Across the European Union, disability rights and inclusive education are climbing the political agenda. Strategies are published, targets are set, funding lines are opened. And yet, if you look closely at where that attention lands, a pattern emerges: almost all of it is aimed at the formal education system — schools, universities, official qualifications. Youth work, non-formal education, and the everyday spaces where millions of young people spend their free time barely get a mention.
For a young person with a Specific Learning Disorder (SLD) like dyslexia, dyscalculia, or dyspraxia, that gap is not abstract. It shapes whether the support they receive in the classroom disappears the moment they walk into a youth club, a summer camp, or a Scout meeting.
A strategy built for the classroom
The EU’s main reference point on this topic, the European Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030, commits to inclusive education “at all levels” and calls out the persistent gap in outcomes between learners with and without disabilities. It is a genuinely ambitious document. But its concrete actions — curriculum reform, teacher training, accessibility standards — are almost entirely designed around formal schooling. Non-formal education, informal learning, and youth work are treated, at best, as an afterthought.
This matters because the European Commission’s own 2026 Work Programme confirms the strategy is about to be updated: new actions are due by the second quarter of 2026, since the original roadmap only ran through 2025. It’s a real opportunity to widen the lens — but there’s no guarantee that youth work will be part of the conversation unless the sector makes the case for itself.
The numbers tell their own story
Eurostat’s most recent disability statistics, published in November 2025, offer a sobering illustration of what happens when support systems are built around formal education alone. In 2024, 44.2% of young people aged 18–24 with a severe disability across the EU had left education and training early — compared with just 8.0% of their peers without a disability. Even among those with a milder disability, the early-leaving rate was more than double that of non-disabled youth (17.1% versus 8.0%).
Once a young person exits formal education, for any reason, the structured accommodations that came with it (extra time, adapted materials, learning support staff) tend to exit with them. What’s left is whatever informal networks, youth organisations, or community spaces happen to be accessible. Too often, that’s very little, because those spaces were never designed, funded, or trained to pick up where school left off.
Why this is a youth work problem, not just a school problem
Non-formal education is not a lesser alternative to school — for many young people with SLD, it is where confidence, leadership, and social belonging actually get rebuilt after years of struggling academically. A youth club or a training course doesn’t come with grades, but it does come with group dynamics, written instructions, timed activities, and all the same barriers a young person with dyslexia or dyspraxia faces in a classroom — just without any of the recognised support structures.
This is precisely the gap that the Dys in Youth Field project is designed to address: equipping youth workers with practical tools to make non-formal settings genuinely accessible.
Sources
- European Commission, European Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030
- European Platform for Rehabilitation (EPR), 2026 European Commission Work Programme Includes Actions in Disability Strategy, Education, Quality Jobs, Mental Health, and AI (October 2025)
- Eurostat, Early school leavers: high share for youth with disability (13 November 2025)
- Eurostat, Disability statistics – access to education and training, Statistics Explained