European Context

At the beginning of the new millennium Europe is confronted with continuing high levels of long-term unemployment. This has a particular impact on the young, women, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, migrants and asylum seekers. Employment policy has become a key area of development with the EU's operational programmes. European governments accepted the principles of work for all, quality of education and the ideas of youth first as features of their own policies, and since the expansion of the European Social Fund, these slogans have been translated into genuine action.

YOUTHSTART and INTEGRA are two of the four programmes in the EMPLOYMENT initiative funded by the European Social Fund ( ESF) Both programmes reflect new European employment policy and its efforts to combine human and social development with efficient economic measures and vocational training to combat unemployment.

The YOUTHSTART programme supports projects for young people under the age of twenty which address both social issues and vocational aspirations. Some of its objectives are

• Integration of young people into the labour market.
• Preparation of first time job seekers for working life
• Equal opportunities
• Familiarisation with new developments in industry (particularly in relation to new technology
• Sustained development of expanding labour markets

In addition to these objectives INTEGRA focuses on the social context. It seeks to harness resources available in the community, including family and neighbourhood, in order to develop schemes which support and empower the target groups. These include immigrants, young people over twenty and other groups most seriously affected by unemployment in the European regions.

The innovative character of all these programmes is that they are based on the assumption that training for the labour market should be combined with efforts to raise the quality of life in its widest sense in terms of society, culture and education. The programmes aim to develop the capacity of each community to sustain long term regeneration initiatives.

Against this background, transnational co-operation is an important dimension of each programme. A European approach to Employment policy that focuses on these social dimensions appears to be emerging from the employment projects funded by the YOUTHSTART and INTEGRA. Transnational co-operation enables us to compare the different administrative cultures and to observe their effects on the social and educational environment. We can compare our training curricula, our schools and measures of community development, empowerment and counselling. As well as basing this on the exchange of staff members we need to seek to exchange the experience of programme participants. Last but not least, we have to evaluate and improve the standards of teaching, guidance and support services and vocational training.