School Belonging Predicts whether an Emerging Adult will be Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET) after School

Abstract

Low school belonging and Not (being) in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) are both signs of social exclusion. Yet little research has considered whether school belonging is a risk factor for NEET. Using two longitudinal cohorts from Australia (*N* = 17,692; 51% Boys), we explore this relationship. Controlling for a range of individual and school level covariates, we find that school belonging at age 15 is a consistent and practically significant predictor of NEET status at ages 16-20. We found that this relationship is not the product of school belonging lowering the chances of students graduating high-school. Rather, school belonging had a unique impact beyond graduation. Given the costs of NEET, school belonging is of significant policy concern.

The Need to Belong: a Deep Dive into the Origins, Implications, and Future of a Foundational Construct

“…Other research has found benefits for mental health and emotional well-being (Allen et al, 2018b;Arslan, 2018;Arslan et al, 2020;Li & Jiang, 2018;Šeboková et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2018), academic success, hardiness, social inclusion, and life satisfaction (Abdollahi et al, 2020;Arslan et al, 2020;Brooms, 2016;Palikara et al, 2021;Scorgie & Forlin, 2019), self-esteem and associated positive outcomes (Foster et al, 2017;Peng et al, 2019), lowered school dropouts (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2018;Uslu & Gizir, 2017), reduced likelihood of absenteeism, misconduct, school disengagement or students leaving school early without a qualification (Ibrahim & El Zaatari, 2019;Korpershoek et al, 2020;OECD, 2018), decreased feelings of alienation, isolation and disaffection or low social integration and social exclusion (Arslan et al, 2020;Palikara et al, 2021), and better performance and self-belief in abilities to succeed academically (Chun et al, 2016;Holloway-Friesen, 2019). Recent research shows that a sense of school belonging is a significant predictor of future employment, education, and training (NEET) (Parker et al, 2021), even up to 15 years post-school, and our understanding of the role that school belonging plays in the psychosocial adjustment of students who have experienced traumatic events or other forms of stress (Cardeli et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021) has immense implications for educational practice, as well as therapeutic benefits.…”