Framing NEET and lifelong guidance in the post-pandemic crisis: between activation and architecture in EU and UK policy discourse

This paper examines how two recent policy reports – one European, one British – frame young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) and the role of lifelong guidance. Adopting an exploratory comparative document analysis with a focal/contextual corpus design, the study responds to a temporal coincidence of three reference documents within 18 months. The focal reports were thematically coded using a general inductive approach, against Guideline 17 of the 2026 Cedefop EU Reference Framework for Lifelong Guidance (prevention–intervention–compensation), with the Capability Approach as normative horizon. The reports frame NEET in markedly different terms – as a population to be activated within an existing instrument, and as a symptom of institutional architectural failure – yet both treat lifelong guidance as a subterraneous policy object, named but not articulated as structuring infrastructure: the European assessment foregrounds intervention logic, whereas the British report centres on architectural failure. Read together through the framework, the reports emerge as partial views of a single structural condition. The paper operationalises the 2026 Cedefop framework as an analytical lens, with implications for adult education research, policy and practice.