Social uncertainty and school disengagement: a theoretical framework of early school leaving in precarious family contexts

Romania has had the highest rate of early leaving from education and training in the European Union for several years, with the burden concentrated in rural areas and among Roma young people. Existing explanations attribute early school leaving to poverty, family disadvantage, institutional exclusion or individual disengagement, but they say little about why families with similar resources make different educational choices when their futures are unpredictable. This Hypothesis and Theory article proposes that social uncertainty, defined as the reduced predictability of a household's material circumstances and of the returns to schooling, is analytically distinct from the level of deprivation and from neighbouring concepts such as precarity, vulnerability, risk and exclusion. Using a staged procedure for building conceptual frameworks, we derive a model in which uncertainty affects school engagement through four mechanisms: the contraction of temporal horizons, family stress, the reallocation of children's time to care and work, and the responsiveness of schools. We specify five moderators, including family resilience resources and student agency, set out eight testable propositions with their boundary conditions, and identify the evidence that would contradict them. We distinguish absenteeism, including its voluntary and involuntary forms, from disengagement, dropout and early leaving, separate objective from subjectively experienced uncertainty, restrict the framework to compulsory and upper-secondary schooling, and treat Romanian and Roma experiences as an illustrative case rather than as proof. The framework addresses one pathway to disengagement rather than offering a general theory of early leaving. It is a set of hypotheses for empirical testing, not a demonstrated causal model, and its policy implications are stated as conditional on that testing.