. Youth with missing information about their educational attendance and who are in military service are excluded.
Source: Calculations based on Labour Force Surveys and OECD (2019[1]), Education at a Glance 2019.
NEETs in Slovenia are more likely to be women, and are often older youth. An increasing share of NEETs are born abroad. NEET rates are also 3.4 times higher among those reporting poor health than among those who do not, though the NEET status itself may also cause health problems. Short bouts of inactivity or unemployment do not necessarily damage future employment opportunities and income. However, more than half of all Slovenian NEETs (53%) remain in this status for more than a year, which might affect their future chances of employment (Figure 1.2). The share of long-term NEETs is particularly high among 25-29 year olds in comparison with other OECD countries. Further analysis suggests that low education and being a mother are the strongest determinants of the NEET duration in Slovenia. Nearly four in five NEETs or their families receive some kind of social benefit; yet one in four Slovenian NEETs are poor. More than half of all NEETs (53%) were not registered with the Employment Service of Slovenia over the period 2011-2018 (15 600 young people) (Figure 1.3). This share is comparable with other EU countries for which data are available.
Note: OECD-18 refers to the average for Australia (2013 only), Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland (2017 only), France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia (2017 only), Lithuania (2017 only), Luxembourg, Norway, Poland (2017 only), Portugal, the Slovak Republic (2013 only), Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey (2013 only) and the United Kingdom (2013 only). Long-term NEETs are defined as those that accumulate more than 12 months of NEET status over the respective four-year period. Since the OECD reference groups are not composed of the same countries, they cannot be directly compared between the two time periods.
Source: OECD calculations based on the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.
Educational credentials are the best insurance against long-term inactivity and unemployment. Making sure that students do not fall through the cracks of the educational system is one of the most important measures to prevent youth from becoming NEETs. This approach is all the more relevant in the light of the current pandemic. While many young people struggle to enter the labour market during an economic downturn, graduates with in-demand skills will find a quality job more easily than dropouts. Educational and other preventive policies can therefore play an important role in lowering individuals’ risks of becoming NEETs.
Most young Slovenians graduate from upper secondary school, but those who do not are at a much higher risk of becoming and remaining NEETs. School dropout is more common among certain groups of adolescents, including Roma youth, immigrants and children of immigrants, and youth attending short vocational programmes. Slovenia already has a strong education system that leads most students to an upper-secondary degree and a relatively smooth transition into the labour market. However, a few additional measures to address the sources of academic difficulties and prevent early school leaving could help to keep the highest-risk students in school.
Slovenia should also reinforce its procedures to follow up with former students who dropped out. Currently, schools are not able to inform the employment services, centres of social work or municipal authorities when a student stops attending school or drops out altogether, due to privacy regulations. Some young people fall into a period of inactivity that lasts several years and during which no educational institution or other government authority reaches out to them.
Source: OECD calculations based on anonymised merged administrative data provided by the SURS and ESS (see Box 1.1 in Chapter 1 for more information).
Young people who train or study in fields that are not in demand or that they are not interested in or suited for may not be able to find or keep a job. By helping students explore their interests and capabilities and their education options, career education and advice can contribute to reducing those skill mismatches. In Slovenia, students in basic and upper secondary education can turn to different counsellors within and outside school for information on education and training options. Building on this strong basis, adjustments that include targeted counselling offers, more comprehensive training for counselling staff and educators, and deepened links to employers can further strengthen the career guidance offered to teenagers. Additional investments in skills needs forecasting could furthermore benefit current and future workers of all age groups by providing employment and career counsellors more insights about worker shortages in different occupations and industries.
While a general education curriculum offers the best basis for many teenagers, for some, work-based learning is more beneficial. Slovenia, like other countries in Central Europe, has a long tradition of having a strong vocational and technical education system. The resulting variety in educational options contributes to the high upper secondary graduation rates. But even good systems can be strengthened further; and the recent re-introduction of apprenticeships is one example of an initiative that tries to do exactly that. Possible areas for further improvement to the apprenticeship programme relate to the matching of employers and apprentices; helping companies become high-quality training providers; boosting student interest in apprenticeships; and systematically evaluating the outcomes of apprentices and apprenticeship-providing companies. Moreover, apprentices and employers may need additional support during the Covid-19 crisis.
Many Slovenian teenagers go on to university, but when they do, they often take a long time to graduate or do not complete their studies at all. Long durations of study, incomplete degrees and prolonged job search periods after graduation all entail economic costs, both for the affected individuals and for the government budget. Helping students complete their programmes and finding well-matched employment more rapidly are interlinked issues. Indeed, providing quality career advice and student support, incentives for on-time graduation and opportunities for field-related work experience can ease students’ university-to-work transition.
Successful engagement of young people in the labour market and society is crucial not only for their own personal economic prospects and well-being, but also for overall economic growth and social cohesion. Young Slovenians who are unemployed or inactive can count on support of the Employment Service of Slovenia and the Centres for Social Work to help them (re-)join the labour market or education. However, a unique anonymised data set based on various administrative databases revealed that more than half (53%) of all NEETs in Slovenia do not register with the ESS. Most of them are 25 to 29 years old, have no work experience, are inactive and still live with their parent(s). Family responsibility, illness and informal education are important motives for inactivity among unregistered NEETs. However, half of this group has been in contact with the ESS at some point in their career, which suggests that there is room to improve the support the ESS offers to young jobseekers.
Different approaches can be used to reach out to young people; countries’ experiences show that there is no single method that works best. Examples from other EU countries can provide ideas for Slovenia to develop an outreach strategy for unregistered NEETs, including peer-to-peer outreach in Sweden and Bulgaria, collaboration with associations and community-based organisations in Belgium, Luxembourg and Lithuania, national outreach strategies in Latvia and Portugal, institutional mandates in Denmark and Belgium, and monitoring frameworks in Estonia and Portugal.
Support for young jobseekers who reach out to the Employment Service of Slovenia improved over the past couple of years, in line with the implementation of the Youth Guarantee with reinforced early intervention measures and a range of active labour market programmes for long-term unemployed youth. However, Slovenia still devotes relatively few resources to labour market programmes compared with other OECD countries and the choice of programmes heavily depends on available funding.
The Covid-19 crisis further affected service delivery of the Employment Service of Slovenia, as caseloads rose and the digital services required for social distancing are still underdeveloped. The ESS is developing ways to organise counselling services via video calls and increase the number of young people they can reach per day. However, additional structural changes are needed to streamline and digitalise service delivery and help young jobseekers find their way (back) to the labour market.
The share of long-term jobseekers (i.e. for more than one year) among youth has been declining in recent years, but the groups that remain require additional efforts. While ESS counsellors have a range of active labour market measures at their disposal for young people, only one in three long-term unemployed youth make use of such measures. In addition, long-term unemployed systematically receive less employment services during their first four months of unemployment than short-term unemployed youth and their participation in active labour market programmes has been declining in recent years.
Certain groups face particular challenges in the labour market, including young mothers, migrant youth and Roma youth. First, young women with children have an increased risk of long-term unemployment, largely due to the weak financial incentives that parents of young children have to move into employment. For instance, single mothers who take up a low-paid job in Slovenia would lose more than 100% of their earnings to childcare costs, lower benefits and higher taxes – the average across OECD countries is only 62%. Out-of-pocket childcare costs are particularly high in Slovenia compared with other OECD countries and have been increasing in recent years for sole parents. Reducing those costs would not only help to bring young mothers (back) into the labour market, but can also help to protect children against poverty and strengthen equality of opportunity.
Second, the NEET rate among foreign-born youth is nearly three time as high as among native-born. While part of the problem relates to higher school dropout rates among migrant children, a significant share of NEETs with a migrant background do not register with the Employment Service of Slovenia. The ESS will therefore have to make major efforts to reach out to this group of unregistered NEETs with a migrant background. Targeted guidance or mentoring schemes for youth with a migrant background like in France or Germany could also help migrant youth in their search for a (first) job and can help counter the lack of relevant parental contacts or information about the host-country labour market and its functioning.
Finally, young people from Roma communities also have a high NEET risk. The Government of Slovenia introduced a range of measures in the National Programme for Roma for the period 2017-2021 to address the challenges and problems of the Roma community, including employment support. However, the Employment Service of Slovenia does not have a comprehensive approach in place to tackle the problem of high unemployment among Roma youth, comparable to specialised councillors for youth and long-term unemployed. Among registered young jobseekers who voluntarily identify themselves as Roma only a small share participates in active labour market measures (even though they are an explicit target group) and they are much less successful than other young jobseekers in obtaining employment mostly due to incomplete and low education attainment. Personal data protection laws impede a better understanding of their specific challenges, but the available scarce information suggests that significant efforts are needed to improve the labour market integration of Roma youth.
Keeping teenagers in school
Reduce early school leaving
Measures directed at all students:
Consider raising the mandatory participation age to 18 for students who have not yet attained an upper secondary degree.
Create transition programmes from basic to upper secondary school that allow students to gain a quick foothold in their new school and fill knowledge gaps.
Allow students to flexibly catch up after the Covid-19 school closures, such as modular grade advancement and voluntary summer school.
Measures targeted at Roma students:
Further train teachers in intercultural communication and Roma history.
Extend the Roma teacher assistant programme to upper-secondary school and enhance activities to involve parents in schools’ decision-making processes.
Measures targeted at students with a migrant background:
Consider introducing language level evaluations for pre-school age children and equip non-language teachers with basic training in teaching Slovenian as a foreign language.
Point immigrant parents to information on the school system and activities in their native language.
Assess the skills and special needs of young accompanied refugees and provide them with reinforced academic and mental health support.
Reducing skill mismatches through career counselling
Direct students to counselling and guidance that meets their needs
Consider creating new positions for in-school career counsellors in regions where there are not enough career education professionals specialised in career guidance for youth.
Offer students with high levels of need the possibility to have regular meetings with in-school counsellors.
Direct students without additional needs towards out-of-school counselling options.
Create cross-age peer counselling opportunities and encourage take-up of these.
Ensure the quality of career education
Train subject-matter teachers in career education during their initial university degrees and professional development courses and integrate career education activities into different school subjects from an early age.
Create tertiary-level certificates and degrees in career education and counselling.
Develop benchmarking tools that schools can use to assess the quality of the career education and guidance they provide.
Strengthening work-based learning in Slovenia
Explore the possibility of a matching service between prospective apprentices and companies through the chambers of commerce.
Identify apprenticeship ambassadors to promote the programme.
Promote initial and continuous education courses for apprenticeship providers and exchange programmes between company mentors and vocational education teachers.
Expand the apprenticeship occupations to include tertiary and highly technical occupations whose graduates can expect a comparatively high salary.
Establish pre-apprenticeship programmes for prospective apprentices with knowledge gaps in key subjects.
Evaluate the success of former apprentices and apprenticeship providers over the long term based on administrative and survey data.
Consider whether subsidies for employers and extended training deadlines are necessary to ensure the success of the apprenticeship programme during the Covid-19 crisis and reallocate apprentices whose companies go out of business or close temporarily.
Improving students’ transition to work
Enhance support services for students
Ensure that all colleges and universities can offer a similar quality of career and other support services.
Identify students at high risk of non-completion and offer them enrolment in structured academic and social support services. Programmes can include regular meetings with dedicated advisors and fixed learning groups that are accompanied by a more advanced student close to graduation.
Build stronger university-private sector links
Continue existing university-industry cooperation projects that allow students to work on practical projects with university and company mentors.
Favour co-operations that include different engagement channels such as joint university-company projects, staff exchanges between firms and universities and student internships.
Reaching out to unregistered NEETs
Develop an outreach strategy
Give the ESS the institutional mandate and necessary resources to coordinate and implement the outreach strategy.
Strengthen existing collaborations and scale up local outreach initiatives where needed;
Offer support to all stakeholders through information sessions on youth activation and integration services and distribution of awareness-raising material;
Encourage all relevant stakeholders to identify, contact and engage unregistered NEETs and bring them in contact with the ESS.
Reach out to Estonia to learn about their data protection regulations in setting up a tool to link data from different registers to detect the young people in need of support (Youth Guarantee Support System).
Integrate monitoring and evaluation mechanisms
Use the merged data put together for the purpose of the OECD NEETs study to learn more about the services unregistered NEETs received from the ESS in the past.
Make better use of the annual satisfaction survey to learn more about young people’s experiences with the ESS.
Develop detailed targets and indicators in the design of the outreach strategy to evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions and programmes.
Regularly monitor the implementation of the outreach strategy and improve where needed.
Mitigating the impact of the Covid-19 crisis
Modernise and streamline practices at the ESS towards a digital, lean service delivery to free up resources for young people who need more support.
Provide additional resources to the ESS to increase the counselling frequency and guarantee early intervention, especially for young people with additional labour market barriers, to support a sustainable integration into employment.
Prioritise the introduction of a statistical profiling tool at the ESS to target and tailor employment services and programmes more efficiently to those youngsters who need it.
Increase the resources for mental health support at the ESS, in order to increase internal mental health competences and to expand the network connections with the mental health sector.
Consider the introduction of contracted-out employment services, which offers the possibility of scaling-up employment services capacity without long-term cost commitments.
Deliver more training programmes for jobseekers (partly or fully) online.
Improving the activation of NEETs
Improve the youth employment subsidy by introducing stronger requirements for post-placement investment in skills and monitor its implementation to raise the quality of the proposed jobs.
Make better use of the rich ESS data by undertaking a rigorous evaluation of active labour market programmes to make well-informed decisions about where to invest the limited funding.
Investigate and address the reasons behind the gap in service use between short-term and long-term unemployed youth, to improve service delivery for young people with a risk of long-term unemployment.
Ensure stable funding sources for both ESS staff specialised in supporting young people and active labour market programmes for youth.
Reach out to France and the city of Hamburg in Germany to study their mentoring programmes for (migrant) youth.
Reforming the public works programme
Integrate guidance, skills assessment and post-placement activities into the public works programme, by
Agreeing on individual targets for each participant at the start of the programme, in close collaboration with the employer;
Introducing employer assessments of the skills and achievements of the participant both mid-way and at the end of the programme, to be undertaken in close collaboration with the ESS;
Following up with targeted training, other active programmes or psychosocial support where needed;
Offering 6-12 months of on-the-job-support for participants who make a successful transition into the open labour market after a public works programme.
Improving activation support for Roma
Explore hiring Roma mediators from local communities in the ESS local offices in areas with weak labour market outcomes among Roma youth, to bridge resistance among Roma people to work with public service providers (like in Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain).
Study the feasibility to pilot an integrated support programme similar to the Spanish programme Acceder, which offers individual pathways, a wide range of training initiatives oriented towards real job opportunities, a close public-private partnership and a one-to-one relationship with companies to overcome discriminatory attitudes towards Roma.
Discuss collaboration with worker and employer organisations to develop mentoring, apprenticeships, and workplace coaching geared to giving young Roma experiences that could strengthen their prospects for long-term employment.
Explore targeted outreach and mentoring schemes for young Roma out of work that could be developed in close collaboration with, or executed by, Roma (youth) organisations (taking the city of Derby in the United Kingdom as an example).
Shift the focus of the multi-purpose Roma centres from organising activities towards providing more individualised counselling to members of the Roma community, as suggested by a recent evaluation.
Reach out to Latvia to see whether their approach in promoting more dialogue between Roma families and professionals from municipal institutions and government agencies could provide new insight for the Roma centres in Slovenia.
Making work pay for young parents
Explore how to address the financial disincentives to work for young parents, and in particular single parents, by
Studying the interplay between taxes, benefits and childcare costs, and their impact on the employment decisions of (young) parents;
Analysing the option to lower the out-of-pocket costs for childcare services for single parents, possibly through higher discounts for this group;
Brainstorming with all relevant stakeholders about alternative ways to improve the financial incentives for (parents) to take up work.