The need for high levels of post-secondary education has more and more become a condition for success within the global labour markets. Thus, the importance across Europe for young people to have an equal opportunity to Higher Education has been recognised and become an important goal for the European countries. However, empirical evidence suggests that when it comes to social class, equal opportunities on its own will not ensure equal outcomes (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training 2014; Caspersen et.al. 2012). The global growth of Higher Education institutions has given better access to students who may have experienced economic, educational and cultural forms of deprivation (Collini 2017). On the other hand, generations of families not entering education is often a consequence of limited social, economic and cultural capitals. Young people/students with a background with being Not in Education Employment or Training (NEET) or having been Early School Leavers (ESL), are associated with long-term negative outcomes. This again produces specific barriers for what we call first-generation students (students identified as the first within the family to enter higher education) entering Higher Education. All the presenters in this symposium are partners in an Erasmus+ project called Marginalisation and Co-Creating (MaCE). Their institutions are all located within districts with high NEET and ESL rates, and high dropout rate from Higher Educational Institutions.

This symposium addresses the concerns above first generation students completion rates and access to the labour market (European Commission 2017). We are investigating which processes leads to completion for the first generation students. We are trying to find out how the educational programmes can build on the young people experiences, to be draw upon as a resource within research and the educational setting. We are therefore engaging students on both master and bachelor programme in research on younger ESL/NEET students, training them further in methodology and working side by side with experienced researchers. In this way, they will be able to draw upon their own lived experiences as well as learning both practically and theoretically together with fellow students and researchers.

The methodology to investigate these processes will apply an ethnographic biographical approach called The Indirect Approach (Moshuus & Eide, 2016) and field notes. This is the same methodology that these students will be trained in for the data collection with younger young people that are in the NEET and ESL category. This is an conversational approach in an informal environment dialogic approach that informants disclose information that is significant and revealing. The quality of using this approach will rely on the ability to engage vulnerable students in conversation in which both questions and answers extract the essence from the students’ context. Building the conversation on the informant’s responses concerning hobbies and currents interests is an example of what we call ‘happenstance’ (Moshuus & Eide, 2016, p. 4ff), in which something unforeseen moves the research situation from an interchange between interviewer and informant to a more personal exchange. Through these interviews we seek to get the students’ own stories about their experience I education.

Through the three papers being presented, we will look at the co-creating/co research and the indirect approach to access genuine inquiry with regards to understanding young people´s lives from their true perspective.

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