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The lack of education and training resulting from leaving education early might contribute significantly to high rates of unemployment and inactivity among young people. Education is also seen as a decisive means of tackling these problems. Therefore, acquiring knowledge about the conditions in which re-engagement with education occurs after it is prematurely interrupted deserves special attention. The study presented here explores the opinions of students attending a second-chance educational centre in Ceuta (where the aforementioned benchmarks have quite high levels) concerning their life courses prior to returning to education there and the impact they attribute to the centre. Data from in-depth, individual interviews were used to do this. These were performed with 39 unemployed young people at risk of social exclusion aged between 18 and 24 (29 had left school early and 10 had not), as part of a broader case study relating to a centre selected for its relative success and its reputation in Ceuta. The information provided by the participants in the form of stories was subjected to narrative analysis, using two processes: summary biographical tables, which represent relevant events from their lives alongside their views of them, and thematic analysis of the information contained in them. In broad terms, results indicate that the life courses the participants follow are shaped by decisions they take from options shaped by personal, institutional, and social circumstances. They are, therefore, something like choice biographies. In this context, early school leaving and re-engagement in training are recurrent, transitory, and reversible, precisely because of the important role played by the people who experience these situations, even if they do so constrained by their institutional and social setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the motives that, according to the students themselves, have led them in the past to a trajectory that culminated in early school leaving. Based on this general objective, the study carried out has an exploratory and heuristic nature and adopted a qualitative methodology in order to obtain knowledge linked to the experience, meaning and context of the protagonist subjects. To do this, and within the framework of a single case study, we have used semi-structured interviews in depth with the young students belonging to the Escuela de la Construcción in Ceuta, which offers training itineraries for the socio-labor insertion of people in situation or risk of social exclusion. This procedure has allowed us to collect information about the trajectory of the students until they were admitted to the center. The stories were subjected to narrative analysis and the results adopted the biogram format, using categories referring to vital stages and scope that allow for the accommodation of the singularities associated with each personal situation. The findings suggest that the resumption of the formative trajectory depends not only on training itself but also on the previous trajectory of the subjects. Reasons pushing students to abandon their education come both from the education centers and from outside them and that both types of reasons will also have an impact on the subsequent decision to resume their training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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